I always thought the reason it was cheaper to build a system from parts than buy a pre-built box was just a matter of scale. It's not hard to find a handful of parts that are on sale because they're beginning to be antiquated and retailers are trying to get rid of them, but I always assumed the price I paid for the parts was still above the normal wholesale price.

I can imagine that in bulk and with the right connections, you might be able to get these parts a bit below the normal wholesale price. The thing I have trouble with, is the idea that you can get enough of a discount to offset the cost of supporting random hardware configurations and software for several different CPU architectures.

Is this really cost effective?

In some less dense areas the +4 will be specific to a house. I can't imagine netflix would have released that and claimed their data was anonymous.

I'm not sure I completely agree with your proposal, but I definitely agree with the sentiment. A party with deep pockets shouldn't be able to force an innocent party into a settlement by making it cost prohibitive to defend yourself - that's extortion by my book.

I think a better alternative would be some kind of motion where a defendant can request that the judge order the plaintiff to pay legal fees. The defendant would need to be able to convince the judge that defending the suit is cost prohibitive and that an innocent but fiscally responsible party would be inclined to settle rather than defend against the suit. The judge could require the plaintiff to pay the defendant's legal fees, and if the judge finds in favor of the plaintiff the legal fees may be awarded back as well. Someone who knows they're at fault would still be inclined to settle out of court, but someone who believes he is innocent would have a viable means of defending himself.

I'm not sure I agree that what you suggest is the best approach (because it allows a corporation at least one frivolous suit before they have to start paying the other side's legal fees), but I definitely agree with the sentiment. Corporations with deep pockets shouldn't be able to force innocent people into settlements simply because it's too expensive to defend yourself - that's extortion.

I think a better option than what you suggest would be if the defendant could file a motion for coverage of legal fees. The defendant would have to convince the judge that the plaintiff's deep pockets make prohibitively expensive to defend the case, and that without the other side footing the legal fees the fiscally responsible action of an innocent party would be to settle. If the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff, he may decide to award the defendant's legal fees back to the plaintiff. If you know you're liable, you'd still be inclined to settle rather than rack up legal fees you know you'll have to pay off, but if you're innocent you'd have a viable means to defend yourself.

Well, it should also be mandatory that source code be made available when a binary falls into the public domain...

I disagree, because I think that would be a huge imposition on some people. When I was in high school I wrote a Half-Life server-side mod that I gave out for free. Being a teenager who was learning to code, I didn't have any kind of version control, I just kept editing the same source directory. Two years after my first release the project had moved on considerably and I most certainly did not have the original source. Two years after the last release I doubt I had the source for any version of the code.

I suspect this sort of thing is fairly common. I imagine there are lots of pieces of freeware or other cheap software where the company that made it either isn't around after two years or just isn't organized enough to produce the source for a two year old version of their software.

I hardly ever use my iPod with headphones. Usually it's plugged into speakers or my car stereo. In those cases the signal quality seems to correlate to the volume set on the player, but the volume itself is set by the amplifier. Admittedly, kicking the volume up to the player's 100% tends to distort the signal, but setting the player to a level that would be "safe" in headphones is short of the best signal.

And before anyone asks- no, I'm not remotely concerned about inaccurate results from trusting mythcommflag to catch commercials.

You're not? I used MythTV for years, and while mythcommflag was probably 90% accurate, that extra 10% could make a substantial difference in the viewing experience. It's not a big deal when you accidentally end up with a commercial in the middle of your show, but it can make a huge difference if it cuts out 30 seconds of your TV show.

I'm with you on this one. I did the 30 day trial of Photoshop many years ago, and while I may not have been using its full potential, the stuff I did with it was pretty intuitive. I've used GIMP for my (minimal) image manipulation needs for several years, and only now that I have quite a bit of experience do I find it as easy to use as I found Photoshop the first time I opened it. For the more complex functions, GIMP may be as intuitive as Photoshop, but for the basic stuff GIMP has a steep learning curve.

Similar things have happened with other products like Audacity. My mother-in-law runs a dance studio and was banging ahead against the software she was using to mix tracks for a recital. I suggested Audacity, but she was convinced that because it was free it couldn't possibly be better than what she had. The next year I saw she was using Audacity and commented that I saw she had taken my advice. She told me that this wasn't a free program, that it had come with some piece of hardware she'd purchased. I shook my head and moved on, but I found it interesting that audacity was gaining a user base through inclusion with hardware.

I pay $8.99 a month for a subscription to Netflix, which gets me 1 DVD at a time and unlimited access to Netflix watch instantly. When I started using Hulu, I looked to see if there was some way I could pay a monthly fee to get rid of ads and was stunned that there wasn't (though it sounds like there may be soon). I'm happy to pay a small monthly fee for the shows I want to watch rather than paying $40 a month for the same shows plus several dozen channels I'm never going to watch.

Full disk encryption isn't a panacea for security. If someone nabs your laptop while it's off in the back seat of your car, you don't have much to worry about. If you get malware of some kind or if someone swipes your laptop while it's running, full disk encryption isn't going to help.

Don't take this the wrong way, I encrypt my laptop and would encourage almost everyone to do the same, but you still have to be security conscious.

Seconded. I use clipperz for all of my passwords. Clipperz has some great features.

First, it's a zero-knowledge web application. The web server doesn't know your username or password for its own site, let alone any of the passwords it stores. Everything is encrypted and decrypted on the client using javascript. It's open source and I've actually spent some time looking through the code, so I trust it.

The offline copy is another great feature. You can download an HTML file that operates just like the normal web site, except that you can't add passwords to it. I use the offline copy for every day use because it's a bit snappier and takes the load away from Clipperz servers. In the event that clipperz ever disappears, I still have my offline copy so my passwords aren't lost.

It lets you generate passwords randomly, so I generate a new password for every site I visit. The passwords are long strings with random characters from all over the keyboard, so they're stronger than something a person could think up or remember. I have a different password for every site, so if one gets compromised by a poorly designed website, I don't have to worry about changing my password on a dozen other sites.

It has a sidebar version that works in several browsers. It provides a list of links you can click to automatically log in to any website you have an account on.

I've recommended clipperz to several friends and family members, and I know of at least one who actually uses it frequently (the rest just have a short list of fairly weak, memorable passwords they use on a much longer list of sites).

You'd lose a lot of functionality that way. The only way Gmail could encrypt e-mails in such a way they couldn't produce them later would be to use asymmetric encryption, and only the recipient has the decryption key. That means you'd have to make sure you never lost your key, and you'd have to put it on every computer you wanted to check e-mail from. You'd lose the major benefits of having a web-mail client. You wouldn't be able to search the e-mail, unless Gmail indexed it before encrypting it, in which case they'd just use the indexes as evidence instead of the plaintext e-mails.

If you need to make sure you have legal control over your data, your best bet is to keep your data out of the cloud.

That was my thought. The iPhone might have more apps by virtue of the fact that it's been around longer, and some of them might be more mature than their Android counterparts, but 3 years down the road that won't be the case. In the long term, I'd put my money on Android if for no other reason than it can multitask.

I'm really hoping the rumors about 2.0 having multitouch support will pan out. Android does pretty well with only one contact point, but it could still benefit from multitouch support.

Other than that, both the myTouch and the G1 have an accelerometer which is used by a number of apps and built-in features of the phone. They have GPS, network, and wifi based positioning, which is pretty accurate even with my GPS receiver turned off. They have a built in compass, and there are apps that make use of it. It comes with an Amazon mp3 client, and you can put music on it with a file browser or just about any non-itunes music player.

I don't know what the OP was talking about, as only two of his points have any merit at all.

Reddit does escape all of those symbols, and they use Markdown for adding links. Still, they managed to get owned by an obscure vulnerability that was discovered only because their code is open source.

And that's the point TheLink was trying to make. It would be far simpler to tell the browser not to accept javascript in a certain block of code than it is to explore all the possible exploits that could be leveraged against your alternative markup language. There are hundreds if not thousands of places you can make mistakes, and it could be remedied by a single mechanism that prevented javascript from existing in certain blocks of code.