Yup, that's the right thing to do.

I already ranted about fonts, but amiunique decided that my browser version (the one supported my the IT department at work) and time zone (UTF-8) and language (en-US) were enough to get uniqueness. Apparently everybody on the West Coast are running newer browsers :-)

Standard Mozilla behaviour last time this question came up is to include a list of fonts that your browser can display; I don't know whether other browsers do the same, or if they've changed it, but it's the kind of "feature" that hopelessly breaks your chances of non-uniqueness if you've ever installed fonts.

My work laptop has a font that's the Official Corporate-Branded font for $DAYJOB's corporate logo. Almost every Windows machine at my company has that (at least, every physical machine and the virtual machines running on the hosted virtual desktop cloud; there may be some lab machines that don't, and maybe some contractors, etc.) You might work for a smaller company that does the same. In my case, I've installed all sorts of other random fonts, either to see what they looked like, or simply because back in the 80s of course you wanted Elvish and Dwarvish fonts on your computer, or because I wanted a better monospaced programming font than the default MS one or Courier New.

Lots of other things leak information as well (cookies, etc.), but fonts are a quick and dirty way around identifying people who block those.

Laptop, not workstation; I'm usually not connected to a work LAN, so network drives are for backup and file exchange at best, not for data I actually use. (Email's theoretically also backed up on a server, though I'm not convinced that's reliable for anything older than a month or two.)

There's a project to get everybody to move to VMware-based Hosted Virtual Desktops, but I haven't bitten that bullet yet; it would let me access my stuff from different machines, but needs network connectivity to be usable and I lose control over some of my storage. (If Google Chromecast supported HVD, it might tempting to just leave the PC at work and use TV+Chromecast to telecommute :)

3D printing technology is changing much faster than I can come up with things I want to 3D-print, so it doesn't make sense to buy my own. If I want access to printers, there are places like TechShop that have them (hey, Bay Area Privilege is useful if you've got it), and I've heard that FedEx / Kinkos copier shops were also doing a pilot project with them (though it may have been in the Netherlands or Belgium and not the US yet.) Also, for slower turnaround, you can send your printer files to Shapeways and they'll print them and mail them to you.

But if you do want to buy one, I was in Home Depot the other day and there was a guy there demoing them, plus they have a whole display rack or two of Lasers, and probably a Robots section that didn't notice. It's really getting to be the Future!

Sure, you were joking, but the RepRap Project was about designing 3D printers that can print most of their parts so you can easily make more of them.

Where did you find cheap SDxC cards for 128-256GB? When I looked online a month or so ago (plus in Fry's today), they were reasonable up to 64GB, then expensive above that (except for no-name Chinese brands on Amazon that had reviews saying the capacities were fake.)

For USB2/USB3 flash sticks, they seem to be cheap up to 128GB, but with most laptop designs, that's going to stick out of the case, so I'd prefer SDxC cards that can stay installed, as long as I'm not using them for high-speed applications. (If I really believed that ReadyBoost accomplished anything, I'd be tempted to get a 16GB USB3 stick just for that, but I assume that makes a lot more difference on a spinning-disk machine.)

The cheapest ones at Fry's today were $40-45 for either 64GB SDxC or 128GB USB sticks. Since I've got just about 60GB of music I had to offload from my work laptop (new one had SSD that's smaller than the old hard drive), 64GB isn't quite enough so I'll wait around for Moore's Law to catch up.

The lease expired on my work laptop, and the new one has a 256GB SSD instead of the 320GB spinning disk the previous one had. It's not enough :-) Specifically, it's not enough to keep my ~60GB of music on, along with the actual work stuff, so that's temporarily off-loaded to an external drive, plus I had to off-load a lot more stuff for the "move almost all your stuff to the new machine" software to have working space.

And unfortunately, the IT department won't let me crack it open and add an extra spinning disk inside it. The state of the art in SD memory cards seems to be that 64GB cards are cheap, but 128GB cards are really expensive, so I'll probably wait six months for 128GB cards to get cheap and install one. 128GB USB3 flash sticks are getting to be cheap, but I can't leave one of them plugged in all the time.

Hey, it's those crazy Texas Republicans again, talking about wanting small government that doesn't regulate businesses, but if you actually want to compete with existing businesses, good luck to you.

The filters have usually been super-secret because letting the public know what was being censored would let "the children" get around them, and would promote the worst kinds of pornography by telling perverts where it was. But English libel law is surprisingly broad, from the perspective of those of us in other countries, and allows people not from England to sue other people not from England if there's some English hook in the publication somewhere, so maybe the CCC can demonstrate that they've been censored and argue that it's libel that's causing them actual damage (after all, the fact that they were censored by the pr0n filter says they were pornographers or Even Worse.)

Yes, the guy had a security clearance, so I suppose entrapping him can be considered part of the quality control process, but it's still ridiculous; Egypt would get much more effective military use from a dirt airstrip in the Sinai than an aircraft carrier. But hey, the FBI gets to put out a press release claiming they caught a spy! And it's less ridiculous than the time they entrapped half a dozen drunken bums in Chicago into a "plot to bomb the Sears tower", and less dangerous than the time they helped half a dozen Al-Qaeda plotters mix fertilizer explosive for the first World Trade Center bombing.

The auction process led to extremely high prices paid to the European and US governments by cellular companies, who turned them into high-priced mobile phone services to the public (nobody sat on them, except maybe a few companies who bought them for resale, and they quickly turned them around for a profit.)

But unlicensed use means that everybody gets to use them, like you with your wifi at home, at work, and at the coffee shop where you hang out, or your car radio talking to your phone over Bluetooth, or your wireless thermometer telling you what the temperature is outside, and lots of similar uses that are only constrained by the physics of sharing the spectrum and the Moore's Law driven decreases in costs of equipment to use them.

The biggest gains in wireless spectrum use for the public have been the open-access unlicensed uses like Wifi and Bluetooth at 2.4GHz, and to a lesser extent 5.8 GHz, plus 900 MHz (typically cordless phones), 433/etc. (telemetry stuff), and other low-power apps. Yes, mobile phones running on dedicated frequencies have also been important, but we'd get more public value by letting the public have access to the spectrum for shared access, even though the FCC wouldn't get a bunch of cash from selling it off.

Also, the high-priced spectrum auctions of the past result in high-priced services to the public because the carriers have to make back their money, while unlicensed use resulted in development of cheaper and cheaper hardware to take advantage of the free bandwidth.

Sure, your laptop battery may not hold enough charge to power your laptop any more, but an LED needs a lot less power than your laptop, depending on what it's being used for. Most of the lightbulb-replacement LED bulbs I've seen want 9-23 watts, but the flashlights are more like 3w, and nightlights are more like 0.5 watts.

Also, that laptop battery is a battery of cells, and they usually don't all die at once. They may not be in good enough shape to remanufacture into new laptop batteries, but still have enough of them good enough to disassemble at third-world labor costs to recover cells for off-grid LED lighting.

You can find a much better hamburger almost anywhere. But you can also find a much worse hamburger anywhere. What McD's delivered early on was a consistently adequate hamburger, fries, and drinks at a relatively low price and high convenience. It would never be as good as the burgers at Ralph's Exxon*, much less the Waldorf Astoria, but it would also never be as bad as the burgers at the Binghamton NY Greyhound station or the vending machine at college. And it would also always be better than White Castle.**

* Ralph's was originally a gas station in central NJ, added a lunch counter, and eventually the food was bringing in more business than the gas. 10-oz burgers on a good hard roll (if you're not from the NY-NJ-Philly area, you may never have had a good hard roll.) They went out of business shortly after I stopped eating meat.
** Unless you're Harold and Kumar that night they were high; if you're high your mileage may vary.