It brings into question all evidence brought by said agents. Those agents could have framed him for all you know, to cover their own misdeeds.

There should be no HTTP anything anymore. Everything should be encrypted. Originally, HTTP existed because the server load for encryption was too heavy for the hardware of the time. That is no longer true.

How about a compromise - 10% flat sales tax on everything (consumption tax, also applied at borders) and then a median+ flat income tax. That way only those making above the median pay income tax, at a flat rate. The consumption tax supports a couple of things.

Umm, that boat sailed a couple of years ago. I don't believe anyone really trusts the gov at this point, and that's not a good state of affairs.

This is easily possible, but realize who you're talking about - this is Google (G), and G makes its money by scanning your plaintext email and building profiles about you to sell ads and marketing metrics. If gmail goes PGP, then G loses the ability to scan that plaintext email, unless it's doing so via a client side process to send the information its interested in prior to encryption, also possible, but kind of defeats the purpose of encryption in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if GTalk goes away soon, because more people are starting to use OTR supported clients. G only sees encrypted messages, pretty useless for gathering data.

Um, there's no good reason you've listed there. Protecting income is not what the government should be about at all, and is a good reason to ditch it.

Modular data centers, or really anything modular in the IT field, has been discussed in various incarnations for decades, either as a product or as a todo. Wikipedia's article even has external references that predate this claim.

That's why there's this universal access fee for phones, and why broadband ISPs were offered billions in subsidies.... So yes, they should offer service.

or haggis

Most PCs only have 2 or 3 USB controllers tops, which explains the absolutely abysmal performance you get as soon as you start plugging in lots of USB devices, since each controller serves as a hub to 2-4 ports.

Hands down, Apple's HFS system should be replaced with something better, one of the more modern FS's out of Linux/BSD land would be perfect. However, I should mention you can plug other fs's into OSX today, and I've been considering ZFS for a while now, just haven't had the time to plug it in and test it.

They theoretically hit it, I can tell you real world speeds are significantly lower, even for heavy I/O tasks. The Samsung 840s run about 120 MB/s, the 850s are supposed to better than double that, and in RAID0, I should hit a consistent 400MB/s minimum. As soon as I have the time, I'll plug them in and see.

Well, I'm not sure the disk performance crown resides with Linux anymore, unless you're running full bore PCIe X4 at a minimum, however you manage to get there, on a single drive. I'm 100% positive that Linux takes the crown in other configurations, but that won't be on a laptop you can quickly take with you, unless I missed a product announcement recently.

But but but... USB 3.0 is the snizzle! Or so everyone says.

I personally think USB should be retired to the same place as IDE, RLL, ATA and all those other bad idea shared bus solutions. The only ones that worked well, IMNSHO, are SCSI type solutions, including SATA, which can now be overwhelmed by a couple of top end SSDs running in RAID0.

And what software would this be, other than perhaps FCPX?