dear person or persons who wrote the whitehouse response, i'd like to respond by repeating back to you your exact words:

"If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and — importantly — accept the consequences of his actions. He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime"

and, as an aside, dear whitehouse aides, may i remind you what happened to aaron schwartz.

nope. don't own a smartphone, don't want one. i design computers (libre hardware, FSF-Endorseable) and i've had it up to here with technology and with software, i spend most of my day sitting down in front of a computer, why the f**** would i want to be taking a break walking around... with a device that not only creates up to 2 watts of microwave-grade energy in close proximity to my body but also guarantees that the concept of "break" is entirely destroyed.

i carry a nokia 3310 - reluctantly. it makes phone calls. it does SMS. the battery lasts 10 days even though it's really old. no, the only reason i would carry a smartphone is because i designed it and made it myself, including vetting all the software and choosing what i wanted. the phone would have a *true* aircraft mode where the power would be absolutely cut from the GSM/3G radio.

i did this before, on a very small scale, for GBP 1,000 about 10 years ago. sales teams kept offering me 2ghz dual-core machines at GBP 300 each and i had to tell them this:

"look, i have a budget of 1,000 GBP. you're offering me a 2ghz system for 300. so i can only buy 3 machines, right? so that's a total of 6 ghz of computing power. on the other hand, if i buy this GBP 125 machine which has only a 1ghz processor, i can get 8 of those, which gives a total of 8 ghz of computing power. so _why_ would i want FASTER?"

so i bought qty 8 of motherboard, CPU, 128mb RAM, low-cost case containing a PSU already, and accidentally included a 3com network card because i didn't realise that the built-in ethernet on the motherboard could do PXE boot..... but still, all-in that was 125 GBP and each one took 15 minutes to assemble so it was no big deal. got myself 8ghz of raw computing power, which was the best that i could get for the money that i had.

and that's the question that you have to ask yourself. what's the highest performance / price metric that can be achieved?

the highly specific problem that i was endeavouring to parallelise was a very small memory footprint non-I/O-bound task: running the NIST.gov Statistical Test Suite. i booted all 8 machines off of my laptop, over PXE boot with an NFS read-only root filesystem. had to wait 30 seconds between each because my 800mhz P3 laptop with 256mb of RAM reaaallly couldn't cope with 8 machines hammering it... not over a 100mbit/sec link, anyway.

once started, i wrote a script that ssh'd into each and left them running the STS for a day at a time. very little actual data was generated: a report.

but the issue that you're solving may involve huge amounts of disk I/O, it may involve huge amounts of inter-connectivity (inter-dependence between the parallel tasks). you may even have to use a GPU (OpenCL) if it's that computationally expensive... ... and that's where anyone's advice really ends, because unless you know exactly what it is you need to do - in real, concrete terms of I/O per second, GFLOPs/sec, GMACs/sec, inter-communication/sec, you really can't and shouldn't even remotely consider spending any money.

so please consider writing a spreadsheet, based on the performance/price metric, extending it to the domain(s) that you're interested in optimising. then the answer about what to buy should be fairly self-evident.

oh and don't forget to include the power budget (and cooling) because i think it will shock the hell out of you. remember you need to include the maximum specs, not the "average" or "scenario design power".

about six or seven years ago i used to go a lot further than that, but at the time people disregarded what i said as being completely outrageous. times change.... let me reiterate it by way of parallel example.

this sentence "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism"

should read "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by terrorist spokesmen...."

i believe it was joseph goebbels, hitler's right-hand man, who said that the way for a government to get what it wanted was to terrorise people by making them think that they were no longer safe in their own homes. that if they didn't cecede power to the goverment then someone who was beyond the ability of the government to control would possibly kill them in their own beds, or on their way to work, or would kill their children on the way to school.

this strategy is one that governments today are fully aware of (they saw how effective it was for stalin and hitler and mussolini after all), and they are quite happy to copy it. unfortunately, when people fully trust their governments and cecede all power to them, historically we've seen how quickly things can flip to become very very dangerous. the problem is that i don't see how, when power is ever so slowly eroded in small incremental steps, it is possible to reverse that situation for people's benefit, without a very large event occurring (such as a bloody riot or a civil war). maybe it's possible now, peacefully, with the internet the way it is, and with organisations like avaaz, al jazeera, 38degrees and more: i don't really know. should we have faith in people and the way the internet works, now?

i'm surprised it's not called "faithbook.com"

no because they forgot to ship it via the USA to have the backdoors installed.

i take it you've not seen "Independence Day", or "Ender's Game", then? we need these planes just in case there's ever an alien attack from outer space, man.

well dang, this is gonna get google banned in a few more countries that have human rights abuse issues and corrupt governments... with the possible exception of america, where google would fight tooth and nail to stop that happening. instead i suspect they'll work quite hard to twist what the definition of "verified editorial" is - most likely by deploying operatives within the team. this is gonna be fuun!

fuck me as if we don't have enough to contend with here on slashdot with moderators (users) getting into a bun-fight over what comments are appropriate and which aren't, under this ruling the slashdot web site owners would have to review all the comments *and* the moderations *and* all the meta-moderations *anyway*! let the moderation wars begin... starting with this comment, yaay!

i did indeed... but it obviously wasn't clear enough. i believe that would come from the subject line saying "facebook is sending encrypted emails", rather than the subject saying "facebook allowing you to receive GPG-signed administrative notifications by email".