CyanogenMod is still an open source, clean version of Android. They are also going to offer Cyanogen OS which will include additions, especially from Microsoft. They are doing this on the side to make some money.

TFA doesn't say that. Like you, I also worry that the change could mean an end of Google allowing rooting and boot unlocking but there is no specific indication that I am aware of yet that this will happen. So it's just speculation unless you have another source.

While you are probably right, I have no problem it this as long as Google continues to offer terms of service which allow rooting and replacement of the OS with an alternative such as CyanogenMod. Current Nexus models are among the easiest to set up with CyanogenMod because you don't actually have to crack them to do it. There is also much less risk of bricking the device.

The possibility of people using encryption that can't be cracked by the government has been part of the bargain since the beginning. Thomas Jefferson understood this better than anyone since he was actually one of the foremost cryptographers of his time. His mechanical encryption device, Jefferson disk , (or close derivatives of it) were used by the US military up to WW II.

I suppose the Apple car will be kind of like the original iPod - just a steering wheel with one button in the center and no other controls.

Indeed, after talking to a lot of people recently about Facebook, I am impressed at how many have an account because of peer pressure. These people mostly say that they don't log on very often and when they do, they just check items about events and never post anything. So the support for Facebook is very broad but also very shallow.

Regarding antitrust laws, I think there have been different attitudes at different times in history. In fact, I think we are building towards a populist movement now which could lead to a round of trust busting like we haven't seen since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. A lot sentiment has been pro-business but that has been changing. I hope that it changes to pro-free market and trust busting supports the free market.

Privacy can be taken back. You may have lost control of your existing data but that doesn't mean you can't protect yourself going forward. Besides, privacy is a complex family of issues and I there are a lot of aspects which aren't dead yet or which could get a lot worse. We have not yet come to a point where people are tracked with facial recognition (and other identifying technologies) everywhere they go in the physical world. We have not yet come to the point where our DNA is analyzed to discover what marketing strategies we are susceptible to. We have also yet to really explore the idea of symmetry of information. That is, the right to know all about the people who know all about you.

Indeed, but keep in mind that the federal government is not the only concern. Government also includes state/provincial, local and foreign. There are also corporate interests, malicious insiders in these companies who may feed data to scammers and ordinary users with access to your feed who may apply some kind of algorithm of their own.

Most of us, who are actually experts in the field, use R for number crunching. Bench scientists, who know enough about bioinformatics to be dangerous, crunch their numbers in Excel.

Yes that's exactly the problem. I am one of a small minority of computational biologists who use PostgreSQL for gene expression profiling, DNA sequencing and related work. PostgreSQL interacts very well with R, the most important tool for analyses in my field. Besides the data conversion issue with Excel, it also introduces the issue of "misaligning" data. You frequently have to put together information from multiple sources, especially public databases, and merge them into one table. A lot of people take these data from different sources sort them in Excel and then cut and paste them together. This is referred to as "aligning data." This is prone to error "misaligning data." The thing is that there is almost always a common value, such as an official gene symbol or an official protein identifier which are primary keys from their source databases. So the better way to do this operation is with a database join. SQL does, in fact, make many processes in bioinformatics both easier to do and more accurate at the same time. By the way, foreign key constraints have saved me from major blunders in data processing on several occasions. Imagine that.

Papers are mostly reviewed by senior researchers, such as the head of research labs, and they seldom have more than a basic working knowledge of bioinformatics. They are not supposed to show the papers under review to anyone because they are sensitive pre-publication materials. That precludes seeking help from their own staff expert on the topic. On top of that, there is frequently a natural language barrier as well as a technical understanding barrier between the senior researcher and the local bioinformatics expert. The result is that these analyses go largely unchallenged. It is actually true, more often than not, that tables and figures from gene expression profiling experiments, for example, are not reproducible using only the information published in the paper. In fact, the methods section related to such analyses frequently don't even make sense. You have to contact the author and talk directly to the person who did the analyses to get the straight story.

That would be peer pressure. The fact that many people feel coerced into having social media (especially Facebook) accounts is the reason which I have stood up to the peer pressure and refused to have an account. I do it to support the right of people to have privacy. Quite the opposite of what people say, you actually have to be a Mister Clean and not someone with something to hide to resist having social media accounts.

Actually, it seems to me that the makeup of this board is geared towards damage control and being able to sue whoever hacks them. One of the big picture items from Edward Snowden's leak is that, not only does the NSA believe that the best defense is a good offense, they believe that many aspects of cyber defense are hopeless. Clinton, of all people, would know this so the DNC may well have concluded that they can't avoid being hacked so they have decided to be ready to clean up when it happens.

Right, this is an item which you pay for. People defending all this invasion of privacy often say that the point is to get things for free. In practice, however, I have found that free things are more likely to respect your privacy. This is especially true of software. Take, for example, Android apps for GPS navigation. Garmin Navigon costs $49 (last I looked) which is expensive for an Android app. It wants access to all kinds of things which don't seem necessary for it's function. They have an excuse for access to the camera. It's to tell you if you are driving in the correct lane. I don't know what their excuse is for needing access to your contacts list. In contrast, the free app, Mapfactor Navigator, only asks for access to the things you would expect and it has a much better privacy policy.

I've said this before but it needs to be said again. The benefits of a thermostat being an Internet of things device as opposed to a LAN-only device is minimal. The main benefit to these smarter thermostats is just that you can configure them from a web page. This is easier than the older ones with a tiny LCD screen and a small number of buttons. The thing is that many devices such as printers and broadband routers have embedded web pages that demonstrate how you can handle configuration web pages internally. There is no need to connect outside your LAN for this. Really, the only thing that an IoT design allows on top of this is the ability to change settings from anywhere without having to set up a method to get into your local network such as a VPN server (many broadband routers today include one), a service like GoToMyPC or SSH tunneling. I really doubt that this ability to change thermostat settings from anywhere in the world is that useful to most people. You loose security and privacy. The real point of the IoT design is to allow the external site to collect data about you. They can probably infer when you are home or away and when you are awake or asleep from the thermostat data. Are those costs really worth the benefits?