Thanks, Lumpy, I came here looking for a mention of Panasonic's offerings. My personal laptop is a Toughbook - yeah, they rock!. I get knowing nods from the Commissionaires at airport security... If the military needs Windows on their tablets, they can get a Toughpad FZ-G1 for half the price of the Xplore - and the display, at 1920 x 1200 pixels, is even brighter than Xplore's offering. As per the spec sheet, the standard operating time of 8 hours can be extended to 18 hours (!) with the optional battery. Bonus: with all the money that they'd save, they could buy some very good whiskey to celebrate a successful mission (or to drown out an unsuccessful one..).

I'm at a loss to understand what the security issues you would have such that cloud-based password managers are a hazard. And yet, such that you can get away with passwords that you can commit to memory.

Any password you can remember is a password that is already in thousands of crackers' try-these-first password lists. All of the online security breaches of password database have provided a rich and extensive database of passwords that people actually use. No, you need to use a password manager. Like five years ago. But a password-managing device is the worst possible option you can consider. How can you back up your password database?

A good, completely off-line option is Steve Gibson's 'Off the Grid' password generator here: https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.... You could generate a paper grid and use that. It can be reprinted as needed, and even if you lose it, no problem.

Some/all of the cloud-based managers can be used offline. I know for a fact that LastPass does not need to be connected to the 'Net to work. It's free, try it out - see if it works for you. There are 'LastPass Portable' versions, designed to run off a thumbdrive.

For a buck a month, LastPass provides stellar technical support (one of the programmers called me at home to sort out an issue I was having when using 'LastPass for Applications' with the steaming pile of a crap that is iTunes): https://lastpass.com/go-premiu... Their security has been vetted by trusted reviewers, they use best practice encryption and protocols. Perhaps their Enterprise services will fit the bill?

Cheap at twice the price. I can't recommend them enough.

No, no, no: Step One: use it to rob the rest of world Step Two: give half of it back Step three: destroy it. /whoever buys it off of you can get the money back...

If Obama really wanted to 'press for the need', he'd propose a $1 trillion fund. Much less than the Iraq War's costs.

..how refuse to take medicine for just a friggin' flu, and just tough it out, were right all along, eh?

And in case people don't understand how footnotes works in Wikipedia, a direct link to the 'other' Wiki's page with her order:

WARNING: if you work for the US Government, it is vitally important that you perform your unending duty to Think of the Poor, Poor, CIA Operatives. (Well, except for that traitorous-because-she-married-an-honest-man Valerie Plame.) As part of that ongoing mission, it is critical that you remain uninformed, so DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK THAT FOLLOWS.

http://www.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/07/09STATE80163.html

No such a difficult problem: "Barkeep, beer me!" Do they know when you've had enough? And how well do they handle a belligerent drunk?

Yes, I did specifically mean that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora#Acquisition_of_gut_flora_in_human_infants

I thought that this was well-established by now: It's so that the newborn can pick up some of his/her mother's digestive-tract bacteria. They need 'em.

Agreed. And it only takes a minute ore two to set up.

..and to the dipshit below. It's an obligatory XKCD reference. https://xkcd.com/1022/

Lest someone not chase the links down, there's a useful 'HOWTO: EFFECTIVELY ARGUE AGAINST INTERNET CENSORSHIP IDEAS linked-to in the TFL at http://rys.io/en/94 "You forgot Poland" just might take on a new meaning.

Thank you - I came here to say this. While we're bashing Mr. Forbes for bellowing loudly to the world his technical ignorance of math and computers, let me quote from the piece: "When you buy a pound of hamburger you expect to get 16 ounces of meat." Well, I don't know where he buys his hamburger (or gets a minion to do so), but when I buy hamburger, I KNOW that it's not 100% meat... According to the Wiki page on 'Ground Beef', it's "Meat content 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%)". I guess his gross mis-overestimation of how much of hamburger is meat draws a convenient (okay, "snarky") analogy to the amount of actual information and considered opinion in Mr. Forbes's opinion pieve vs. how much he thinks there is in there...

Cliffs generally are places where a lot of wind gets blown about. They probably are good places to install wind turbines. Bonus..we could use the electricity they generate to electrocute politicians.

The Arrogant Worms could tell ya.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URU1qC5fjkk