It's not even proper engineer's mindset. An engineer speaks from field experience, or at least knowledge verified by past experimentation.

This is just some armchair know-it-all, like a lot of people commenting on Slashdot. A software engineer, more likely.

That's funny, but PGP was designed with the assumption that communications and email storage can easily be snooped on. It's an end-to-end scheme, and so is S/MIME. The security of both is as good as the encryption algorithm and your and your peers' procedures for key management and exchange.

If a government (to me, the U.S. government agencies are agents of a foreign state) wants the contents, they need to go after you, rather than installing blanket wiretaps at your service providers and silencing their staff with a secret gag order.

They apparently delivered at least one of them to Russia free of charge already. Some years ago, there was a purportedly documental story on Russian TV where an employee of the British embassy was shown using a "spy rock" clandestinely in Moscow. The veracity of that was widely dismissed because of the ridiculousness of the idea. Some of these spy operations sound like gratuitous toying with cloak-and-dagger stuff.

I'm a white guy. Should I "have a word" with the white supremacists, even though I have nothing in common with them except the skin color?

Pah, expiration date. I check the roasting date of the beans I buy (got a grinder at home); usually the microroastery sells something they roasted in the last two weeks, and that's how it should be.

Search for "Samsung" and you'd be surprised by the spate of negative stories featuring Samsung recently. You'd think somebody is on a campaign to tarnish them... but then, why do they keep getting exposed cheating on benchmarks, funding astroturfers, and screwing workers over in poorer countries.

Do you have any evidence to confirm that open source geeks write any significant share of applications on the Play Store?

I buy products that do what I need, and I don't want to pay more just because the manufacturer thinks the customer buying cheap products don't deserve quality.

The topic of this discussion is software. There are some brands that ship software which does not act like it's been coded by a bunch of nincompoops and barely made to pass a fairly superficial set of checks. I've learned from experience that Samsung is not one of these brands, so it is excluded from my purchase decisions.

So what you're saying is, if you buy the "right" Samsung device, it'll be OK, but if you are some poor schmuck who bought a random cheap Samsung because it fit the price point (like I did with my digital TV that crashes if I switch the UI language), it's your own fault if it will turn out buggy and unsupported? I say fuck that. How about choosing a manufacturer who serves all its customers well.

As this article demonstrates, you can get buggy vulnerable crap even if you buy their expensive Smart TVs.

The software must be reworked as well to match this grade of parallelism. As things stand, this is not happening even to the degree that would load 4 cores for any tasks except the "embarrassingly parallel" ones, like image processing.

Some reviews report that the Nokia Lumia 1020 strains to process frames from its monster 41 Mpix sensor, because they didn't go for a dedicated image processor like they did with the Nokia 808. So when Windows Phone finally gets support for SoCs with more than two cores, this is where it will help. But yes, this is the only case I can think of where more than two cores are needed on a phone.

I wonder how much this flagship fetish is an effect of Samsung and other similar manufacturers, who may give a shit about fixing bugs in premium products, but anywhere else the software is utter garbage. I do have an okay working Samsung Blu-Ray drive, but I figure it's only because it's made by a JV with Toshiba.

I think the right answer is, refuse to sponsor shoddy production practices and pick a manufacturer that does its job diligently across the whole product range. If Nokia can make great $30 phones, why Samsung should be excused?

When Nokia's optical image stabilization demo video was found to be staged with a pro camera, it was the doing of an ad agency. Didn't matter a bit.

Ironically, the real thing turned out to be nearly as good. Now selling at an AT&T store near you in the Nokia Lumia 1020. OK, OK, the last bit does not look organic at all.

That's more than a year old, and the calibration issue was fixed long ago.

Source?

Oh yeah, such things never happen with Samsung. "If you don't know about them then it's for you to Google", good advice, you should use it too.

Those old days were a long way ago... Please, it's the company that gave me an N81 with brittle nonsensical buttons at the top and fastened the USB/power port to the N900's system board with a bit of dried out snot. The quality of Lumias feels like a huge improvement.