If I don't personally assemble the bits on punchcards by hand, I don't trust anything! I figure I should have my trusted JVM ready to go in about forty years...

No one said Microsoft actually knew how to gain market share. The old tools of threatening OEMs with a fate worse than death don't work any more, so Redmond is a bit of a fish out of water.

The transparent, libertarian way is to have your money stolen in front of you.

So, the 700,000 bitcoins that disappeared under Mt Gox were stolen "in front of" the people who owned them?

Maybe we need to define "in front of".

Neoliberals? I'm under the impression that Libertarians with the minds of teenagers are the ones so in love with Bitcoin

Neoliberals = libertarians. They mean about the same thing for the purposes of this conversation.

Because Microsoft aping competitors' tactics years behind them has worked so well of late.

Neoliberals will shrug this off as an anomaly, but the ability of people of privilege to steal is enhanced by unregulated free markets.

It never fails. When there are no rules, it pays to be unruly.

But that NAS is likely sitting at your location, which means if it gets burned down by insane meth heads or swallowed by a sinkhole, you're good and screwed.

For my business, I use DFS that replicates our shared drives at all three locations, so I feel fairly confident that an almost up-to-date mirror of the data is being held at two other locations, all of which are separated by a lot of miles. Coupled with offsite backup, I feel the business data is secure.

At the moment my personal data is on Dropbox, with my absolutely confidential data in a Truecrypt container. Still, Dropbox is kind of expensive for the 7 or 8gb of data I'd like to store, so I will definitely be considering Google's offering. Since both work the same, at least for the PC versions, in that each computer has a full copy of the data, if Google goes offline or pulls the plug, I still have my multiple copies sitting around.

Yeah, those fools should have definitely given their money to the pros.

You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.

If they can mine my TrueCrypt container, then they're doing something amazing.

Do you carry your SATA drive around with you wherever you go and attach it to every computer you use?

Yeah, there's a portable SSD in my bag, with eSATA and USB. There's a couple of 64gb SD cards in there too.

It's smaller than my smartphone and a lot more sturdy. It sits in one of those little slots on the side. Never had a problem with it.

I've had enough of trusting companies like Google to always have a particular service available and to keep their snoots out of my stuff.

On the other hand, if a company that doesn't data mine, and encrypts all data and does not acquiesce to NSA requests, then we can do business. But not for free or cheap because of data mining. I don't like F2P. I don't want anything for free. I don't trust anything that's being offered to me for free or for cheap. It just means the true price is hidden and that's creepy.

It's official. The name is now changed to MtGotchya.

Indeed, it's states rights when it comes to lack of gun control, teaching creationism in schools, denying gay marriage, and polluting. When states try to enact gun control, raise taxes, abolish creationism, raise environmental standards, or allow gay marriage, suddenly states rights aren't important.

I'm saying they're basically the same in terms of the mechanism proposed here: people have health insurance not tied to employers so they'll start their own business. That has nothing to do with where the reforms are being enacted: it should have happened at the state level with romneycare if it's going to be true for the nation with obamacare.

Put another way: that debate is valid but shouldn't matter with the current subject.

Hi. SCIENCE. Turn in your nerd card if you don't see why this is slashdot material. We need more nerds engaged in politics, not more nerds being apathetic about it. Especially on this issue.

Bureaucracy getting in the way of research is a very real issue. Administration of research funding has increased dramatically more than actual funding for research. Not unique to research of course, that's just bureaucracy. It's getting in the way of science. From the guy's letter

I would disagree with his point here: the red tape is bad at universities. In my thesis work, we ran into an issue where we had too much data and needed to buy external hard drives to backup the data. Data that would be required by the grant to be stored. However, buying hard drives was prohibited by the funding, according to our administration. Eventually, someone coughed up the money from their pocket. I'm quite certain at my university, the same issue would have come up. It's possible the university in the guy's anecdote did too, someone just handed an administrator $35 from their own wallet.

Cable news viewers aren't going to demand red tape be cut for biomedical research, they'd be more likely to demand the opposite. Ironically, they advocate the opposite for private industry on the grounds that it stifles innovation. Then they bemoan research funds being spent on fruit fly research while alzheimers hasn't been cured. Nerds need to demand the issue be solved.

I'm skeptical of any anecdotes I hear about obamacare. On top of the fact that anecdotes aren't real evidence, there have been several well-publicized obamacare horror stories that have turned out to be far-right funded lies.

The other way is also true. The "strong evidence" that obamacare is going to make many more startups doesn't seem to be much more than a theory. Here's the study they're referring to. Seems odd that they don't show self-employment increasing in Massachusetts, given that Romneycare is basically Obamacare and happened there eight years ago.