Making the feature optional is enough for me. I don't know how to make that any clearer. Nevertheless, I still have concerns. There's no perfect solution. I'm not going to hide my concerns.

I beg to differ. You've got a lot of balls to come in and accuse me of prejudgment when you're the one who's prejudging me. In fact I've been accused (not by you obviously) of being too trusting of Microsoft on this very issue. See this thread. Anticipating the possibility of future problems absolutely does not involve prejudgment of any kind. There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking through the possible scenarios. It's a lot worse to be blindsided by the unexpected at the last minute.

Rage? What part of my comment did you interpret as rage? I said very clearly that this was a concern. Concern is a standard English word with a meaning that describes my feelings perfectly. It is far, far short of rage.

My main concern is that, although the spec does indeed require that the manufacturer must allow the user to turn off secure boot, Microsoft might not enforce this requirement very aggressively. There are tons of examples of buggy BIOSes and ACPI implementations which claim to be compliant with the ACPI spec but fail badly on Linux because of various severe bugs, all while somehow managing to pass Windows certification (because the Windows certification tests don't actually test alternative OSes).

Microsoft has no financial incentive to make sure that manufactuers adhere to the portion of the specification requiring that users be allowed to turn off secure boot. They could easily arrange for their test suites to refrain from rigorously checking whether or not the BIOS switch works.

Sorry, Dropbox and Owncloud do not solve the problem of airplanes. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. With very few exceptions, airplanes have no wifi, and they certainly have no 3G. Even when wifi exists on a flight, it is unacceptably slow. I want to access my files on a mobile device during a flight. This is hideously difficult on an (unjailbroken) iPad. Downloading and saving files onto the device one file at a time does not scale to my needs.

Oh my god, uninformed summary is uninformed. Please don't make it any worse with your (even more) uninformed comments.

I'm a cryptography researcher specializing in pairing-based cryptography. I know this subject well. Here's the real deal. Pairing-based cryptography is just as (in)secure as RSA. Nobody goes around thinking that 923-bit RSA keys are secure. RSA is very widely used. (The current world record for an RSA break is 768 bits, but 1024 bit keys have been disrecommended for a LONG time, and there are teams working on breaking 1024-bit RSA right now that expect to succeed within a few years.) Nobody really expected 923-bit pairing keys to be secure. Those keys are too short. It's nice that these researchers did this, and it's nice that we know exactly how hard it is to break a 923-bit key, but the only take-away lesson here is that short keys are insecure. It does not mean that pairing-based cryptography has "severe weaknesses" or that the whole concept of pairing-based cryptography is somehow insecure.

I repeat: the key broken in this study was short. The study's conclusions are not very surprising or indicative of any weakness in the underlying protocol.

Another gross misrepresentation in your comment is the insinuation that pairing-based cryptography is somehow anyone's "pet new crypto standard." The number of international standards documents dealing with pairings is exactly zero.

Your snarky reply, while cute, is not particularly accurate, and does not really contribute to the discussion.

Since you didn't bother to provide any details, I have to guess what you mean by your three words. Anyone who's taken a compilers class knows that the word "compile" is a very general term; it would be no exaggeration to say that almost anything a computer does consists of compiling something in some form. Assuming you mean the iPad can't compile, say, C code (and that this is presumably a showstopper or at least a significant drawback), it's certainly true that if compiling code is one of your main requirements while traveling then an iPad will serve you poorly. But given the incredibly limited capabilities of any sort of rig along the lines of what the asker is proposing, I have a hard time believing that the ability to compile code is a major requirement for the person who was asking this question. It's not like a Raspberry Pi (or even an Eee PC) will be a beast at compiling.

If you have to, an iPad can be used for compiling C code, either indirectly (by sshing to a remote server), or directly by jailbreaking. So your use of the word "can't" is wrong. It would be much more accurate to say that compiling code on an iPad is difficult and that if this is one of your main requirements then you need to say so up front in order to receive useful advice in return. Certainly the vast majority of travelers don't have any sort of requirement to compile code on the go.

I have one of those Eee PC 1001PX's, and it's not bad, but let's be real. It doesn't get 9 hours of battery life. I get 3 hours on a bad day and 4 on a good day. This is on Windows 7; it's actually a bit better on Linux, but not by much. If you want battery life (and you should, when traveling), get an iPad with external keyboard. I don't like what Apple does as a company, but I have to admit that from a technical standpoint their product wins.

Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Facebook's privacy controls are so crude that they force users to overshare. Google+ gets fine-grained sharing exactly right. Any analyst using quantity-based metrics (all of them) are going to overestimate Facebook and underestimate Google+.

Also, Google Maps is curiously missing from your list. Maps was developed almost entirely in-house and dominates its market.

As Wikipedia makes clear, the difference between a savings and loan assocation and a bank is far less than the difference between a smartphone and a PC. Even if we count WaMu, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Nokia is the biggest one-and-done failure ever if there is only one larger such failure in history.

The article never said Nokia's failure is the most massive failure ever. It said Nokia represents the most massive corporate failure in history from a position of global market dominance. Enron never came close to dominating world energy markets, or even world electricity markets (several state-run electric utilities, for example China's, are bigger than Enron ever was). I agree Enron was a massive failure but this simply has no bearing on the article's accuracy since the article never made any claims otherwise.

The Verizon site that you linked states pretty clearly that only existing customers are allowed to keep their tiered plans. New customers will have no option other than the shared plans. It's unclear from the site whether adding an extra line to an existing tiered plan will trigger a mandatory change to a shared plan -- does this count as a new customer? If so, that's a huge issue for the fairly large proportion of the population that gets married, has kids, moves in with their parents, etc.

Of the three companies that you listed, none of them ever at any point ranked #1 in market share in their sector. Lehman was as you said the 4th largest investment bank (Goldman has been #1 for at least several decades), WorldCom was never at any point the largest telecom (AT&T was), and WaMu was never the largest bank. Nokia on the other hand had the largest market share in both the smartphone and dumbphone markets in 2010 and plummeted to the #4 rank in a single year. The claim in the article states that this is the largest market share collapse in history by a Fortune 500 company having #1 market share. His claim is very clearly restricted in scope to market leading companies. I think you're misinterpreting the blog article and thinking that it claims more than what it actually says. Your examples do not involve market-leading companies (those having #1 rank in market share) and therefore cannot invalidate the author's claim. I think it's quite remarkable that no market-leading company in history has ever fallen so far, so fast as Nokia.

Enron, for all their opulence or "most innovative" awards, was not the largest energy company in the country at the time of their collapse. Nokia on the other hand had #1 smartphone market share in 2010 and lost 75% of it in a year. The blog article (if you read it in full) claims that this is the largest one-year collapse by a Fortune 500 market leader in history. Enron does not contradict this claim.

Even with self-signed certs, you can't always get the certificates to match the URL. The problem is not the cost of the certificates. The biggest problem is a shortage of IPv4 addresses. Buying extra IP addresses is difficult to impossible in many cases. If you have only one IP address then you're stuck with one certificate, no matter what. You want two virtual servers? Tough luck. (Putting multiple servers on different ports doesn't work for lots of reasons, most notably firewalling.)

I can think of plenty of legitimate situations where one is forced to use a mismatched certificate. It's not even that insecure as long as you personally verify the key fingerprint the first time you connect.