Yes they are. If you have food and think you can part with a little in exchange for something that will be worth something when the crisis blows over, why not? I have a nice painting in my living room which my granddad got from someone in exchange for some food during the "Hongerwinter" of '44. In a crisis that threatens the value of money itself, people might be more inclined to take gold instead of cash in cases where large sums change hands. What happens in a (Mad Max kind of) crisis is not that gold drops in price, but that the price of food and other essentials goes up. And gold is not all that unwieldy; plenty of places here sell 1-gram "coins" currently worth about 50 euro.

GP is right though that it's better to get gold during the good times, when prices are low. If the crisis has already hit, you're too late.

Doubtful. The NSA knows what information he had access to and what he has released. They will have to take the same security measures either way because they have to assume the information will be released if it hasn't already. They also have to assume the information either is or will become public.

Dell isn't always the seller as there are commercial resellers and outlets that stock Dell equipment - PC World for instance.

My wife has had the top edge power button on her iPhone4 die 3 times now, and each time Apple wanted £119 to replace the unit - she now doesn't have an iPhone and won't ever have an iPhone again.

Well, that's enough information to confirm that DNA is not involved. While the methodology may be intrusive and problematic from an informed consent point of view, it's not as alarming as the police randomly stopping motorists to add their DNA to a surveillance database.

You know, there are other detectable substances in saliva and serum besides DNA.

If this is in linux, this might have something to do with ACPI. The firmware has a table called the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) which basically tells the operating system how to turn integrated peripherals like network cards off and on when going to sleep or waking up.

One peculiarity of the DSDT is that the ACPI specification allows it to include different instructions to different operating systems, and this is a common source of problems in linux installs. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) deliberately sabotage non-Windows operating systems in their DSDTs. Others simply deliver DSDTs that are untested and potentially buggy in non-windows operating systems.

Anyhow, an OS can switch devices off an on itself using ACPI, so I think ACPI may trump BIOS settings. One way to test this is to boot with ACPI turned off. If this fixes the problem of the mic being available even when disabled in BIOS, then you have and ACPI/DSDT problem. If not, then it is a design flaw in the machine's design (e.g. turning the mic off in BIOS simply turns the gain to 0) and you wasted your time reading this post.

Look on the bright side. This might be what finally spurs support for your phone from an alternative operating system.

Doesn't Asus have Transformers with 10" and expandable storage? ... yep, memo pad, transformer, slate... As for your last point, MS is completely willing to drop a platform that turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. We'll see.

The F-450 is sufficiently ungainly to where most people will not drive one for vanity. I do know of one F-450 pickup truck conversion, which has a shortened frame and a custom bed, but even it is regularly used for towing.

I'd imagine that the range will be somewhat decreased, but if most Leafs which haven't been piloted into a tree (etc) aren't still operating in 12 years, I will be shocked. Hopefully not literally.

I believe the assumption here is that it's not difficult for TPTB to get their firmware onto your computer. In an enterprise it's slightly tricky to do it without risk of being caught. Where individual users are concerned there is little risk in leaning on the OS vendor to deliver to you and you alone an additional payload right in a signed patch package.

Hi.

the Nyquist limit of the audio sampling hardware of a cell phone over instruction rate of a modern CPU is a pretty small fraction.

The "audio" in question is most likely all below 24 kHz, that being the Nyquist limit for the 48 kHz sampling hardware, unless it happens that some phones can actually sample faster, and have microphones that can respond to higher frequencies.

The instruction rate of the CPUs in question is many times that frequency.

It doesn't sound likely.

Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies).

Say what? Through what mechanism would multiple cores shift down the frequency? And what about parallel instruction streams contributing to noise?