Yes, the safest approach is to enable encryption just after you get the device (after using it for a few minutes to accumulate some randomness in the Linux randomness pool, so you get a good key). If you don't, totally wiping it is more or less impossible, though the odds of anything significant surviving either the normal wipe or the encrypt & wipe (which probably won't actually do any more than the wipe) are pretty small.

I'm pretty sure that's not true, because it would make device encryption pretty much useless. A glance at the code certainly appears to show that it encrypts all volumes, but maybe /sdcard somehow gets excluded from the list? I'll ask my colleague, who "owns" disk encryption for Android at Google, tomorrow and post a followup.

I'll also note that none of the devices I have handy (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 1st & 2nd gen, Nexus 10, Moto X, Moto RAZR M, Samsung Note 2) even have an /sdcard partition, exactly. They all mount their data partition on /data, and /data is definitely included in device encryption. In fact, it and /cache are the primary targets of device encryption (/system doesn't matter).

Human visual acuity in a healthy human eyeball can discern features as tiny as 30-arcseconds in size. If you holding a retina display device 30 centimeters away from your face, 30 arc-seconds is only 48 micrometers at that distance, while retina displays use a resolution of 78 micrometers. Further, because the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem suggests that you will need at to sample at at least double the highest frequency of a signal to receive the signal with minimal distortion, suggesting that a true retina display would need pixels that are only 24micrometers in size, and not 78.

So basically, increase the resolution by a factor of slightly more than three, and then you're looking at something that you could truly call "retina".

Even during the last ceasefire the blockade was still in effect so it is not as simple as you suggest.

But there are also those who don't have a blistering hatred, yet still feel that he broke the law and should be accountable. I find these people to be especially common among those who themselves are or have been under legal and moral obligations to preserve US government secrets and are appalled that Snowden essentially dumped a huge pile of unsifted sensitive data on the Guardian and trusted them to keep it secure and behave responsibly.

These people largely agree with the need to publish some of the data, but find dumping all of it to be criminally irresponsible.

I think there are a lot more people like that than those who have the blistering hatred you mention. FWIW, my own take (as someone who once held a Top Secret clearance) is that Snowden's action was necessary, that it was infeasible for him to properly vet and carefully release the data, that the news agencies have done a good job and been responsible, and that whatever damage it may have done is far more than offset by the good that it has done. So on balance I consider him a hero. But I do know a lot of people whose concern about what he did tips the balance the other way, even though they don't "have blistering hatred".

It also helps to be able to set foot on US soil without being arrested. Not a constitutional requirement, per se, but a fairly important practical one. Otherwise even if you win you have to figure out how to sneak into the country and your own inauguration so you can get sworn in -- and acquire the ability to pardon yourself -- before being body slammed to the ground, thrown into the back of a black Suburban and transported to Gitmo for waterboarding.

They are getting 99% of the academic tail, too.

1% Elitism is EVERYWHERE.

Absolutely. So, look at the source: https://android.googlesource.c...

That file contains the code that generates the master key, derives the key encryption key used to protect it (using scrypt), stores the protected master key, and configures dm_crypt with the master key.

Some functions to look at:

- create_encrypted_random_key(), which creates the master key (reading from /dev/urandom).
- encrypt_master_key(), which derives a KEK from your password and uses it to encrypt the master key.
- decrypt_master_key(), which does the reverse.
- create_crypto_blk_dev(), which creates dm_crypt block device.
- cryptfs_setup_volume(), which mounts an encrypted block device.
- cryptfs_enable_inplace(), which encrypts an existing file system.

The device doesn't know you're trying to wipe. It knows that you (a) requested full disk encryption and then later (b) requested a wipe. So it can't optimize (a) away. I suppose it's possible it could just lie and tell you "Yep, I'm encrypting" even though it isn't, but that's the sort of thing that would definitely get noticed by security analysts and gleefully published.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2012/11/27/civil_war_who_would_come_out_on_top_if_the_united_states_all_declared_war.html

Oh, sure, Of course, we have essentially redefined what "natural selection" even means (we didn't remove it entirely, as some people claim - but we did prioritize sexual selection over all other forms).

Eugenics doesn't only concern itself with psychological traits, but also with physical ones. That alone is sufficient to disqualify such categorization.

free trade theory is correct

There is no such thing as "free trade" and there's no proof that the "theory" is correct.

"The Free Market" is a fairy tale that the elite tell us to keep us from leaving the veal pen.