What I'd really like with modern trends is more emphasis on "private clouds". I want to put my data on my own server on my own network, so it can be accessed from any of my devices around the house and over VPN if I'm out, but with the data always securely under my control and backed up according to my wishes.

This is easy for some formats, including plain files obviously. However, it's surprisingly awkward for stuff like e-mail, where there are plenty of relevant concepts like IMAP and mail stores and smart hosts and web mail systems, but actually setting them up in a useful combination if you're not an experienced sysadmin is quite a challenge.

Sadly, it seems even the best FOSS client software is dying out these days, often because "everyone has Google Whatever". As far as I know there hasn't yet been a lot of movement in the FOSS world towards having easily-deployable private clouds for e-mail, shared documents, and so on, which always surprises me given the implicit freedom, independence, privacy and security.

You might not have much recourse even if it's a commercial service you're using. Ironically, on-line back-up services are among the worst offenders. If you use one, go ahead and check its terms, and see whether any of those lovely restoration options they offer will still be there if they decide to close down on a whim. (Hint: Probably they won't, and all you'll get is maybe 48 or 72 hours to download as much as you can at the same time as every other customer they have is trying to do the same.)

If it matters, back it up on systems you control yourself. If it's private, don't upload it to anything, and encrypt the back-ups. It's really that simple. Then again, so is "make sure you back up your important files", and how many people don't do that because it's mildly inconvenient? Maybe those on-line back-up services aren't quite so bad after all...

I guess this bookends the grumpy programmer's 40 years later....

I remember what I learned after a year; then I remember after about 6 years, I realized what I hadn't actually learned after a year.

What happens if a grue shouts "xyzzy"?

I truly doubt there's a Golden Gate Bridge in it, but there might be a starship....

It took me a while to parse your comment... as the IEEE is an international standards body. Then I realized that you weren't talking about nation states, but half of the party system in the US... and then was lost again figuring out how a standards body pushing a security standard for SAs related to political gerrymandering in the US. Did you mean that the Republican party of the US is intentionally trying to make the Internet less secure, and that an international standards body setting down guidelines for big business to follow when architecting new software designs would somehow annoy them because somehow people would suddenly be required to use such standards to develop software like SSL/LTSP/SSH/etc?

Right, but you HAVE to take the new phone when you are up for it, or you leave money on the table. If you promptly re-sell the phone this might work out financially. (Or in the unlikely event that your phone wears out or breaks at exactly the same interval as your replacement schedule.) The payment plans are a much better deal (if the interest rate isn't too high), since the payment eventually stops. The subsidy in the old plans went on forever.

If I'd stated that damage on impact was polynomial, I would have been technically correct, but would have drawn blank stares, even on slashdot. Plus, x^1 is polynomial technically. Squared would have been more accurate, but would have just made the sentence more complicated.

So I'll leave the pedantry up to the responses, and let people understand the implication based on what I originally said.

Well, then pretty soon those people so lacking in self control will do all their acting behind bars.

Neville Chamberlain was in a tough position as the United Kingdom had pretty much disposed of their military in the aftermath of World War I. Their navy was certainly world-class, but the army and anything which could be used to stop Germany was basically non-existent. Ditto for the U.S. Army (which even had serious legislation going before Congress to completely disband the U.S. Army altogether and rely strictly on the state militias for national defense). The rest of the world was disarming at the time Germany was moving into the Rhineland and elsewhere.

Military intelligence was also miserable at the time, where Germany purposely inflated the numbers of their soldiers by marching the same units across prominent bridges (easily seen by observers)... only to ship them by train back to Germany to have them march again over the same bridge several times. Basically the UK & France thought Germany had many more soldiers involved in those early occupations than really was the case and something that might have been stopped simply by calling Germany's bluff.

I don't know if it is too late to do that with Putin's Russia or not... which I suppose is the question some are asking right now.

FTFY.

True, but still an utter red herring.

I'd put this slightly differently -- the same situations where you wouldn't want Google Glass are the ones where you probably wouldn't want a police officer looking around. However, I don't see the bodycam as violating any more rights than the officer already does -- we just give the officer an exemption in exchange for safety/security -- NOT in exchange for privacy; that's the realm of security guards.

So yeah; if a police officer is somewhere/doing something they don't have a reason to do, I want the bodycam. If they've got nothing to hide, the bodycam's not going to add much more to the equation.

I think what the question really shows is that Canadians have a much stronger grasp of the English language, and don't see a few buzzwords and ignore the context. It's one thing to "walk by faith and not by sight" but quite another to think that we depend too much on knowledge (science = knowledge... scientific method or scientists are different kettles of poutine).