Part of the reason that school uniforms became unpopular was that they tend to be quite expensive. And this doesn't remove the social stigma if it's related to wealth: it's quite easy to tell who has the new uniform that fits well, and who has the second-hand one that almost fits. I don't remember anyone being teased for that at my school though, although people did get teased for having new shoes that were still shiny and not having the decency to get some mud on them on the way in...

So how do you boot the laptop to demonstrate that it's a real laptop? I've been asked to do that at a US border before (leaving, at the time). They didn't care what was on the laptop, but they did care that it was actually a laptop and not a bomb made to look like a laptop. Getting to the 'enter password' screen was enough for them.

You might like to look at what OpenSSL is actually used for. If you do any encryption, the odds are that you're using OpenSSL, or code derived from OpenSSL.

Those documents were compromised - by the NSA. I understand if you disagree, but I'm willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt here and assume that Snowden didn't share the list with anyone else and The Guardian wasn't going to publish it. That means that in practical terms the British agents aren't actually at risk, and wouldn't have been at risk, although I certainly understand why the British government believes they are, and they legitimately could have been (if the British police can obtain the list from David Miranda, so can anyone else). Still, I believe their intention was to publish a story that this information had been obtained by the NSA, not publish the information itself.

I wonder if it has occurred to anyone that the NSA's actions in other countries could be construed as acts of war....

Apple no longer makes computers that have optical drives. How long do you think it will be before the rest of the industry follows suit?

(Those who need them can of course still connect external optical drives.)

I'm being forced to learn Python.

If you're not intending to make any profit from it, then you can set up a company that has no assets to distribute the app. This will cost you a small amount, but it means that the patent troll can take the company to court if they want, but it will cost them money and the company will just declare bankruptcy without attending court and they won't be able to recoup their legal fees.

It's harder to covertly insert a backdoor into an open source client because people can watch the changes. It's much easier to insert it before it's open sourced, because then people have to review the entire code drop at once. That said, adding a back door into OpenSSL would be comparatively easy because no one understands the convoluted twisty maze of code paths in it.

Full homomorphic encryption is really hard. Homomorphic encryption allows you to encrypt your data, do some computation on the result, and then perform some operation on the output to get the same result as doing the operation on the unencrypted data. Current solutions are at least a factor of 1000 slower than doing it on unencrypted data, but that's only for general case. There are ways of encrypting data that preserve certain properties so you can, for example, perform simple database operations on it in the encrypted form and only interpret the results if you hold the keys. The down side of these approaches is that they increase the size (effectively doubling it for every primitive operation that you want to support), but with storage becoming cheap they may become interesting...

Having a romantic breakup is a lifestyle choice (at least that's what the other poster is arguing), and you put it into the same category as mental illness.

Not sure how you did that calculation. iPlayer HD is 3.6-4Mb/s, which works out at around 5-8 hours for 10GB. Standard definition content is 0.7Mb/s, which works out at just under 32 hours in 10GB.

That's 56Kb/s if you've got a good line, but if you've got a line that can do 56Kb/s then you're probably also close enough to the exchange that you can get ADSL, and a cheap ADSL package will cost less than dial-up these days. If you're somewhere where you can't get ADSL, then the line quality is likely not going to give you more than 26.4Kb/s, which works out to under 3KB/s once you add in protocol overhead and 2-2.5 being more common.

Sounds pretty sensible then. I suspect, from what they say on the Apple site, that it's actually slightly more subtle than reducing the priority, as that alone wouldn't give the power savings that they claim. I would think that what they're actually doing is increasing the time between scheduling quanta for AppNap applications and tacking them on to the end of quanta for foreground apps so that the CPU doesn't get two wakeups.

You'd lose that bet. It was one of the first-generation Core 2 MacBook Pros (I waited to replace my G4 PowerBook until they came out with 64-bit ones, because I didn't think 32-bit support in OS X would be around for much longer).

You don't mention what version you ran. They fixed it in Parallels 3.

That's the exact opposite of my experience. The ticket about the random crashing had a lot of backtraces attached but silence from Parallels support staff. It was eventually closed once they fixed the bug, with a note saying 'Fixed in Parallels 3'. The cause of the bug was that they completely failed to read the Intel docs on how IPIs work and it only worked on Core 1 as a result of an implementation detail that was explicitly not guaranteed by Intel. After reading that, even if it had been a free upgrade, I wouldn't have been inclined to trust them with code in ring 0.