In order to use Cortana, you have to switch your Windows login to be your Microsoft account. No, thanks! I have no intention of changing my desktop login to be my Microsoft account. Cortana will have to wait.

Privacy in danger? That question assumes that we still have some privacy to BE in danger. We haven't had any data privacy for a decade already.

You don't drive your house around, but you still insure it. Home insurance is a thriving industry, despite the low odds of payouts, especially compared to the odds of payouts for car insurance. Don't worry, car insurance companies will still be in business, and make money. They will adapt.

Maybe an idea like this could be used in countries whose governments want to squelch free speech. Radio Free Europe did this kind of thing during the Cold War, broadcasting ideas that weren't welcome in the Eastern Bloc. Satellite-based Internet is out of reach for most citizens of such countries, but maybe not something based lower down, like in the stratosphere.

I've never had a keyboard phone fail

A beer spilled on my Treo 650, killing a couple of keys. I was able to buy a replacement keyboard off a random eBay seller and swap it in without much trouble (after which the phone was as good as new), but it was an annoyance all the same.

I suspect a newer touchscreen phone would've been less vulnerable to that kind of failure. Can't say that I've tested the theory yet, even though I usually have a beer in one hand and my phone in the other (to log the beer) whenever a beerfest is on.

It's also pretty inefficient for me to have to consider each part of the federal budget and give it a thumbs up or down.

Reduce the size and scope of the government and this becomes less of an issue.

H.265 is going to become the standard in the near future - not just for 4K (in which is will pretty much be the only solution) but for 1080p as well, since you get significantly higher quality (including 10 or 12 bit color

Any idea why they never did that with H.264? MPEG-2 offered 10-bit color. DVD and (I think) ATSC take advantage of it, and it makes a difference in scenes with large areas of slightly changing color (like a shot of the sky). That it wasn't available in H.264 (except maybe for some crazy-high profiles or levels not in regular use?) always seemed like a step back.

If its Linux only don't present it as a successor to TrueCrypt. A very important feature of TrueCrypt is(was) that it targets Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Any archive being available to any of the three platforms.

I don't know about Mac support, but if Tomb is just a wrapper around LUKS, the volumes it creates should be accessible on Windows as long as you use a filesystem Windows knows about. Ext2IFS doesn't work on anything newer than Windows Vista, so you're most likely looking at FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS if you want your LUKS volume to be portable.

Assuming a suitable LUKS volume, you can mount it on Windows with LibreCrypt, which is the successor to FreeOTFE (by way of DoxBox). My work machine still has FreeOTFE on it, but I just installed LibreCrypt on Windows 10 at home and the encrypted volume on my flashstick mounted right up.

Pretty useless.

Try this:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solar+irradiance+of+Pluto+vs+Earth

There's a roughly three-order-of-magnitude difference between Earth and Pluto. What that'd actually look like, I can only guess...twilight in the middle of the day, perhaps?

Maybe that's why this strange van showed up at my house after a made a tweet about how I planned to assassinate Obama's character.

You can't assassinate that which doesn't exist.

We need to figure out how to reverse the process and apply it to the entire Internet.

...or at least to the SJWs. :-P

Still more reliable than an optical disc. The real backup is on RAID6

RAID isn't backup.

Getting a college degree, you actually learn something.

I've run into more than a few people who have made it through college quite uncontaminated by knowledge.

I'd argue that there are even some college curricula that will leave their students less prepared for the real world than if they had just gone straight into the burger-flipper and barista jobs that are the only types of work they'll ever land outside academia. You can identify most of them by the presence of the word "studies" at the end.

The drivers in California aren't necessarily bad, but they are much more aggressive and more likely to do something stupid out of impatience.

California drivers never heard of lane discipline. They think nothing of (as Denis Leary might put it) "driving really slow in the ultra-fast lane," or of passing the aforementioned assholes on the right.

It works fine on all three. But what I thought was interesting was that when I opened the page in IE, the computer's fan started revving up. As I zoomed in and out and panned around, it really got going. Chrome and Firefox...both cool as a cucumber. That says something about the optimization (or lack thereof) in IE's rendering engine.