Consumers have no way to educate themselves, because the companies are not compelled to reveal what they are collecting or what they are doing with the information with any specificity.

China, Iran, North Korea, occasionally Turkey, Libya, Egypt, perhaps Russia, Ukrane, Hong Kong. Something like 25% of the internet either can't or potentially can't access Facebook right now. But with TOR you can.

"Anyone still going to the movies?" Answer: yes.

I came here to post something similar. We've seen a load of switchers over in FreeBSD land as a result of systemd, including one company that's currently a moderately large RedHat customer and plans to migrate before their current support contract expires.

No, because your laptop doesn't authenticate base systems either. It will try to connect to any AP that has an SSID that it recognises and (if it expects DHCP on that network, which is usually the default) send a DHCP query. And, if that AP is malicious, then you'll get the exploit code delivered to your DHCP client.

I keep my calendar on an ownCloud server that I can access from any web browser and is automatically sync'd with my phone, tablet, and laptop in the background, so any one of those devices can beep and give me reminders of appointments, and I'll notice whichever is closer to me. It also integrates with Tracere on the phone that automatically silences the ringer when I'm in a meeting.

But your way sounds good too...

I'm a big fan of Skagen watches. There's been a trend in men's watches to make them bigger and bigger (presumably so the wearer can say 'we are men, for we can lift big watches!' on a regular basis). I want a watch that's light and convenient and I've not found anything better. The thinnest ones that they make aren't water resistant and are light enough that you can barely feel them. I have one with a titanium mesh strap, which is marginally thicker and lighter, but I can still forget that I'm wearing a watch. The new smartwatches are just a continuation of the 'let's make watches big' trend. If I want to carry something that bulky around, I'll put it in my pocket, with my phone...

Huh? First of all, DHCP has no authentication. If I pop up on your trusted network and answer DHCP broadcast queries faster than the router, then your DHCP client will trust me. Second, you realise that that's how most operating systems are configured to work out of the box? Plug in network cable (or join WiFi network), send DHCP broadcast packet, trust the response.

I doubt that they're inserted intentionally. If you insert an intentional backdoor, then there's a chance that it can be traced back to you. Pretty much any nontrivial program contains bugs, and if the program is written in C then a good fraction of those are exploitable. If you've got the resources to insert intentional vulnerabilities into open source code, then you've got the resources for the lower-risk strategy of auditing and fuzzing the code to finding some existing ones to exploit.

To address each of your points in turn:

8GB is RAM was the minimum I was buying 4 years ago. Back then, it was because it was the sweet spot in price per GB. Unfortunately, in some machines it was the most that the board could support and so is now the thing making me ponder replacing the motherboards. Specifically, on my NAS box, because increasing the disks will increase the size of the deduplication tables, meaning that I'll need to increase the size of the RAM to get tolerable performance, meaning I'll need to replace the motherboard and CPU to be able to accommodate more RAM, meaning that I'll end up just keeping the case and optical drive - everything else is upgraded.

Swap out the hard disk for an SSD? The only machine I've bought in the past 6 years that wasn't SSD-only has been my NAS. The laptop I've just replaced had a 256GB SSD and it was replaced with one that has a 1TB SSD. Buying hard disks hasn't made sense for years unless you need a lot of storage that you rarely access (i.e. NAS / SAN uses), and even then adding an SSD for L2ARC makes sense (as long as you have enough RAM).

Upgrade the video card? I've not done anything that taxes the GPU in my old laptop, but then I'm not a gamer.

Not wanting to upgrade the CPU? You claim two bottlenecks. The first is disk to RAM. My laptop's SSD can do over 300MB/s sustained transfer and over 60MB/s on small random files. With a reasonable amount of RAM, the only limiting factor is the SSD write speed, because all of the working set lives in RAM. If you think that RAM to cache bandwidth is a bottleneck, then you're running some very unusual workloads. If you're doing the sorts of things where a 6-10 year old CPU is still fine, then you probably don't need to upgrade the machine at all: my mother was quite happily using a desktop of that sort of vintage, with no upgrades, until she replaced it with a laptop last year.

For reference, the machines I use when I need a bit more processing power than my laptop have dual (ZFS, mirrored) 3TB disks, 512GB SSDs split between log and cache device and 256GB of RAM. The large log devices speed up write performance, because you're almost always doing sustained linear writes to the spinning rust. The 256GB of RAM means that you very rarely even hit the SSD for loading files. They have 24 cores, and I can very easily saturate them all. If you gave me a 48 core machine, I'd use that instead, but currently the extra performance isn't worth the cost (doubling the number of cores roughly halves the time it takes for various things, but the linear gain is much smaller - going from one hour to half an hour was a big win, so was to quarter of an hour. Going from three minutes to one and a half minutes isn't that exciting).

But as it happens Denmark's per capita energy usage is also less than 1/2 of the US.

And yes, at least a good chunk of that is actual, honest-to-god lifestyle differences, not just situational.

Wind is neither very expensive nor environmentally damaging.

You didn't bother to provide a source but I will: New wind and solar plants generate cheaper low-carbon electricity than the latest nuclear reactors, a study shows, indicating they will lead a global push for green energy. There are lot of different factors that make this claim debatable, but even if wind is still somewhat more than nuclear, it's not "very expensive" which was the point.

It's an actress. Nobody asked her to be gay. They asked her to act being a gay person. Wearing clothes.

Whatever happened to Id Software?

The graphics engine programmer from ID, John Carmack, works for Oculus Rift. It was kind of newsworthy around here.

So if you think they should source programming talent from Id... your a bit late to the party. Unless you think they really need John Romero too... ?

Nobody claimed that Tim Cook was brave (except some who didn't think it through). He didn't come out to show that he is brave. He came out to demonstrate to lots of gay people who are not in his position that you can be gay and become CEO of one of the worlds biggest companies, in order to improve their outlook to life.