I've lived here for several years and like the weather. It doesn't rain as hard as New York. I just wish I got a bit more snow.

It's "danegeld". Geld (also gild) means tax or fine; for instance, a weregild is a fine paid for having murdered someone ("were-" meaning "man"). The danegeld was a more efficient and universally better alternative to Viking raids -- the Vikings would extort money from a town in exchange for not attacking. This meant they assumed less risk, and the town had fewer casualties and kept more of their possessions.

This works out fine for towns that can't hope to fight off the Vikings. For towns that can reliably fight off the Vikings, they can refuse to pay, which leads to battle; eventually the Vikings will learn to concentrate on other towns because it's safer.

You live two lives. One is an ordinary, boring life that you don't mind the NSA finding out about. The other is as secretive as possible. No using credit cards. Nothing that requires ID. No flying, no buying alcohol.

One obvious problem with this is withdrawing cash. You have your public life, and the NSA sees you going to an ATM and grabbing $450, then it sees a transaction for $447 with an unknown person -- that's evidence linking your private identity to your public one. This is ameliorated if your public identity has a habit of withdrawing extra cash and a means of disposing of extra cash in a publicly acceptable way, like giving it to beggars, but it's still present. If your private identity has an income, though, and that income is sufficient for its expenses, then you can have wholly separate finances for both, which severs that link entirely.

A weaker link is one of location over time. Let's say the NSA can plot your public identity's location over time using things like bus pass usage, credit cards, phone calls, and security cameras with facial recognition, and they can plot your private identity's location over time using phone calls and security cameras. Eventually they'll realize that your private and public identities are occasionally colocated, or that whenever your public identity is in use your private has gone dark and vice versa.

Of course, that only matters if it's worse for you if the NSA has linked your public and private lives than if they merely have the ability to detain you during the course of your private affairs.

When I have a phone conversation, I do it by recording MP3s, putting them in encrypted form on microSD cards, and leaving them at dead drops.

What could you do with computers that functioned like standard x86 family computers with attached fast, parallel floating point processors like modern GPUs? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances.

Whereas if we have processors modeled on human brains -- well, let's just say I don't want to be the one to write real-time algorithms targeted toward a billion networked processors each running at 100Hz.

32-bit x86 processors can address more than 4GB of RAM. The ARM specification allows for 40-bit PAE, which should support up to a terabyte of RAM. So we could get an iOS device with a 32-bit ARM processor that has 8GB of RAM; that's not an issue.

Each process will only be able to see 4GB of RAM, but right now, iOS apps get killed after using more than 256MB of RAM or so. The policy seems to be that each application can use about a quarter of the machine's RAM, so if they're keeping that trend and want a device with 16GB of RAM, they'll want a 64-bit processor, but I think that's a ways off.

So you want to live about two centuries. Perhaps a bit less. That's twice as long as you currently have.

Is your aversion to suicide greater than your desire to live an extra hundred years?

That doesn't get me what I want when I say that I want to live longer than the eighty or so years I can currently expect. I want that living person to have some sort of continuity of memory and personality with who I am today.

If you want to juggle multiple browsers, one only for silverlight, then use netflix-desktop. Otherwise use Pipelight.

They're pumping you full of cryofluids after you died of something. Either they can fix the effects of the cryofluid and whatever killed you, or they can recreate your brain from the frozen copy, or they're going to leave you in the dewar.

Like what? Change the laws that they aren't obeying so they disobey even more?

That's...brilliant.

If each packet goes through ten Tor nodes on average before leaving the network, then you are anonymous for 1023 out of 1024 packets. In practice, packets only go through three nodes -- entry, relay, and exit -- which means you are anonymous for about 87.5% of your packets.

Now, IP packets can be up to 64KB in size. Loading one image of decent resolution will be maybe five separate packets. That's a 50% chance that the FBI is monitoring every step of the way and can therefore trace that packet back to you. -- assuming that each packet gets a separate route. Alternatively, loading one web page can result in a large number of requests, even ignoring AJAX -- one for each image, javascript, or CSS resource required by the page. Again, if there are five such resources (including the primary html file), you are left with a 50% chance that the FBI traced that packet.

This is a pretty big problem. It can be reduced appreciably by introducing more hops into a Tor connection, but that increases latency, and client applications tend to dislike that.

Because most people are running on EC2 and the Virginia datacenters are the most popular for that?

Thanks to the two-party system, we have a choice between different flavors of the same police state. Since we vote for individuals rather than parties, there is less room to enforce party policy.

In the US, you can throw away your vote on the US Constitution Party (aka the theocratists), the Green Party, the libertarians (who have nice-seeming objectives but rely on the innate goodness of people and free-market economies), or what have you. Or you can vote for a candidate who might be able to get into office. That pretty much limits you to choosing gay rights or not, and how quickly to erode abortion rights.

The main other difference between the two primary parties is how they campaign. The Republicans use more vitriol and lies about fact; the Democrats use more false promises.

Reminders are helpful. I might know that I should question something, but it's not instinctive -- it takes too much effort, and remembering to think is surprisingly hard.