Yes, the price of the 850 is obscene. The 840 wasn't very overwhelming either. The Crucial M500 is where it's at.

OpenVPN gets me around the port 25 filter...

You don't know how to set up and use port 587 or 465?

I think CoolVibe means "get a real VPS with a static IP and real DNS".

Sergei Brin, is that you? “If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great. We're doing it as well as can be done." Did you say that to the Guardian?

Thank you for clarifying that. So far, checking into that, I ran across this, which says that Google tried to scapegoat one engineer (shades of GM), when actually management failed to do its function, and according to the FCC Google impeded and delayed the FCC's investigation, resulting in a fine of - wait for it - $25 grand. I would say that is about the equivalent of one dust grain filed off of a single penny to you or me.

The project software was clearly designed to capture and record those packets which included email etc, and that data had no possible relevancy to the ostensible purpose of the project, which was basically only to link SSIDs and MACs to their geographical location. So it's a strange definition of "inadvertent", but even with the benefit of the doubt, I think the issue a lot of us have is, why didn't Google just say oops, say the words to make us actually believe none of the questionable data was actually inspected by anyone, come clean and be open about it, and properly aid the FCC in its investigation? There is just too much an odor of Watergate coverup to the affair.

You sure as hell got THAT right. But it's not like the shills are prevnting real people from posting here too. We only have ourselves to blame for the din of the shills and apologists completely drowning us out here.

All you guys posting to the effect that Google has been doing nothing wrong in connection with this - you all lost me at the point you failed to acknowledge or comprehend this:

[Google] acknowledged that its Street View cars were accessing email, web history and other data on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks

Did any of you even read the summary? I have no issue with Google recording the presence of my (hypothetical) open WiFi hotspot at such-and-such location and publishing that fact, even with an exterior photo of my property. I have a BIG problem with them snooping on private correspondence and other private matters exposed on said open WiFi.

The fact that if I did have an open WiFi it would sure as hell be on a different network than the one I use for email and other personal activities is BESIDE THE POINT. The point is, per the summary, Google is actively snooping on things they know for damn sure are not intended for them.

If the summary is wrong on this point, fine; please point out exactly how it is wrong.

Can we give the ribbon thing a rest?

Hell no. Any other questions?

Seems to me that they should be locked up in POW camps run by the military, from which there is no release so long as the combat continues, save at the discretion of both sides agreeing on an exchange. Their confinement would be strictly a military issue, not subject to appeal through the judiciary. As such I have no problem with using extraterritorial as well as territorial military holdings, as in neither case would the military aims of the national government be allowed to be betrayed by gerbils.

Of course in my imaginary world, the US, and hopefully most of the civilized world, would have, through due process, declared total war against the islamists who made themselves our all-out, zealous enemy which is a bandit cartel rather than a proper religion.

Since that didn't happen, nothing I suggest based on that is going to be operative. In actual fact, two successive US regimes have convinced me they have no interest in addressing reality in an effective manner, so whatever comes home to roost on the US as a national power is richly deserved.

The fact that the people in the US on the whole do not directly deserve the hell that will exponentially be visited on them - life is harsh, as the lion tells the wildebeeste and the shark tells the seal. Stupidity has consequences. The US voters installed these horrific regimes just as surely as German voters confirmed Hitler in a plebiscite.

Do they have USB condoms?

I was about to say if they don't, they should, suggesting all you need is to have ground and VCC connected and D+ and D- left open - but that's not the way it works! You might get 100 mA that way, or you might get nothing, but you'll never get the full 1/2 amp or the extended 1.8 amps that way. You need enough smarts in your "condom" to negotiate the current.

But all is not lost. I second what the AC suggests: LockedUSB. They have done the work and produced a neat little package, and it's worth the reduced price for what it does.

silver has the best electrical resistance, followed by copper, followed by aluminium

Our AC is full of bull. Gold is more conductive than aluminum. However, the figures for the four top metals are grouped so closely that there isn't much to choose (other than heavy-duty power transmission, where the ratio of resistivity to density rules and cost matters greatly, so basically it's either copper or aluminum, and aluminum has a significant edge).

Resistivity in ohm-meters at 20 C:
Silver, 1.59*10^-8
Copper, 1.68*10^-8
Gold, 2.44*10^-8
Aluminum, 2.82*10^-8

Gold (or platinum) plated contacts are most desirable for circuits which carry very low to extremely low current, because it is free from corrosion, so surface resistance stays low. For circuits carrying significant current, contacts operate under much higher mechanical pressure, so wiping clears the corrosion at the points of contact. Platinum has more than TWENTY TIMES the resistivity of gold, yet it is still very suitable for contact plating. The resistance contributed by a plating only 1.3 MICRONS in thickness is utterly insignificant. In fact, you need a tin substrate under the gold plating to make it durable, and tin is only as conductive as platinum. But it doesn't matter, because the tin substrate only needs to be 1.3 microns thick, too.

The meat of the connector, relay or switch contact can't be silver, copper, gold or aluminum because none of them has any significant degree of springiness. Phosphor-bronze is good. Its resistivity is seven times higher than copper, but that is just a fact of life. The wires leading to the contacts form a current path many times longer than that of the contact itself, so the resistance of the contact is not very significant.

Interesting question, by way of backtracking from the challenge. I know of two statues (if that is what you meant to write) of Lenin in Finland. There are also two such statues in Italy, and four such statues in the US. I guess they must have been ex-Soviet countries too.

OTOH, the Finnish armed forces killed a lot of Soviet soldiers during WW II. And Nazi German soldiers, BTW, in a different period of the war.

I wonder whether C/C++ should provide a safe buffer

When I see that expression "C/C++" used in this particular context it raises my hackles, because it indicates the writer does not understand the difference.

In C the programmer is free to USE a buffer safely, by doing his own bounds checking. In C++ the programmer is free to use C++'s non-overflowing dynamically-allocated/self-growing constructs, as well as a simple C style array or fixed-size-allocated buffer. C++ makes it substantially easier to use a buffer safely, but you can do it in C also, by exercising more intricate care in programming.

In principle you could greatly increase reliability/security by switching the ecosystem from C to C++ and enforcing certain rules, but I am afraid that the base of truly competent C++ programmers is at least an order of magnitude less than that of C programmers, and worse, programmers who can write C++ and get it to compile, but are not truly proficient and competent in C++, seldom realize their own deficiency.

TL;DR: C++ *HAS* safe buffers if you choose to use them.

Er, Finland was never part of the Soviet Union.

Please read Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast and then tell me if you still think natural language is appropriate to command computers.

The use of natural language to interact with Star Trek: The Next Generation's computer has an extremely powerful appeal. I read Heinlein's novel prior to the debut of STTNG and I was still impressed by the latter, but my belief in the feasibility of the idea is greatly tempered by the former.