Yes. Reagan, a Republican was still president in 1991. Oh wait...

Phil Zimmermann's PGP already put crypto in the hands of the masses. It was a little cumbersome to use, even back in the '90s, but it's there. Anybody who wants good crypto, even on their phone, can probably find it and set it up. That group especially includes what I will call dedicated professional terrorists. FBI tapping into vanilla off-the-shelf iPhones will not catch them. This bill is about the common tech carried by the common man.

... for the Commodore PET. http://pettil.tumblr.com/ But now my code is better than it was in 1979, and by now I have used dozens of other languages and operating systems. Am I "expert"? No. I take the approach of learning the minimum I need to accomplish the mission (usually delivering maintainable code) plus whatever else I become curious about along the way. What usually works best is to combine a new project with a new set of tools, so I'm learning the new tool while trying to finish the project. I describe the approach as "You are here and you want to get there." or "Lewis and Clark" approach. If you started with Perl, learning Ruby. Consider learning something old school, like Forth. Install Linux on your desktop. Force yourself to live in it by deleting Windows first. In short, become uncomfortable. The best learning occurs in that space.

'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.'

I had a similar thing happen with Apple's iTunes a few years ago. One of my kids downloaded a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff using my debit card. Since I didn't (still don't) own an iPod and run Linux on the desktop (no iTunes client) there was no way it was me. I was pretty sure it was an inside job, but there was no phone number to contact Apple. The child vehemently denied any involvement. After going back and forth a few times with iTunes' web support people, they told me it was fraud and I should involve the local police department, ending the matter where they were concerned. I went back on their site, but instead of reporting it as a fraud issue, I took the "I forgot my username and password" route. I entered my credit card info and they gave up the goods, handing over the kid's email account. The iTunes were also discovered on the kid's iPod, as well as receipts in the yahoo mail folder. Busted.

from the link: "using 30-year-old or older machines."
from the fine article: "First released in 1981; discontinued in 1994 using 30-year-old or older machines."

I recently (three weekends ago) fired up my Commodore PET 2001 (a *genuine* pre-1980 computer) and have been writing a Forth for it. It's really a lot of fun, and I'm finding that 30 years experience in various high-level languages has improved my "6502 assembler golf" game a lot. It's very incomplete, but the inner interpreter mostly works. Feel free to throw down on it here

Charlie