- Mac at home with the client

All these tools and the service are free for basic usage. nvAlt is open source; the other clients are probably not, but as long as my data is in a format which is not application-dependant, that's enough for me.

It depends on your eyesight. Mine is not so good, I don't really see the difference between a Retina display and a regular one. And I am happy with the low price I paid for my MacBook Air :-)

My family visited the USA this Fall and were surprised at the level of paranoia and violence...

It depends on what you mean by "roll". For both authentication and encryption, I think that it is wise today to use solid tools developed by experts (ideally open source tools), but to deploy your own system in order to keep your data (keys, passwords, etc...) under your control.

They rolled back because of the huge negative reaction. That is the story.

I am close to 50, and I experience just the opposite : younger developers who think that version control is an outdated stuff.

Concerning meetings : I have no problem with people texting during meetings, but answering calls is only for assholes

And neither applicable in Switzerland, where private schools are mostly for those who failed in the public ones.

This is slashdot science ?

Besides, the slashdot summary is ambigous : it mentions a population of 3,386, but in which unit ? Number of legs ?

I am glad to live in a place (Central Europe) where there are seasons, and not the same thing all over the year.

Luckily, this is not scalable.

I agree, it's a preference, based on past history.

It might change in the future, but I think that BT Sync's architecture is very promising. If they refuse to provide an open source implementation, then somebody else might implement a very similar solution based on the very same architecture.

Yes, but I would be more interested in their protocol to be published, in order to be able to implement interoperable solutions between BT Sync and other competing products (free as in free beer, free as in free speech or closed/commercial).

I think that opening BT Sync's code is neither sufficient neither necessary :

1. - BT Sync seems to be a protocol, which can be observed. It should be easy to check that Sync is only sending files to expected places and not the NSA, independently from the licence of its source code.
2. - Even if DropBox or Apple would release the source code of their cloud application, your files are sent to a centralized place, from where anything can happen. This does not seem to be the case with BT Sync

You are perfectly right; but I tend to have a bit more trust in BitTorrent than DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Docs or iCloud.