I don't understand how this would lead to vendor lock-in, can you explain what you mean?

http://www.newsobserver.com/ne...

It also nullified local ordinances around the state that would have protected gay or transgender people from being fired simply for their sexual preference or identify. It also clears the way for businesses to refuse to serve gay or transgender patrons.

The state has always had laws on workplace discrimination, public accommodation, minimum wage and other business issues. This law makes it unlawful for cities to expand upon those laws, like Charlotte and more than a dozen others had done.

The Topaz Solar Farm in California was completed in 2014 at a cost of $2.5 billion with capacity of 550MW with an operational lifetime of 30 years. So your cost is 4 times too high for technology that is several years old and your lifetime is half what it should be. You can't rely on 10-15 year old data for technology that is plummeting in price every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm) is in California and produces 550MW. The Topaz Solar Farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm) also in California produces 550MW. CVSR produces 250MW, IVSP produces 99MW, MSS produces 265MW, and the Blythe Solar Power Project will produce 480MW when completed. So in a very small area of California, we have nearly two gigawatts of capacity, far more than this project will reach upon completion, despite the sinister machination of the "Greens of California."

http://www.wareable.com/smartw...

"The watch will change the technology as it develops, Jean-Claude Biver was clear about that. We want to be able to change the technology but keep the watch elements."

Unlike other smartwatches Tag has promised that this will be upgradeable to the latest technology for a fee. However, if they add a heart rate monitor or other such features the casing itself would need to be modified. Not that I'm arguing in favor of the device but it is worth noting.

Instead of opening your data up to yet another corporation by trusting someone else to analyze your raw data, why not create an open source application that you can download to analyze your raw genetic data? I'm sure the molecular biologists out there would be more than willing to help contribute.

If you are looking for open source options you can try BlockParty - https://github.com/krishkumar/... and Adios - https://github.com/ArmandGrill.... You no longer need a developer's license to deploy software to your own iOS devices. I've been using Adios on a device that doesn't officially support content blocking (as per Apple's rules) and it works fine.

Watch the video. The SMS is actually an MMS or instant message and he's downloaded a file called "Malicious.app" to the desktop. He then double clicks on that, the dock disappears, and very quickly the "Allow" button is clicked. By default OS X machines come set to allow only Applications from the Mac App Store to run. Most people reduce this security setting to allow applications from "Mac App Store and identified developers" to run. Either way, you'd have to 1) Not notice that this is a .App and not a picture, and 2) Have disabled the default security settings. Otherwise you'd get a big warning saying "You can't open this because of security settings", which would be pretty hard to miss and then you'd have to ignore the warning, change your security settings, re-open the file, not even worry about what the dialog saying "Allow" is and ignore the fact that your dock flashed on and off for no reason.

I agree that you should be required to enter your password to access the keychain, but this is a guy from Beirut shilling for his password management company. Not only that, he doesn't mention which OS versions are affected or anything else. This could very easily be the NULL-pointer dereference exploit posted last week repackaged in a very clumsy way. If it is, why doesn't he say so? Post the exploit code at least so legitimate researchers can pick it apart.

If you run around turning off security features and running random .apps from people willy-nilly on your computer, no matter what OS you're running.

Other major chip manufacturers will conduct their own reverse engineering or hire speciality chip patent infringement firms to map and analyze new chips from competitors. So a company like Samsung will do a fairly thorough teardown of new Intel chips and have a fairly detailed map. Not that a suitably clever backdoor couldn't be hidden from this type of scrutiny, it's not exactly the type of thing they're looking for. The always-on Cortana DSP is worrying and they've admitted to that, that could certainly serve as a backdoor with some degree of plausible deniability. The data collection centers the NSA has now are probably sufficient for the type mass data collection they want and they don't have the risk of potentially sabotaging one of the biggest US corporations. There is some level of peer review in chip manufacture and I doubt Intel would want to sabotage themselves in that way, or that the US government could legally obligate them to sabotage their chips in that way.

I'm viewing the hex on Mac OS X. I formatted a thumb drive, saved a newly created .docx file on it, ejected, connected to a Red Star 3.0 VM, opened the drive on Red Star, ejected and then connected back to OS X. The md5 and hex were exactly the same before and after. When I posted this to a thread on reddit the author came back to claim that the behavior didn't occur with .docx created in MS Word but did occur with .docx created in LibreOffice and with .jpg files. The .docx file I'd used in the first trial was created in MS Word so I repeated the process with a .docx from LibreOffice and a .jpeg file. Again the md5 and hex were exactly the same before and after connection to RS3.0.

Before: https://i.imgur.com/oOoWssF.pn...
Open in Red Star 3.0: https://i.imgur.com/MiORhD3.jp...
After: https://i.imgur.com/uqAvXC6.pn...

The above uses an MS Word document created in Office 2011.

I've tried jpg, docx created in MS Word, docx from LibreOffice, and numerous other random file formats copied onto my thumb drive - the MD5 remains exactly the same in every case.

Thinness and lightness are not some sort of exclusive point of marketability that only Apple users care about. These are guiding principles for technological development at almost every portable device manufacturer. You can look at the patent stream from Samsung and LG and see this quite easily, at least half of their portable device patents mention weight and thickness reduction. The manufacturers are not simply heading in this direction because they've decided that it's the cool thing to do, they perform market research and have determined that these are characteristics that play a major role in purchase decisions. This is also the reason that manufacturers increasingly use pouch batteries adhered to the case with adhesive. By removing the protective casing and screw mounts from the battery, they reduce weight and thickness. However, a pouch shaped battery is easily punctured and relies upon the hard exterior casing of the phone/tablet/laptop to protect it. If the manufacturers allowed consumers to simply pop their pouch batteries out and leave them sitting around to charge, they'd be liable when some consumers inevitably dropped something on the pouch, puncturing it and leading to a fire. Also, the increasing use of adhesives in place of bolts isn't isolated to portable devices, huge sections of the BMW i8 are now glued together where they would have been bolted in the past, while sacrificing consumer repairability, the weight reduction enables improvement in range as well as mileage.

>Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could loose (sic) it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc.

Simply strongly encrypt your data before backing it up to the cloud, you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way. If you can't find a cloud storage service that you trust/trust won't go out of business, you can make your own cloud using Amazon's AWS system. The levels of security at the facilities and redundancy mean your data will survive anything short of nuclear Armageddon. Personally I'd just go with the local encryption option.

MDMA is relatively benign and no one is overdosing on it. What you do increasingly see is people overdosing on what they think is MDMA because it's not as readily available now thanks to law enforcement.

http://www.theguardian.com/pol...