I bought a brand new Sony blu-ray player a month ago. While they direct you to a website to activate the player's internet streaming and get a firmware update, I had the option of not providing personal data, so I didn't. The website merely said "enter this code into the player" and on doing so the device downloaded updates and the additional features just started working. Sony has my IP address, but not my name or other personal details.

I'm not apologizing for Sony, just relating my experiences.

I know this means they have my browsing habits now. It doesn't bother me, as every website and streaming provider already has this. Singling out Sony is myopic.

...unless the serial data came in while the floppy interrupt handler was already in progress. In such a situation, the serial handler must wait until the floppy handler is finished, and depending on what the floppy handler is doing, it could take long enough that more serial data would be delayed or lost. And for those of us who tried to do things like download files directly to floppy disks on slower PCs in the 1980s, this was a regular occurrence.

The 16550A UART's 16-byte buffer meant that several bytes could come in before the serial interrupt needed to be handled again, allowing serial communications to run at full speed for longer time periods before needing to be emptied. This made a world of difference working on slower machines writing to floppies (and faster machines trying to download something in the background while in a multitasking environment).

Because I'm using my own private key to encrypt the data. Research is your friend: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/articles/encryption_key?s%5B%5D=encryption

This doesn't prevent the OP from using local backup in the meantime. I backup to local storage as well as cloud. The local backups complete quickly in case I need to retrieve a file, and the cloud is there for if my house burns down.

The OP stated in his question that he has a lot of data but no money to buy redundant storage -- well, that's his real problem. If you have 3T of data, buy 3T of backup. I don't know what the OP is looking for other than a magic compression answer or something.

"I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution." Not sure what brand tin-foil hat you're wearing, but there are cloud backup solutions that encrypt your data *before* it leaves the machine. I use CrashPlan (I can't speak for others) and I've verified the encryption myself by capturing the traffic leaving my machine, even when CrashPlan was backing up to other machines on my own private network. Even the data it writes to locally-attached hard drives is encrypted. So there's at least one company who gets it right.

Not very well. I just tried this last night and the result was out of sync. dgindex + avisynth + 10 minutes later and I had something in sync I could work with.

The author of the article completely misses the secondary benefits of 24/192 delivery: Such fidelity (if delivered uncompressed) allows the recording to be considered archival and can be used for audio research, or as a historical record of the production methods used at the time the music was mastered. The format is indistinguishable from 24/48 *for most people*, obviously, but that doesn't make it worthless. If I could own 24/192 downmixes from the studio masters, I would consider it a unique opportunity.

Get the flatscreen anyway but hold onto your CRT for any vintage console gaming you do. Modern LCD/Plasma TVs, even with a "game mode", add one frame of latency to all analog inputs; CRTs obviously do not.

Your understanding of dongle-protected software is incorrect. The software has several sections of code that are encrypted, stored inside the dongle, or combinations of both. Each copy of the software you get must be paired with its hardware dongle or else it can't run. Not *won't* run, *can't*. Modern methods also ensure that not all pieces of the software are loaded into memory at the same time, making it very difficult (but not impossible) to dump segements of memory in an effort to reconstruct a single unencrypted binary that will work. A decade ago there was still some software that used dongles as a simple hardware check; these dongles usually attached to the parallel port. Modern USB dongles are a lot more secure. They are also a lot more expensive, so the OP will have to weigh that against their profits.

This is a known-cyphertext attack using the tile filesizes as identifiers. Build a database of map tiles' sizes and coordinates (x,y,z) from gmaps, then compare against the SSL response stream.

It doesn't say if it's only effective for satellite view.