Excellent comment, and I'm a fan of most of what Google does, as well.

But I cannot support Chromebooks with my consumer dollars. (Nor do I like their self-driving car project.) My fiance and I are both in IT security.

The way we see it is- if your PC data is stored "in the cloud" instead of on discs YOU own and control, you're vulnerable in many ways.

Network connectivity goes down for a period of time? Can't do your word processing! Ectetera, etcetera.

I use all kinds of Google web services (including Gmail and Google Docs). I sometimes develop websites for clients that are hosted on third party web servers. I integrate Dropbox with every device I own, and I love it.

But my local discs sync with Dropbox as much and as often as they can. And I would never put something I don't want people to see (pirated media, "sexy" photos of myself, etc.) into my Dropbox folder.

I use "cloud services" but I always back up my content to discs I OWN and CONTROL, and my private stuff never sees the Internet. If something is on a web server you don't own, always assume other people (even if only employees of the company that owns the web server) can see it.

And if network connectivity fails, even if only briefly, it shouldn't be able to stop you from accessing your everyday PC data and engaging in activities that shouldn't have to have Internet access to work.

Noooo... I'd never buy a Chromebook. And I normally love Google and I'm definitely a Linux geek.

I have a rare brain condition, an arachnoid cyst, which is a type of non-cancerous brain tumour I was born with. It's between the parietal and occipital lobes in my left hemisphere, larger than a chicken egg. My neurophysiology is quite peculiar, and I have traits of hyperlexia and Non-Verbal Learning Disorder. The neuroscience team who are working with me have a lot of testing to do, but I'm certain my cognitive strengths, as well as my cognitive weaknesses, are partially to due with my cyst. It's considered to be congential brain damage.

Interestingly, my fiance (a rather brilliant computer scientist) has acquired brain damage from a car accident, and from the time he fell down a flight of stars and broke his neck and bruised the rear of his brain.

Of course, Microsoft is taking a cue from Apple- closed f&*king everything. Well, the hardware and software I choose for myself is open.

This makes me happy.

Did you know at least one other corporation had a trademark for the name iPhone before Apple announced their choice of product name in 2007?

Considering what patent trolls Apple is, and considering Brazil is a sizable market for smartphones and computer equipment, this is a tiny bit of karma, as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, Xerox has yet to see money for inventing the OS GUI and the modern mouse.

How many individual developers has Apple picked on for patent infringement? None that I can think of.

How many patent trolls has Apple stepped in to defend their customers from? Lodsys backed off from attacking App Store developers when Apple said they'd sign on as a co-defendant in any case.

How many patent trolls has Nathan Myhrvold created through Intellectual Ventures? Literally thousands.

Apple's embroiled in a patent war. Don't confuse that with being patent trolls.

You also forget that Xerox remained uninterested in producing a consumer computer incorporating the concepts they pioneered. Likewise, HP, when Steve Wozniak was working there, declined to produce a personal computer he designed.

Your comment was fine without the Xerox bullshit - they agreed to let Apple take a peek at their inventions in exchange for a $1m investment. Apple later bought the rights to the Xerox Alto GUI.

Do you mean the infogear/linksys/cisco iphone? The one that was discontinued in 2001?

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1127

A mark shall be deemed to be “abandoned” if either of the following occurs:

(1) When its use has been discontinued with intent not to resume such use. Intent not to resume may be inferred from circumstances. Nonuse for 3 consecutive years shall be prima facie evidence of abandonment. “Use” of a mark means the bona fide use of such mark made in the ordinary course of trade, and not made merely to reserve a right in a mark.

Strange that a trademark should only last 3 years of non-active use when copyright is lifetime + 70 years. I guess there's IP and there's IP.

This is hilarious! I have two points to make:

1. M$ has been trying to sabotage GNU/Linux for at least the past 20 years. "Secureboot" on Windows 8 OEM UEFI is just the most recent attempt.

2. Why should I pay over $120/year ($10/month) for a subscription to an application suite that has all of its GOOD features replicated in LibreOffice, with a shitty UI and all that DRM on top of it?!

P.S. If you try to tell me that Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. have been working on "Secureboot" fixes, that's irrelevant. The fact that they had to come up with fixes in the first place is horrendous. And now when I buy new socket LGA 1155, 1156 or Xeon mobos, I have to ask if "Secureboot" is on it if it has UEFI BIOS.

I personally haven't found any WYSIWYG equation editors that are nearly as fast, easy to edit, and good looking at the built-in MathType/MS Word equation editor.

If anyone has suggestions for LO plug-ins or other free software, let me know.

Wow, people are gullible idiots, aren't they?

Go Daddy is the last company on Earth I would register a domain with, or order ANY services at all.

And we should all remember their position on SOPA. But even before then, they were a crappy company, with lousy service and lousy security, and actively fighting against our digital freedoms.

When the previous CEO murdered the elephant on video, that's when I moved all my domains. That was more than enough to make me never want to do business with them for the rest of eternity.

Which reminds me, Mashable published some lameass excuse from the CEO when it kicked up a big stink. Mashable must be getting kickback from Go Daddy.

Then again, would anyone consider Mashable as journalism? It's more like a glorified online shopping catalogue.

Does anyone have advice about improving my karma? I'm roughly 42nd percentile. I suppose lurking doesn't help.

I know this is going to sound preachy, but the best way to improve your karma is probably to stop thinking about how to improve your karma.

That is, just post your thoughts on a topic, written as best you can. At least, that's worked well for me and probably most other high percentile-ers. Don't start pandering to what you think will attract a lot of upvotes- karma is meaningless after all.

Cynically: many stories are reposted. Discover what those are, and what the popular opinions on them are. Then monitor new, and make the popular comment early to reap most karma.

Commenting at the right time seems to help.

Having a single thought per post also helps; people tend to upvote if they agree with the entire post.

I stand out a little bit, because although I'm a "Valley-type techie", I'm also a woman with purple hair. Being a woman in tech has its pros and cons. The Silicon Valley I'M based out of is what some in the tech media refer to as "Silicon Valley North"- Toronto. (I also live near downtown, but that's irrelevant.) I was a computer whiz ever since I was a very young girl. By the time I was 11, it was 1995 and I just got into web development, as a self-taught hobby. (There, I just dated myself.) I didn't even consider a career in tech until I was already in my mid-20s. Why? I theorize that being female (girls aren't encouraged to get into computing as much as boys are) was a minor reason, but being told by teachers in the public school system for years that you have to be EXCELLENT at math to get into computing professionally is the main one. I'm not bad at math, but I thought I was when I was a kid. I blame former Ontario premier Mike Harris. In the 1990s, he really fucked up the school system. One of the policy/curriculum changes he and John Snobelen orchestrated was "show your work" in math. As soon as arithmetic and algebra get more complex, I use different techniques to solve problems than the mainstream ones in textbooks. For example, I don't do long division. I look at a division problem, figure out what the largest "X times Y" is that fits into the number I'm dividing, and I work back and forth from there. I can even get a decimal answer correct down to the first few places (3.451, for example), just give me enough time with a pencil and paper.

The way my brain is wired, you can try teaching me long division thousands of times, but my math work in practice will always be with the methods that correlate with how my brain thinks about numbers.

Getting the correct answer without cheating wasn't enough in the Mike Harris curriculum. If, when you "show your work", you aren't using the method that's on the blackboard or in the textbook, you get NO MARKS. Therefore, even though I'm competent enough in math (I wrote my GED later on without studying and got a higher mark than 99% of the adult test takers in the province that year, plus I scored perfectly in the math battery), I thought I was a "dummy."

And since I was told by teachers over and over again that you have to be EXCELLENT in math to get into a career in computing, and those same teachers convinced me I was HORRIBLE at math... guess what?

But in my teens and into my 20s, I kept using computers constantly every day, and I carried on with my web development projects. Web design was only a "hobby" for me, after all.

I had lots of jobs in retail and in call centres. In my personal life, if someone's Windows machine had a problem, I fixed it for them. But I never considered a tech career until I was 25. Which doesn't sound too late, until you consider the people who started working in IT when they were 18.

Well, guess what? People who entered my life in my adulthood kept telling me that I'm "really good with computers."

I started developing websites for a few small businesses because people close to me saw the work I did as a "hobby." I also wrote my CompTIA A+ in my mid 20s and passed with flying colours.

I got into consumer remote Windows tech support (as a call centre employee) for a couple of years. My tickets were varied, but a full 60% of them or more were malware related. Thus began my fascination with not only malware, but IT security in general.

Word spread that I'm good at removing really nasty malware (rootkits that malware removal programs don't have signatures for, etc.), and hardening/securing Windows (which, as we all know, is not a very secure OS platform to begin with, even with the NT kernel and NTFS file system), Mac (more secure because of its Unix roots, but no software is perfect), and Linux (ditto). So I got a job writing about IT security for the InfoSec Institute! http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/author/kimcrawley

Not too long ago, I met a wonderful man, in a setting that had nothing to do with IT or development. His name is Sean Rooney, and we fell in love. It probably helped that, by an amazing series of coincidences, we have the same interests for the most part. It was an amazing coincidence that he's one of the top IT security people Canada has ever produced. He's contributed to the curriculum of the CompTIA Security+ and the CISSP, among others. He's contributed to Canada's laws regarding digital security and rights. He helped catch the notorious USENET "hacker" of the 80s and 90s, "Hipcrime". He's worked for the Canadian Military, Alcatel (public transit system controllers in big cities around the world), and the RCMP, among other big clients.

Sadly, although the old IT security he founded, Coldstream, was very successful for 14 years, a corrupt accountant and a corrupt bureaucrat brought the company down.

Now that we're together, we've relaunched his old company as our new one, Cyberia Labs. http://cyberialabs.coldstream.ca We have some of the old Coldstream team members with us, including a top cryptogapher, Sandy Harris.

I'm working with computer scientists who can blow me away in many areas of IT and development. But interestingly enough, I'm quicker and better at Windows tech support than any of them, and that also includes Windows Server. I'm the only web developer on the team. So whereas Sandy speaks C++ and Perl, and Sean speaks Assembly languages, I'm the only one who speaks HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and PHP. I'm also an art school dropout. I've had a passion for visual art ever since I was a little girl, and I'm equally comfortable in analogue mediums and digital mediums. I was also a good art college student, but seeing my classmates live as starving artists for the most part, and realizing that my teachers would be starving artists if it weren't for their teaching jobs... discouraged me. But in a group full of techies, I'm the only artist, so I can make our website look nice, etc.

I also have had a bit of a career in soft journalism. My tech writing is for the InfoSec Institute, but if you Google my real name, Kim Crawley, you'll find some op-eds I wrote which were syndicated in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other publications. I got the writing bug from my Dad, who is a rather successful novelist. So, I'm the only member of the Cyberia team who can write in "English" to a professional, readable standard. I've edited technical and scientific articles from many scientists and tech people. Their ideas are wonderful! Their content is amazing! But it's totally unreadable. If I had a penny for every time I had to turn a scientist's 500 word sentence into several paragraphs...

So you see, dmor, even though I'm a "techie" and I'm the co-founder of a tech startup (we already have clients!), my non-tech skills- art, creative writing, my ability to translate "techie speak" into language end users understand, and my instinct for marketing, make me vital to our team.

Although I really dislike Steve Jobs (his walled garden system for Apple products, and the way he's abused his subordinates over the years), no one can argue that he had a natural talent for marketing.

In THAT sense only, I see myself as Cyberia's "Steve Jobs" to my fiance Sean's "Steve Wozniak". I'm technically inclined enough to "fit-in" in Silicon Valley, but Sean is the one with the patents and white papers. (Sandy has patents too, and it's all very important IT security related technology.) But I'm the "pretty" one (not that Jobs was "pretty", but you know what I mean), and I'm the one who can market, make things look stylish and artistic, and sell our business to people who aren't "nerds."

I figure, dmor, a lot of the people here on HN have non-tech skills and talents that help them in their tech careers. And getting good at those non-tech skills would be impossible if there wasn't some non-tech in their backgrounds or experience.

One woman in tech to another I'd love to meet you. I'm headed to Toronto and Montreal in February but if you're elsewhere in Canada I'm sure we can find a way for paths to cross. There are few of us (@bluehat is one as well) - email me (info in profile)

Sean and I are co-founders of an IT security startup, Cyberia Labs: http://cyberialabs.coldstream.ca Sean has 25 experience doing IT security work for Alcatel, the Canadian Military, and Sears, among others. As far as blackhats go, he was instrumental in helping the FBI catch "Hipcrime" (Google it). As far as whitehats go, we ARE whitehats. We've got the patents, years of 2600 magazine issues, and http://hacklab.to memberships to prove it. ;) My dad is also a screenwriter, newbee40, so we'd be glad to help you make your character seem authentic. Visit our website, send me an inquiry via the web form on our website, and we'll see if we can arrange something. Warmly, Kim

Let Sears know that their store machines in Puerto Rico (the ones employees use to clock in and customers use to browse their catalogs) are not quite secure. Plus they insist on having the USB ports uncovered, and load anything that is plugged into it.

:)

I'm sick of tech blogs that drool over Apple crap. Same with Microsoft. They just want to take more and more control away from the user.