Couldn't you just line a ziplock bag with a couple layers of tinfoil? Also, when you put your phone in there it cuts off its WiFi, cellular connection, and 3g/4g, which means your phone is useless while it's in there. You might as well just take the battery out when you don't want to be tracked and save yourself $400.
I used to work in a flavor company. "Natural" strawberry flavor also uses an ingredient extracted from rotten eggs. It has to have at least some of what it says it is (like strawberry extract) to be called what it is, but this can be like one drop in a barrel. Also, if you add even the smallest amount of natural flavor to an artificial flavor, you can call it "Natural and Artificial."
Basically, the artificial flavors are really cheap, so people try to avoid the natural stuff when customers don't care.
But on that note, there are some good ingredients, since some flavors are too hard to create unless you use the real stuff (like black tea -- you just overbrew it to make a concentrate).
How is that relevant to the NSA story exactly? Are you saying that the Government vacuuming up any and all data it can, and granting internal and external analysts easy access to that data, is comparable to the owner of a private server analyzing the network traffic of their servers and networks? If you want to hold private server and network operators to a standard that restricts them from doing that you're going to have a bad time.
And the purpose of Tor might be different than you imagine:
I'm tired of this example. AFAIR, Yahoo got a valid court order to turn over information, and they complied because they had a presence there. No other company: not Google, not Microsoft, not AOL would have done anything different.
Yahoo! responded to being put in this situation by, among other things, funding a fellowship at Georgetown (and Stanford I think) for a researcher and 2 students to study human rights issues and communications policy related to the internet: http://isd.georgetown.edu/programs/yahoofellow/
We're ruling out that the ring effects people around it. I don't think we were ever told whether the eagles could resist its evil. Also, Frodo had to leave the company before this plan would have worked, since he started to realize the ring was corrupting the people around him.
The more likely case is that the Chinese regime is trying to silence microbloggers. They've been the only real voice of what's going on there with all the recent political turmoil, and there are media outside of China who are picking up what they're saying.
I was going to get an iPad a while back. Basically, unless you're doing basic Web browsing or just playing games, you need a keyboard to do any real work on a tablet. Also, they're light, but still not much different than a MacBook Air - and they're not much cheaper. Tablets still just seem like a novelty to me - toys for gaming and watching movies.
If you want a serious tablet though, check out the Modbooks. They're regular Mac notebooks hacked to use touchscreens. They're good if you do art on your notebook, since you can basically draw on the screen, you get all the features of a full-fledged notebook, and they were around long before the iPad.
