Bitlocker is a Microsoft product. It has backdoors.

Historically propriatary software tends to be rather poor when it comes to cryptography. Cryptography is hard to get right, since even apparently trivial changes can have huge effects on the security of the code. Any requirement for "backdoors" is likely to make things even harder.

Encryption is not a one size fits all solution. I can say that I use encryption for everything because my HDDs use FDE (BitLocker, FileVault, and LUKS.) However, encrypting everything that hits the platters doesn't give any protection against remote attack.

Note that "cloud storage" along with "file sharing" can be a method of defeating filesystem encryption. Especially if the communication is itself encrypted so you can't easily tell what is being synchronised/shared.

so they encrypt it, giving people a false sense of security, while they give the decryption key to the NSA...

Or the NSA has checked the software to ensure that they already know/don't need that key.

Hmm, an IS person doesn't know anything about IS conditions, and someone who isn't denies the conditions exist, and won't do the most basic research?

Wow. Just, wow.

As I said, so some research. One would be surprised that someone with the username "can has do it yourself" wants to be spoon fed, but then, this is /.

Walking is a privilege, not a right.

I've once read an article by a guy who managed to escape a dictatorship. He said that no country truly appreciates freedom until it's gone through a few decades of fascism and/or of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It seems it's time for the USA to have such an "enlightening" experience. The good side: afterwards things will improve. The bad thing: a restoration usually happens only two or more generations down the line.

Well, at least your grandchildren will see it.

Wikipedia is a good starting point. I credited you with intelligence to know that, and with the ability to follow links to cited articles and also query a bit on google.

Hermaphroditism is but a subset of intersex, fyi. All hermaphrodites and pseudo-hermaphrodites are intersexed, but not vice versa. It is possible to have ovaries and be XY, or to have testes and be XX, and likewise any combination with XXY, XXXY, XX/XY, and so on.

The vegetarian position isn't that we aren't predators, it's that we can chose to not be predators. I know people who did in fact make the fully informed choice of continuing to eat meat after pondering the pros and cons along multiple moral dimensions, and others like myself who've chose to stop eating meat, but most people never make a choice proper, they just go along with the flow. IMHO that amoral automatism is worse than actually opting for either alternative.

By the way, deriving a moral position (an "ought", in the case "I ought to eat meat") directly from a set of attributes (an "is", in the case "my body is able to digest meat") is usually considered a weak argument or even a fallacy. It usually requires an added goal system or similar to become strong. Check the is-ought problem for details.

> As to the consumption itself, as far as I can see, everything is clunkier on touch device. Everything.

Agreed. I know I'd rather hold a laptop up to my ear to make phone calls, or whip out a laptop on the subway or an airplane - and texting? Who wants to text on a device where they don't have to sit down at a table? Stupid touch devices - totally useless and far more clunky than a nice convenient, bulky laptop. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

No. "low light" for photography is in a wedding where the human eye can see perfectly fine but even with an f/1.8 lens you are shooting at ISO 800 or higher if you want a reasonably fast shutter speed. "extremely low light" where photography is in a bar or a club and are shooting at ISO 3200 or better in effort to get reasonable shutter speeds. "Dark" starts when reading is uncomfortable but not impossible. The kind of photography discussed in the article is an amazing feat.

If I want to be near hot air I would be flying gliders in Australia instead of listening to marketing BS.

No, no, no. Just as worshipers. The slaves are the robots. As for the soldiers, you only need them to deal with troublemakers, and a satisfied populace doesn't cause problems (to you at least). Besides, why risk revolutions and the like if doing things slowly can be as much effective? Link perfect, permanent fun to giving up on babies and over time the issue of too much useless people existing solves itself. It's win-"win" all around!

It's more likely that some kind of guaranteed minimum income will be adopted once robots are cheap enough and productive enough for the rich to not mind sparing a small percentage of all the surplus they produce to keep the masses in house getting high with access to 24 hours per day of American Idol / sports / reality TV / video-games / porn / sex, all for the cheap, cheap cost of a free vasectomy / tubal ligation. Bread and circus. Brave New World, not 1984, with most people utterly satisfied. No revolts, no demands, no nothing, all the while the 1% steadily moves into the 0.1%, then 0.01%, then 0.001%... with extended life, then immortality, then cybernetic augmentation...