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Are you kidding me? I... can't... My brain hurts! Please pull your brain out of the box beside your desk and insert in skull before opening your mouth again. I cannot believe that anyone that has an internet connection can be this out of touch with reality. Please, tell me your kidding.

As far as I know the 2TB Raid problem hasn't been fixed. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 If anyone knows differently, please let me know.
I've been using a drive docking station and splitting my backups for large databases.

It's not like anything bad's ever happened when critical systems are rolled-out untested, unprepared, or irresposibly.

I mean it's not like someone's life is ever put in jeaopardy by minor software glitches, especially in hospitals. ...on a side note, Googling "IT disasters" leads to some very interesting results.

-Matt

I've replied to the Apache argument in the corresponding thread. It's simply factually incorrect. Go to Secunia and check for yourself - Apache has more security holes than IIS, for the last two major releases at least (that's since 2002...).

Not only do you completely ignore the Apache argument so well made by MaskedSlacker, you also forget that the "tiny ass segment" now makes up about 15-20% all in, incluing in it many of the worlds most valued hacker targets, like prominent websites, company intranets, bank servers etc.

Regarding Linux servers being potentially more lucrative targets. In truth, any servers are more lucrative targets, but you don't hack servers by infecting them with malware - that just doesn't make any sense. Malware - viruses, trojans etc - is used to steal information from desktop PCs, and also to link them up for botnets.

By the way, I know quite a few banks which run their Internet banking systems on IIS.

If it was as easy to hack Mac OS X as it was windows, for instance, we'd see an awful lot of very upset hispters.

No, not really, and it is painfully obvious as to why.

Imagine that you're a malware writer. Now you can spend your time writing Windows malware, and target 9 desktop machines out of every 10 out there. Or you can spend the same amount of time writing OS X malware, and target 1 machine out of every 10. Which one would you choose?

Now why do you think that any single malware writer would make a different choice? Or do you expect them to congregate, compute the marketshare, and allocate platform quotas according to that? "Now, guys, we've got 8.7% of Macs out there, so let's draw the lots on who's going to write a virus for that."?...

unlike Windows, most decent OS's will not just execute arbitrary code that can damage the system

All OSes we're talking about here will happily execute arbitrary code that user asks them to execute - as in, running an executable file. Damaging the system is not any more of a possibility in Windows than in Linux or OS X - if you're running as admin/root, then you're screwed on all of those, but if you're not, then only the files you own are potentially affected. And Vista or 7, out of the box, are not set up to make the user created during installation an admin.

Hacking an individual box of course is possible, and if you have the skillset, time and money, is almost as easy for a Mac or linux box as a windows one, depending of course if it's a stock Mac or Linux box, or if it's someone who knows what they're doing.

As pwn2own has repeatedly demonstrated, OS X is actually easier to hack into than Vista.

I will have to accept that keyboards will be a thing of the past.

Don't be so sure of that.

It's probably the same patent issues claimed in 2004: Linux potentially infringes 283 patents.

InfoWorld's editor in chief, Eric Knorr, should be commended for dealing this matter quickly and decisively when he discovered Mr. Kennedy's deception. At the same time, he should think very carefully about the series of decisions that led to this outcome.

Wrong, looks like he knew all along.

From http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=75498&messageID=1468379 [zdnet.com]

IDG knew. Galen Gruman, Executive Editor of InfoWorld knew. As
did Eric Knorr. And several others. But poor Gregg Keizer - hey,
the man was looking for an anti-Microsoft angle at every turn, and
he let his zeal get the best of him. I honestly never meant any
harm, especially to Gregg.

Slashdot should ban all articles from InfoWorld. After all, most of the anti-Vista fud articles posted here were written by Randall Kennedy.

One example among the many: Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/11/0110251

From http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=75498&messageID=1468379

IDG knew. Galen Gruman, Executive Editor of InfoWorld knew. As
did Eric Knorr. And several others. But poor Gregg Keizer - hey,
the man was looking for an anti-Microsoft angle at every turn, and
he let his zeal get the best of him. I honestly never meant any
harm, especially to Gregg.

Looks like he just got trolled, just like many people here at Slashdot, which faithfully published all the anti-Vista fud spouted by "Barth".

One example among the many: Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/11/0110251

In a world where rootkits and malware infest nearly half of Windows desktops and deliver a tranparent proxy with encrypted tunnels into your precious LAN, all servers are web facing servers. The security of the firewall is a myth serious professionals no longer subscribe to, and many never did. Secure your intranet server and your desktops as if they were in your DMZ because for all practical purposes that's where they are.

See http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=75498&messageID=1468379 for what he claims he is and does.

According to the linked reports (both those in the summary and this one at ZDNet- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31024) the only reporter for InfoWorld who "Barth" was quoted by was Gregg Keizer. This raises a question: Did Keizer know about this deception? And if not, how did he get contacted by Barth initially? It is possible the Keizer was deceived but some sort of answer would be nice.

ZDNet, an InfoWorld competitor, was about to go public with an exposé on Randall C. Kennedy and Devil Mountain Software, but InfoWorld actually beat it to the punch by disclosing the matter itself.

InfoWorld's editor in chief, Eric Knorr, should be commended for dealing this matter quickly and decisively when he discovered Mr. Kennedy's deception. At the same time, he should think very carefully about the series of decisions that led to this outcome.

Randall C. Kennedy was an InfoWorld blogger known for his outrageous, inflammatory posts. Often these posts appeared to disregard the facts, overinflate the issues, or otherwise ignore the tenets of basic journalism in favor of sensationalism and manufactured furor. Doubtless InfoWorld appreciated the traffic such posts drove to its site. What it should have realized, however, was that beyond contributing to InfoWorld's success, Mr. Kennedy had a personal incentive for generating that traffic: promoting his own company, Devil Mountain Software. With that as his motive, he had far less incentive to consider InfoWorld's journalistic integrity when crafting his blog posts. Preserving that integrity was the job of InfoWorld's editorial staff. They failed to do so.

Compounding the issue is InfoWorld's decision to partner with Mr. Kennedy on the "Windows Sentinel" project, InfoWorld's in-house branded version of Devil Mountain Software's exo.performance.network Windows monitoring product. The original post announcing Windows Sentinel is currently hidden behind a password, but the Google cache clearly shows that InfoWorld was aware that Mr. Kennedy was behind Devil Mountain Software all along:

Today, I'm happy to announce the beta version of InfoWorld Windows Sentinel, a joint project with the exo.performance.network founded by InfoWorld Contributing Editor Randall C. Kennedy. ... According to Randall, the main point is "to develop a more concise picture of the Windows computing landscape.

InfoWorld's editorial staff should have seen that allowing a contributor to use InfoWorld's brand to promote his own company's products and/or services constituted a conflict of interest at best, and at worst, a serious breach of InfoWorld's responsibility to provide truthful, unbiased reporting to its readers.

InfoWorld needs to think very carefully about how to proceed in future if it hopes to recover its integrity after this incident. In an age where publications are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their power to drive revenue, it is more important than ever that editors take a stand for the paramount importance of high-quality, thorough, accurate reporting and editorials, untainted by financial interests or the pursuit of personal gain. InfoWorld stumbled by continuing to support Randall C. Kennedy when it should have, at the very least, questioned his judgment. It can and must do better.

As for the drive's internal cache being diluted with data that isn't going to be used, you are going to be sad to know, hard drive caches are used for prefetching data. Yes they contain read/write info and the command queue, but they also prefetch raw bits based on predictive algorithms.

I hung out with Bruce Schneier for a 1-hour talk once. If you want to scale up your paranoia further, you can do what he does: never let your computer touch a network or another person's hands. He has no wireless card, never plugs an ethernet cord into the slot, and never gives his compy to anyone else. Very difficult to sniff traffic that doesn't exist (but not impossible).

That must make keeping his blog updated tricky though...

So I've been using this line in my crontab for a long time now without any problems (well no more problems than I usually experience with Flash under Linux):

* * * * * rm -fr /home/me/.macromedia

I think this solves the problem, but maybe I'm mistaken...?

That depends on your threat model. Your cron job might keep your kid brother from discovering your cookies. If you *really* don't want people to know what flash is caching, I'd s/rm -rf/shred -uf/ there for starters. Then I'd think about putting my whole OS on an encrypted partition (trivial these days with Fedora, not sure about other distribs).

Of course, you still have problem with sniffing and all manner of malware, all of which could defeat your goal of preventing people from knowing what kind of flash content you're downloading.

I hung out with Bruce Schneier for a 1-hour talk once. If you want to scale up your paranoia further, you can do what he does: never let your computer touch a network or another person's hands. He has no wireless card, never plugs an ethernet cord into the slot, and never gives his compy to anyone else. Very difficult to sniff traffic that doesn't exist (but not impossible).

Learn your history. Apple NEVER announced ZFS for OS X.

if so, they sure fooled the media to think they did at the time.. ZDNET: "Apple announces ZFS on Snow Leopard". http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=335&tag=col1;post-584

and even Apples own web site editors where apparently fooled to think so.. from ars technica "Up until Monday's WWDC keynote, the preview page for Snow Leopard Server specifically referred to ZFS support as one of its key features!" (as per story this web site info purged by Apple) http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/06/apple-dashes-hopes-for-zfs-support-in-snow-leopard.ars

Until you can buy one at the store, it's another piece of vaporware from Microsoft.

Exactly. I liked how we never talked about the iPad before you could buy it for instance.

Except one company (Apple) has a history of delivering what they promise, and another (Microsoft) does not. It's not about a general rule of "we don't discuss product announcements", it's a general rule of "Microsoft announces things, then only occasionally delivers them"

But it becomes a bit ironic when the big example of recent MS vaporware used by other posters right here in this thread is how MS dropped WinFS from Vista. Which is exactly matched by how Apple dropped ZFS from OSX ;) http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=584

Yeah, Google is currently the hot topic of the tech week: Nearly every tech-related blog has some negative opinion about Google either taking on the telcos, privacy concerns, anti-publisher/book settlements, or too big to fail...

Considering they're mainly all blogs, I'd say there maybe some strings being pulled, paid for in the form of cash by a certain rival. That because what Google is doing is no different from that rival, nor what MS, Novell, IBM, HP, etc... has done in the past.

Here's a better story: Microsoft halts Windows Update distribution of security fix after blue-screen reports.

* The update is voluntary. * They're doing a better job than they did with XP. * 32% of all counterfeit Win machines have malware. See http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/watu.asp or http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1759&tag=col1;post-5242 for more information.

Anyone remember the US government initiative in the 90's to be able to snoop on its citizens phone calls?

The Clipper Chip failed because it was subjected to citizen protest. However, around the same time CALEA was passed, which is very very similar in effect.

Aside from abuses afforded by CALEA, the US government's spy networks have repeatedly snooped on its citizens' phone calls. There was no victory with the Clipper Chip. It was just a minor setback.

I've never heard that Rails would make "programmers obsolete", in fact it seems to be the opposite; if you look at the official Rails site you'll notice that the biggest tag-line is "optimized for developer happiness".

Rails makes developers happier, not unemployed. What's more, anyone can write bad code in any language, so pointing to Twitter is hardly a conclusive argument. There are lots of big Rails sites out there, including Basecamp, the original Rails application.

For a better (and longer) write up on scaling Rails, I refer you to this article.

Actually, Flash Player has supported the playback of H.264 since 2007 and Flash Player is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of videos have now been encoded to H.264 on the web (H.264 used to be mostly only used for Blu-ray, not so much web videos).

A lot of people are confused about FLV. FLV is not a codec, it's a container. The video inside is usually encoded in Sorensen Spark, On2 VP6 or H.264.

Troll detected. No, even paying people off won't make them stick with Silverlight. I predict it'll die a slow, stinky death like the Zune and Bing will. Not that any of this really matters, people will keep buying Apple stuff regardless, because Papa Jobs knows best.

Kindle sales may have played some part, in that Amazon sold a bazillion of them last quarter.

It's a bit of a digression, but...

Supposedly only 1.5 million Kindles have been sold (but there is a lot of guesswork being used in that blog, so take that number with a grain of salt).

I doubt it's enough to make up for the supposed losses claimed by the publishers. Anyway, Amazon isn't using cheap ebooks as a way to sell Kindles; rather, it's the other way around. Or it should be.

Now, back to the main topic...

Microsoft Already patented it!

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6609

United States Patent Application 20070185697
Kind Code A1
Tan; Desney S. ; et al. August 9, 2007
Using electroencephalograph signals for task classification and activity recognition
Abstract
A method for classifying brain states in electroencephalograph (EEG) signals comprising building a classifier model and classifying brain states using the classifier model is described. Brain states are determined. Labeled EEG data is collected and divided into overlapping time windows. The time dimension is removed from each time window. Features are generated by computing the base features; combining the base features to form a larger feature set; pruning the large feature set; and further pruning the feature set for a particular machine learning technique. Brain states in unlabeled EEG data are classified using the classifier model by dividing the unlabeled EEG data into overlapping time windows and removing the time dimension from each time window. Features required by the classifier model are generated. Artifacts in the labeled and unlabeled EEG data comprise cognitive artifacts and non-cognitive artifacts.

Perhaps they could start by consulting someone like RMS and Linus rather than involving themselves with Microsoft and proprietary software:

"Taxation without web presentation
The Library of Congress recently signed a deal to accept 3 million dollars worth of "technology, services and funding" from Microsoft towards building a new website powered by Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in."

"Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by Silverlight will be unable to use the Library of Congress' new website. How is that compatible with the principles of democracy or librarianship? It's taxation without web presentation. And how exactly is that a quantum leap forward? (If the LOC really wanted to make a quantum leap, it would open up its data.)"

* http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2008/02/taxation-without-web-presentation.php

Silverlight lockins - references with links re: Silverlight
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/02/24/silverlight-ooxml-sharepoint-and-more/

LOC / Silverlight news
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=724

Do your own searches for more references:
"library of congress" silverlight
"library of congress" silverlight site:boycottnovell.com
etc.

So, LOC, does this mean you'll redo any portions of your site(s) which feature Silverlight, which is proprietary (troll posters need not bait us by mentioning the useless Moonlight plugin which did not work when major media outlets streamed stuff like the Olympics which required Silverlight, where was Microsoft's big ball of interoperability goodness then? Nowhere! Linux users were scrambling all over posting VLC and other type of workarounds. this is about FREEDOM, not % of population using a certain OS)

It's worse than you think. In some countries they have even more rights and are harder to try in court since it's kinda hard to lock them up in a prison. I know a story of a corporation that willfully infected its customers with malware (which would get a teenager nearly in jail and gives him a criminal record) and got off with paying some pocket change.

Software patents stifle innovation.
Yet they are still around.

Many of us hate software patents. (myself included).
They limit what we can do, so we have to find innovative ways to avoid them.
Meanwhile we are happy when some large companies get bitten by patents.

Besides litigation, how do software patents benefit their holders?

I guess you missed the IE8 zero day exploit just last week? It's only the latest way in which PC users get owned through no fault of their own.

It's not like OS X never had glaring 0-day exploits of its own, so what's your point?

I guess you missed the IE8 zero day exploit just last week? It's only the latest way in which PC users get owned through no fault of their own.

It's not like OS X never had glaring 0-day exploits of its own, so what's your point?

Maybe I'm lucky but I don't notice flash playback using very much CPU. Just tried it on youtube, full screen. 5% cpu usage. 10-20% of %5 is 0.5 to 1% CPU usage.

I guess 5% to 1% is great for you, but to me such gains aren't worth putting up with quicktime. Especially since Apple keeps trying to sneak in itunes along with it. Anyone remember itunes causing BSODs? http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=543

I don't recall Adobe ever bugging me and suggesting I get "Flash Player Pro" when I try to play flash movies.

Adobe is bad, but Apple has a worse track record.

I sure hope someone comes up with a decent alternative when flash player gets as crap as adobe acrobat reader, but quicktime isn't a decent alternative to me.

I don't think I'm trolling, so I guess you can call me an idiot, which is fine with me as long as I don't have to use quicktime.

Android makes impressive gains in Q4

They went from 1% to 16% in a year.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-15BuffaloPR.mspx

http://www.pcworld.com/article/132893/microsoft_linspire_sign_linux_patent_deal.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3373

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400435

Why not just hear it from the horse's mouth?

From http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2941

Why Safari? Why didn’t you go after IE or Safari?

It’s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don’t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don’t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you’d find in Windows.

It’s more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn’t have anti-exploit stuff built into it.

With my Safari exploit, I put the code into a process and I know exactly where it’s going to be. There’s no randomization. I know when I jump there, the code is there and I can execute it there. On Windows, the code might show up but I don’t know where it is. Even if I get to the code, it’s not executable. Those are two hurdles that Macs don’t have.

It’s clear that all three browsers (Safari, IE and Firefox) have bugs. Code execution holes everywhere. But that’s only half the equation. The other half is exploiting it. There’s almost no hurdle to jump through on Mac OS X.

The same people wrote 64bit Windows.

And a similar kind of people wrote, reviewed and audited Linux.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-332141.html

Linux has it's own version of such bugs. Yes, even with the 'many eyes' looking at the source, it does happen, F/OSS is no panacea.

From http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-332141.html

A hole has been found in Linux kernel versions stretching back eight years that is 'as trivial as it can get to exploit', according to the Google employees who discovered it.

Julien Tinnes and Tavis Ormandy, the security researchers who discovered the vulnerability, have already issued a patch for the flaw. According to a blog post written by Tinnes on Thursday, the hole "affects all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures", and is "the public vulnerability affecting the greatest number of kernel versions".

Eight year is a pretty 'good' record, but Windows still wins by 7 more (NT3.5 released in 1994, more or less the time of release of Linux 1.0). Also notice that then Linux bug was fixed almost contextually with its report, whereas the one this article is about has not not been fixed 6 months+ after the report was acknowledged. This is where open source wins.

Yea such exploits do not happen in Linux.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-332141.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/21/massive_debian_openssl_hangover/

Linux has it's own version of such bugs. Yes, even with the 'many eyes' looking at the source, it does happen, F/OSS is no panacea.

From http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-332141.html

A hole has been found in Linux kernel versions stretching back eight years that is 'as trivial as it can get to exploit', according to the Google employees who discovered it.

Julien Tinnes and Tavis Ormandy, the security researchers who discovered the vulnerability, have already issued a patch for the flaw. According to a blog post written by Tinnes on Thursday, the hole "affects all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures", and is "the public vulnerability affecting the greatest number of kernel versions".

The only one i remember is the Intel Compiler optimizations only working on Intel CPU's..

Such as doing some math tasks via MMX - even though AMD's had MMX the compiler wouldn't put in the optimizations unless the CPU was identified as Intel.

People got pissed because Intel's compiler was the defacto default for a alot of people - but if you think about it - why should they be responsiable for optimizing a compiler for a competitors CPU? and dealing with all the bug checkking that has to go into it.

Say they had allowed it to do the optimization and AMD's cpu had an erata that caused it to fail and crash the program because of the optimization - people would be pointing the finger at Intel's compiler..

honestly i would have done what they did - and say screw it - if they want optimizations they can release their own compiler.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1567108/intel-compiler-cripples-code-amd-via-chips

then you have to look at stuff like this

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=518

the marketing racket they had with dell - yea that was wrong - but leave their compiler out of it - AMD should release their own if they want optimizations.

• http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=1799
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1184550/GPS-satellite-close-breakdown-fail-2010--leading-motorists-straight-trouble.html
• http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/05/18/daily24.html
• http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/gps-satellites-to-start-failing-next-year/

Considering most of these articles were on slashdot before, you don't have much of an excuse.

Those do exist. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=813

Saw a few of these advertised in the travel rag (can't remember the name of it for the life of me) that sits in the airplane seats. Not as common as they should be, but you can buy them.

That doesn't make MySQL a good example of FOSS and large corporations. Sun acquired the copyright, but since the license is GPL, Sun/Oracle cannot eliminate the open source version -- they can only compete with it. (How different is that, really, than before?)

What is happening with FOSS in huge corporations?
Firefox, mozilla.org, and Google - seem like a fairly successful combination, maybe not the leading browser today, but the browser marketplace is much, much healthier now than when IE6 was released. I think Firefox played a huge role in the changing browser market.

Google's other FOSS products - I think Google is trying too hard. They're playing with fire like mobile devices, which does benefit search (their main engine of profit) but puts them in really hard situations, like trying to create an open handset but still be friends with the mobile industry (who react to openness like it is deadly poison). They're following Apple here - who uses OS X on the iPhone and the desktop, and Google has a long way to go to catch up. TFA says Google is sinking their hooks into Android, but paradoxically, that should be impossible with a truly open platform. Yes, Google doesn't want you to root your phone - but the ability to hack a device when you have total control over it has proven to be doable despite Apple's much greater efforts. I don't think Google will go anywhere near Apple's penchant for lock-down.

IBM - IBM may have a better big business approach to FOSS: they jumped right in with a business model that applied open source software to increase their capabilities, but they keep a tight grip on their profit centers. They are a huge help with the threat of Patent wars, but they are doing so from the brilliant position of leveraging their profitable patents to help open source. At the end of the day, IBM keeps their patents, and open source keeps its source code. Only Microsoft loses.

Sun's other FOSS products - Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox are all very important open source products. What will happen to them? If Oracle finishes gobbling Sun up and they languish, does that mean GPL software is incompatible with big business? This hypothetical situation is not very likely, IMO. Oracle's not going to destroy value.

Well, maybe I'm wrong on that one. Maybe Sun and Oracle (and Monty too) will end up destroying something valuable. I think that's a reasonable conclusion:

Monty sold MySQL to Sun -- probably not thinking long term -- and Sun snatched MySQL up for a huge sum -- probably not thinking long term -- and now Sun is on the ropes, and Oracle is trying to buy what's left of it before all the customers slip away. Is Oracle thinking long term? Personally, I doubt it. They're probably maximizing shareholder value in the next 6 months. The values that made MySQL -- the community esprit de corps -- is being destroyed, but Oracle might end up owning the Sun logo (ooh, shiny) by the end of the year. Overall, value gets destroyed by shareholder shenanigans.

I'm just restating poorly what Dana Blankenhorn says. (He's the inspiration for TFA.)

This wouldn't be the first time sociopathic CxO's driven wild with greed ignored the community and got wiped out. Capitalism works poorly, but it still seems to be working. Don't blame Open Source for Big Business's biggest problems!

or save straight to PDF from my OpenOffice Writer,

You know, you can do that with Office 2007 as well, by downloading a plugin.

That plugin was originally built in to Office, but Adobe threatened to file anti-trust complaints over it (yes, Adobe threatened to file an anti-trust suit over what is now a published ISO standard. I'm not making that last bit up).

Read again , for the US it is only 1.2 trillion, or more like 2% GDP which isn't too far off when I could all the loss of time my colleague and me get with POS windows software breaking down. WORLD is 6.2 trillion USA 1.2 trillion

in 1987 by North Korean agents, so liquid explosives do actually present a potential threat.

Some more information about liquid explosives:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-149180.html/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858/

Re Tor: written a few years ago, but gives most readers an idea of how Tor works and can be tracked
"High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity"
http://cryptogon.com/?p=624
As for tracking scripts see this post :) :
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12691-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31021&messageID=574848&start=-1

The patent in question.. Decide for yourselves.

Movies are sent in a red Netflix envelope. There is a perforated piece of paper with your address which covers one side of the envelope (it covers the side with Netflix's return shipping address--the envelope you receive is the envelope you ship it back in.)

The movie itself is in a sleeve inside the envelope. The sleeve contains the movie, a description, and a barcode. A correctly inserted movie will only have the barcode revealed through a little window, presumably to make processing easier at the shipment facilities.

See:
http://blogs.courierpostonline.com/mojodojo/files/2009/03/netflix-1.jpg

http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/netflixenvelope.jpg

And don't forget Sarah Palin herself tried to circumvent archiving laws by doing business from a personal email account with yahoo

.