This. Ask people who the first man in space is and if they have a name it's almost certainly Yuri Gagarin, unless they confuse it with the moon landing. Very few count Alan Shepard's suborbital flight as really going into space even though he took a peek and got the astronaut wings for it. What SpaceShipTwo is delivering will certainly give you some bragging rights, but you'll also find many party poopers who'll tell you it's $200k spent on not really going into space anyway.

And there's a lot of potential for SpaceX to improve on that $20 million/head if they take a Falcon Heavy which should be able to lift 8-9 Dragon capsules to orbit as it has payload 53000 kg to LEO, one Dragon is 6000 kg launch weight. My guess is that it's possible to design a "Dragon XXL" to carry 100 people to sit on top of that rocket. At $85 million for the rocket let's say $100 million total with capsule - a $1 million/head trip seems entirely within reach in the next 10-20 years. While that is still out of the average persons' reach there's literally millions of millionaires out there who could go if they spent their entire net worth going. And thousands who wouldn't even feel it.

You ought to look into things before forming an opinion about them:

For-profit colleges had a 19.1 percent default rate, down from 21.8 percent last year.

Four-year public universities and private nonprofit institutions, meanwhile, had the lowest default rates -- 8.9 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively.

cite.

That doesn't make any sense at all, if they can choose "facebook" I can choose "facebookcorewwwi" and feed it 0 bits to get my hash. It is the other way around, you must generate a public key and SHA-1 hash that, cut to 80 bits and convert to base32 and that'll be your service descriptor. Since each letter = 5 bits they basically brute force created 2^40 = public keys to find one that hashed to facebook*. There are tools for this, the estimate for a single 1.5 GHz processor choosing 8 letters is about ~25 days. Note that spoofing a full address would take millions of years the same way.

Personally I think the picture is becoming increasingly simple: if data is collected, there is a good chance it will be disseminated and cross-referenced with whatever else is known about you, or that can be statistically inferred from what is known.

There was a time when I thought that encryption, and layers of computer security features, had given individuals measures to strongly protect information, so long as they didn't do something dumb. Now I don't think so. It is simply not possible to implement and use a system of any scale without making mistakes. You might as well pin your hopes on making ten free-throws in a row. Therefore, once you share information beyond yourself, there is a good chance it will go further than you wanted. Your privacy lies solely in being one of many, and not being individually targeted with greater resources than you have to defend yourself.

There are no perfect crimes. Information wants to be free. Etc.

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.