Socialism is the centralized control of the economy, not the ownership of the economy.

Care to back that up with any kind of citation?

Nope. The people can control a specific industry. For example, it would not be completely inaccurate to describe the British Health Service as socialized medicine. However, if the forced transfer of the people's money to private institutions and their shareholders is about as close to the opposite of socialization as you can get.

Government forcing private individuals to purchase something from a private entity simply because they're citizens is Socialist.

Ahem.

The core principle of socialism is that the means of production are owned by the people, thus no private entities. You're neatly proving the statement that the right routinely label anything they don't like socialist.

Alone, alternating caps adds next to no security.

Well, yes, that's why I specified in this theoretical example that the salt was the initials of the website with the caps alternated. One needs the salt (which, yes, is not a true cryptographic salt, although I do know people who run their generic secure password plus a salt through hash algorithms and use the resulting hash as their password) to be memorable to the user and again, virtually no one is important enough that someone would sit there pulling apart an almost random password to figure out if the user salts their passwords per site and if so what it is.

You're spending waaaay too much time analyzing a throwaway example when the meat of the message is to subtly vary passwords so that if a website fails to properly store your password that the keys to the kingdom don't fall to the bad guys, that a simple technique can both dramatically improve the quality of one's passwords while safeguarding against bad programming and/or system administration.

Use unique passwords for everything important and use a secure but salted password for various sites. Let's say my generic secure password is $sJ55Pm#

I salt the secure password between the fives with the initials of the website alternating caps. So my /. password could be $sJ5Sd5Pm# and my World of Warcraft password could be $sJ5WoW5Pm#.

I only have to remember one good password and a formula. Someone clever enough could hand analyze the passwords and might spot the salting but realistically, very few people are worth that effort.

which makes me think there's no point in super complex "try and guess THIS one!" passwords.

One practices good password habits because they help when a site does things properly. Nothing is going to save you if a site is terribly set up but that doesn't mean you should abandon best practices.

1. Something good that you will actually carry with you. The micro-four thirds system has a good ecosystem of cameras and lenses that combine being reasonably small with reasonably good.

2. If you go with a DSLR, get a good prime (fixed length rather than zoomable) wide aperture (light opening width - the thing that looks like f/x.y. Lower values of x are better). Both Canon and Nikon have excellent F/1.8 50mm lenses are very reasonable prices. The fixed length means that you'll have to work harder at composition rather than just being able to wing it, which I think develops good habits. They are also less likely to break (fewer moving parts) and are very sharp (having a fixed length makes it easier to create sharp lenses).

Ah, yes, legal advice from the intarweb. Worth every penny one pays for it.

Good security is about proper risk assessment. Unless you live a wildly criminal life and/or never surf the web on your phone, your chances of being stopped by the police and having your phone copied is minuscule compared to browsing to a malicious or compromised web site. Don't spend so much time worrying about ebola that you don't get your flu shot.

Really? A platform that's how many years old now and doesn't have a usable web browser (most browsers figured out that opening tabs in the background was good years ago and I've not seen a browser that didn't remember how far down in the previous page you were when you click back since the mid 90s) or (non-Kindle) e-reader application is what you think is a high-end platform with a alive dev base?

As a sound engineer, I'm curious what a "voltage/capcitance/current/frequency issue" is? I was mostly with you up until the frequency part.

The things that have been added to stereos (mostly surround processing, some simple source switching, and D/A converters) since the 70s aren't huge power sucks to the extent they would cause amplifiers to sound worse.

it's like saying "Lets add a 1000W lamp to this wall socket and not expect anything bad happen to the Audio on the same circuit."

As long as there's not a dimmer involved leaking into the circuit, a 1000 watt incandescent light sharing a circuit with a home stereo should have no effect unless you have a ridiculously loud and/or inefficient stereo.

Talk to any sound engineer (read non-audiphile subscriber) and they will have tons of stories on how fickle sound set ups can be when no one knowledgeable is watching the setup and correcting things.

Watching the setup and correcting things? You set up a system and pretty much just use it. You might re-tune a PA system once there's bodies in the seats acting as diffusers or raise or lower the overall volume based on the size of the crowd. But it's not like you sit there adjusting things about the amplification system itself as a matter of course during an event.

The big factor is that people just don't care about audio sounding good so manufacturers have cheaped out to save themselves money.

You can get a very capable Android cell phone from any of the major providers for under $100 these days. I've not been under contract since 2006 or so and I was able to get one with a second generation snagdragon processor and unlocked world capability for $150, but I'm also on a small provider that actively tries to avoid being evil.

It might be OK for the three applications you listed but I think you'd be disappointed by the media that the CPU can support and by how clumsy playing games would be on that tiny of a keyboard. But all of those things are true of my cell phone too, which I carry pretty much everywhere I go because it actively improves my life. If something's going to have a similar form factor to a phone, it has to give some reason to carry it in addition to the phone.

The only thing that makes this really distinctive is that the hardware is completely open, which only affects the user experience by giving a very, very small minority of people a happy glow.By doing this project badly, they're hurting their own cause.

These things have been out for two years or so and sold 1000 units (according to the claim on wikipedia). I wouldn't hold your breath on high resolution eInk. On the other hand, in two years or so you'll be able to get a fairly capable 7" Android tablet with everything you wanted (albeit with ethernet off a USB dongle) for around $200. Maybe 5" as well, although I don't know if that form factor will take off.

No, I'm pretty sure the only insane asshole involved is you.

Arduinos solve problems and are successful, despite being nice hardware. SheevaPlugs solve problems and are successful.

If people want to design and play with these for the fun of it, more power to them, but it's poorly conceived and will never be very successful at reaching the hands of hobbyists and they shouldn't be surprised when they fail. As I told the other gentleman, if they're dedicated to open hardware, they'd be better off creating open hardware for desktops where they wouldn't have bad space, heat, and power constraints rather than poorly duplicating functionality of something that most people carry around already.

The problem, as stated, is that it lacks wireless capability, which is something that is largely the point of portable devices. By not supporting a protocol that users can find (how many people do you know with 802.15.4 connections in their homes?) they haven't solved that problem. This creates a larger obstacle to getting the product into the hands of users, which is their primary goal, yes?

If you're not going to make a compelling portable product, why not make a compelling non-portable product that doesn't have the costs and constraints of trying to be small, portable, and battery powered?

It still has low specs and poor design, except now it has an ugly dongle (that makes it harder to carry without breaking it) that doesn't connect to anything people actually use. Tools have to solve problems and this doesn't solve anyone's issues other than a very, very, very tiny minority of open fanatics. If it's not a tool, it's a toy, and these don't seem like much fun.

In the mean time, the rest of the world has cell phones that are more powerful, have better displays, better input devices, and roughly the same cost under contract. And they connect to the cell networks as well as people's home, office, and coffeeshop networks.

Moving on..

Before the 16:9 1366x768 screens completely took over the market, most laptops that were mid level or higher had 1680x1050 screens. That was superior in resolution in both directions. Now it's very hard to find anything better on anything short of a top of the line model, other than a few that are 1600x900 - again inferior to the old standard.