"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference "

Nothing arbitrary about the mass surveilance. It's all quite deliberate and systematic. Your rights are well protected.

"Hosting in Europe is exactly the same as hosting in the US!"

Not really. A US citizen does have legal rights regarding US spying that non-citizens do not, and can at least nominally ask for restitution, and use their vote and political action to influence the practice. Note how the widespread surveillance being exposed is illegal for targeting US citizens, but perfectly legal - and thus with no recourse available - for non-citizen targets.

In the same way, if you're a European citizen you really should prefer using hosting, email and other providers based in EU jurisditions. That will in the same way give rights and leverage to influence privacy issues that you are not given by US authorities.

So yes, the rational response to the widespread surveillance is unfortunately a balkanized internet, where we all mostly use and pay for services within our own legal bloc and avoid any companies based elsewhere.

I will never buy a hybrid drive from seagate or anyone else. It's a huge waste of effort and money which only adds additional more uncertainty to the failure cases that already exist. 8GB of flash on a hybrid drive at best improves boot times by a second or two (literally, just that), and there's no point 'caching' application binaries when you can trivially stuff 16G+ of ram in a modern machine.

My windows box boots from a normal HDD just fine. If anyone is unhappy with their boot times it's probably because their machines are loaded with tons of crapware.

Laptops don't need HDDs at all. Just go with a SSD. There is absolutely no need to store your life's work on your laptop when a myrid of wireless/internet/automatic backup solutions are available.

Workstations and servers will want discrete SSDs in addition to HDDs. We stuff 128-256GB SSDs on our servers, use ~30G for boot+root, and the remaining 200GB to help cache the filesystems on the HDDs. Works great. The last thing you want are idiotic multi-failure-mode hybrid drives on an important machine.

I am not particularly married to WD or Seagate, but the last few years Seagate's line-up has been such a horrid mish-mash of half-baked features that I've pretty much been sticking to WD.

-Matt

Not really, no. You will save money going with 2.5" HDDs instead of 3.5" HDDs, however. SSDs still eat less power when idle, but HDDs don't eat a whole lot of power when idle either.

Otherwise it depends on the kind of machine it is. If it's a desktop or workstation, then cpu's with integrated graphics (AMD APUs or Intel xxx5 chips typically) use far less power than systems with discrete gpus or graphics cards. Later generation chips eat less power when idle. Intel pretty much wins on that front if you want a powerful but low-power workstation. Haswell mobos and a good PSU will draw under 20W without having to go to sleep. Costs some money, though.

-Matt

That was a *woman*?

If you're concerned about political correctness making it's way onto Doctor Who, that tardis has long since sailed. It's not only gay-friendly to a fault, it's eco-friendly and anti-militarist. UNIT doesn't count -- our brave boys in berets represent a military reduced to its proper scope: gamely attempting to repulse cheesy alien invaders while someone with more brains figures out what to do about them.

In Dr. Who the military isn't some kind of awesome war machine, it's more like occupational therapy for the incurably dunderheaded.

Those would be the *interesting ones*. The ones who are happy going with the grain pretty soon become part of the grain.

There wasn't a SWAT team involved, just three SUVs and six lightly armed detectives in casual street clothes. If anything that shows that old-fashioned police work is effective.

I see no evidence that the police are immune from epic fails in judging character, or are indeed better at it than anyone else. But they do have a lot of experience with *investigations*, and that counts for something.

Firefox for Android does reflow. Usually works well, but a few js-heavy sites can fail, and you end up with sidescrolling anyway. I just never visit such sites again; the internet is too big and life too short to put up with the annoyance.

If you folks on the right had asked one of us *liberals* back in '08, we'd have told you Obama wasn't one of us. He's essentially what would have been a centrist Republican thirty years ago. These were people, like Bob Dole, that we liberals didn't agree with, but could respect and work with. In fact, "Obamacare" pretty much follows the private sector oriented reform plans of Bob Dole. If Obama were a liberal he'd have gone with single payer, and negotiated tough price concessions with pharmaceutical manufacturers (which is the source of America's runaway heath care spending). You'd have seen banks regulated or broken apart, and criminal investigations in response to the financial crisis of '08, not an attempt to put the system back together again the way it was before the crash.

In fact Obama is very much the kind of president Dole would have been: an economic pragmatist, a diplomatic multilateralist, and an aggressive user of military force where he perceives an imminent threat to national security.

If you want to stop state intrusion into private affairs, you've got to stop being afraid, and convince others around you to stop being afraid. The more fear there is in the political climate, the more impunity the government has in its actions.

Liberals got behind Obama in '08 for the same reason we got behind Obamacare: we backed the best alternative achievable in a climate of fear -- a climate, by the way, that makes the state internal security apparatus feel empowered to do anything it wants in the search for terrorists.

I've seen gaming headsets that mix two audio sources (is yours the PS3 headset?), but I haven't found wireless earbuds available that do that (thinking more about it, it seems my problems are only with wireless earbuds (I've had sets from two manufacturers)).

I use the Sony SBH20 wireless earbuds: http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/accessories/stereo-bluetooth-headset-sbh20/ Seems to work fine. I haven't had any problem with mixing up devices, but I'm pretty careful about turning off BT whenever I don't use it to save battery. So I turn on the headset (or keyboard), then turn on BT on the device I want to use. Then turn both off once I'm done.