Idealism hits up hard against pragmatism. Software is one thing, but when you are selling a physical device with a real cost to manufacture, it has to actually do stuff for people to buy it.

I'm all for fighting DRM, but building what would be a mostly useless device and having it sit unsold serves no purpose.

You can use VirtualBox headless (using vboxmanage), but it's not really the intended use case and there are better alternatives.

Though I tend to use vboxmanage for dealing with disk images, because I find the UI for that stuff to be absolutely terrible.

Generally agree. I use it for a handful of Windows apps I still need (like the updater for my GPS) and a few purpose specific Linux installs and it works fine for that. I'll probably keep using it as long as it still works. Worst case, KVM will probably do what I want just as well.

KVM is probably the closest alternative and is free (probably more so than VirtualBox is you go all church of Stallman mode).

Indeed, and some software falls into a realm where you pretty much need paid developers working on it to get anywhere (due to complexity of the code base or lack of interest).

Hey now, normally the CRTC is as corrupt as they come. This is a group that has been heavily infiltrated by big media, who tried to institute 1996 level data caps, and who's outgoing president whined that the internet is their biggest obstacle to controlling what Canadians watch.

I'm actually somewhat baffled by what seems to be a series of decisions on their part which appear at face value to be in the interests of the Canadian public and not their telecom friends.

I imagine it's more likely they'll end up charging everyone less in order to make their service actually usable.

It's a risk/cost analysis.

Tempest protected equipment is readily available from any number of suppliers. If you want to spend the price of a car for a shitty mid-range desktop that'll probably protect you from this kind of attack, the option is there and has been for some time.

They shot first, they eroded the trust to a point where people, not criminals or terrorists or pedophiles but ordinary law abiding people have stood up and said "we don't trust the government any more, nor the systems in place to protect our privacy, and so we have to take it into our own hands."

The proliferation of wide spread encryption is almost a direct result of actions by the NSA, FBI, and friends. They brought this on themselves. If they want people to once again accept them as partners in protecting their rights rather than adversaries, they need to regain the trust they've lost.

To be honest, I think a "team play" level is in there as well.

Working on your own software pet project, working on an open source project with other developers, and working in a corporate software environment are very different experiences. The rock-star programmer cliche still exists, but I think your average run of the mill programmer's success is more determined by how well he plays with others and balances his relationship with management and other forces of evil.

Also throw in a requirements level. A lot of people struggle with this early (and sometimes late) in their careers. It sounds simple, but figuring out what the customer wants (what they _actually_ want), and what you've agreed to provide, and what the program _actually_ needs to do (all three are often exclusive concepts) is a big deal. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what they want (but won't be happy until they get it). Sometimes the customer thinks they want the wrong thing, and won't be happy if you deliver it to them. Requirements analysis is a specialization all it's own, but speaking the language is a huge asset if you go into "big software" (aerospace, medical, defence, etc).

Or something like duplicati which lets you have the benefit of encryption without the downside of having to upload your entire volume every time you want to update it. There's probably a security trade off (I don't know of any specific attacks, but I assume a single encrypted volume is probably more secure), but to me it's worth it for the convenience.

I think panic is the key word.

Microsoft doesn't want to be the next RIM. They've been sitting comfortably on their office/desktop monopoly while google and apple have (not necessarily for better) been driving the future of computing, and are worried they may no longer fit into it. Everything they've done recently screams of desperate flailing to stave off a march down RIM's "we innovated once, that aught to be enough" path of doom.

This comes off less as some young guy saying "tablets guys, tablets are cool, lets do tablets!" as some old guy screaming "everyone is using tablets and we don't do tablets, we need to get on tablets now!".

Indeed. I mean you can find them in google, but you'd think an article on the subject would at least include a screenshot of what it was actually talking about.

I've used the flashblock plugin on firefox for a long damn time, but I'm finding it has stopped working properly on a lot of websites, including just recently youtube. I'm guessing this is due to some javascript shenanigans, but haven't had time to investigate.

Postfix? I thought postfix was pretty solid.

Legal expectation of privacy and social expectation of privacy are pretty different concepts.