It sort of depends on the value of your secrets. People are reasonably certain that if you wipe random data over a disk 32 times that it can never be recovered, reasonably certain, with current technology anyway, well with the current technology we know about anyway. Now you have to ensure of course that it's been done properly and some dimwit hasn't just cleared a partition instead of the whole volume, and of course when you start dealing with SSD's or more expensive drives with smarter controllers your ability to actually do a write to every sector to achieve this goal is somewhat questionable, and of course doing a 32 times rewrite on a large drive is going to take a few days to actually finish, days you're paying someone you trust with that data to sit and watch it, well presumably anyway.

On the other hand, physically destroying the disc is much faster and much more effective, depending on what the company charges, it might actually even be cheaper since you could actually do it to a whole bunch of hard drives at once.

Is it probably excessive if you're the radio shack at the mall? Sure, if you're the government though?

Vista had some serious issues, and Win 7 is much, much better, but it was never quite as bad as people made it out to be. They also tend to forget that Windows XP was as bad or worse on most existing hardware when it was released. Particularly in terms of RAM XP required a something like 4 times what would run 98 comfortably.

You'd probably actually find that Win 8 ran fine on that rig, it ran faster than 7 on mine.

The stupid thing is that by SP2 Vista was actually not bad. Hell Vista at release was actually pretty good, it suffered from Microsoft's battle with vendors over a halfway decent security model, but was otherwise fine, still better than XP.
For that matter once you get by the whole moronic touch crap, 8 is actually even better than 7.

I don't think it was a choice, windows xp is just seriously old, and full of really bad design decisions.

The fundamental problem is that people are hanging onto Windows XP like it's their god damned life. The fact that it's actually a horribly shitty 13 year old OS and that every single subsequent Microsoft OS is dramatically better (yes that includes both Vista and Win 8), seems to mean nothing to anyone. Sure there are people who can't upgrade, but there's a lot of people who just refuse to, including people on places like Slashdot who should know better (god how horrible was Linux in 2001).

Microsoft has back ported IE 11 to Win 7(and presumably Vista, who knows), but they can't port it back to XP, you probably couldn't run the latest Chrome in a version of X11 from then either.

Microsoft's "IE strategy" if there was one, was to do absolutely nothing with their browser for the better part of a decade, nothing more, nothing less. In 2001 when they released IE6, pretty much no one was actually standards compliant, certainly not Netscape, Opera came close, but had a tiny market share. Every release they've made since then has been moving further towards standards compliance, not away from it.

I know it's popular to bash Microsoft, and they have many sins to answer for in the web arena, but doing two tenths of fuck all for ten years isn't exactly a vile conspiracy.

Only if they get to keep them.

It isn't so much that big companies are wasteful, but that when you've reached a certain level of market saturation in your core business area the only way to expand revenue in any significant way is to expand into new business areas. You can almost think of these as new business ventures as opposed to simply purchases by a company, and most new business ventures, even those by established players, fail.

That said, the Motorola purchase seems particularly insane, the only logical reason for Google to make that purchase was to build their own phone which is something they didn't even try. I'm not really surprised they didn't try given that it would have caused a backlash against both Android and ChromeOS in their entire supply chain for little to no gain, but they should have known that before they bought the company in the first place.

Except selective enforcement, even if that's what this was, can only be tyrannical if the law is already tyrannical. In a system like ours where the executive doesn't actually get to create law this means that through selective enforcement, even if that's what they were doing, is actually reducing the tyranny of the legislative branch.

On top of that, allowing the executive(that is to say the police) the ability to take into account circumstance and context is the only way in which any kind of justice can exist. The law is black and white, but real life quite often isn't, every single time that we try to reduce the ability of the executive and judicial branches to selectively enforce the will of congress, for example through minimum sentences, we make our country a worse place to live and less free. Yes selective enforcement allows for the opportunity for the wealthy to bribe their way out of power or for the poor to be made an example of, but it also allows for people to be offered second chances or for their circumstances to be taken into account.

The enforcers of the law can only truly be tyrants if they enforce laws which do not exist or if the laws that they enforce are tyrannical. We have the courts to protect us from the former, and selective enforcement is part of how the executive protects us from the latter.

That wasn't even close to my point. The police in Hicksville are doing what the residents if Hicksville want them to do which is crack down on undesirables. They wouldn't for one second get away with treating the town majority like that. It's not lck of oversight or the fact that control measures don't work. Not for the NSA, and not for the Hicksville PD, it's that we don't really want criminals to have civil rights because civil rights get in the way of arresting them.

Then FOSS offers a solution, code it yourself or pay someone else to code it for you. It'll probably cost you 5- 10 years of full time development or close to a million bucks to accomplish, but you have that option.

For whatever reason there simply aren't enough developers who have a professional music editing itch to scratch or perhaps there aren't enough with the same itch to scratch for anything much to get off the ground. Realistically it's not all that surprising that people who make their money out of content creation and copyright might not be the biggest proponents of FOSS and so not necessarily the most willing to sink huge amounts of time into it.

It's not about not being able to drink plain water, it's about how insane you'd go if you ate nothing but plain water for the rest of your life.

On top of that, once you've taken all this crap, processed it and dried it into a powder, shipped it across the country and then left it in your cupboard for a while, does it still have all those nutrients? Are they delivered in a more effective manner than vitamin pills(which are largely useless)? How do you ensure you're not getting too much of something? The guy in question even seems to have health problems associated with it, ones which seem to match the ones associated with tube feeding in general.

TL;DR; Even if it works, a longer life at what cost? There's evidence that castration will vastly increase your lifespan too, but I'm not lining up.

Of course people crossing a border pass that test. US Customs was created and empowered to search people crossing the borders by the people who actually created the constitution. Searching people and objects entering your country is something that law enforcement is empowered to do in every single country on earth and has always been empowered to do in every single country on earth.

They can't stop the officers of Hickville PD mostly because the community doesn't really have a problem with the abuses of Hickville PD.

You see, the citizens of Hickville don't much like African Americans or other minorities very much, they wouldn't say that to your face, but it the cops are hassling people, well they're probably criminals. Because they're in Hickville, the residents of Hickville are the only people who regularly see what they're doing and since those same residents actually approve of what they're doing nothing happens.

Bitcoin will eventually be deflationary because of the limited supply cap. The fact that we have things like fractional reserve banking increases the amount of time it could theoretically remain non deflationary, but there comes a point where if you made any more imaginary money the whole system will collapse and you need to make some more real money which bitcoin doesn't do.

The major problem with bitcoin however is that a fairly small number of people already have the vast majority of coins that can ever be mined. If you stuck the entire world onto bitcoins the few thousand people who currently own bitcoins would become richer than anyone who currently exists on earth while everyone else would be third world poor. Except of course that most of the people who had all those bitcoins would be incredibly asset poor and a lot of the people who didn't would be incredibly asset rich. You'd have extremely poor people who owned multi billion dollar companies and extremely rich people who didn't even own their own home. That's insane and won't work.