A little mercury released over the volume of 1 room is more of an issue to you than much more mercury spread over half a river. Getting a face-full of mercury is an issue, having much more mercury spread over an immensely larger area of environment is not as big an issue (for hypothetical you, with a broken bulb). So it is an issue, (if you're idiot enough to break one).
Then no doubt you'll have some cretin child break a bunch of bulbs and be exposed to hazardous mercury levels. Cue: think of the children, bad publicity, people staying with incandescents (or getting something else entirely), and the whole panic...
How effing lazy are you Americans (or how lazy do your omnipotent corporate overlords think that you are)? How difficult is it to pick up the remote and press a button upon entry of the room in order to trigger an event? Do you need technology to pre-empt and fulfil your every intent?
This is almost an insult to the customers (spoon-fed consumers), who are perfectly capable of changing the channel/customisations when and if they see fit.
If the ads get more insidious, the ad-blockers will get better... Within a few days (ish) of the introduction of such a "feature", the geek forums and technically-minded sites would be swarming with ways of blocking/limiting most of the ads or limiting the targetability. Then an effective block will get be written into an ff extension and dumped on mozilla (or merged with adblock+ or some other adblocking ff extension) and the problem (for the tech-savvy) is gone (for a while). Leaving Joe & Co. (the real user base), free to point their internet exploders elsewhere and/or complain about the shitty adverts being sprayed all over the videos people being imbeciles on camera... Ultimately harming the less-savvy users and eventually the corporation.
Google would have to be either have to be stupid or very greedy (charging advertisers the earth) to implement such a thing.
That is to stop the CPU chip from permanently destroying itself by overheating (which it would do within seconds if the heat sink was removed, it could last a few minutes without a fan). It will not affect the heat production of the rest of the system (PSU, motherboard chipsets, drives, etc.) Furthermore, the performance drop when CPUs do this is so horrific you would do better to pull the plug on the machine, that way there a much more significant heat production drop. Turning off a section of your machines is better than having them all/more of them effectively hung, and still producing heat...
While MOND may or may not be a valid possibility, it is worth someone following up on it in case it turns out to have some validity. As for missing matter, I am often amused by the inferance that it is some kind of über-special new matter (ocaisionally characterised by ridiculous fictional particles: eg. MACHOS, WIMPS, google them). Neutrinos, underestimations of the amount of inobservable gas/plasma between stars, bodies which don't radiate and aren't visible (not just black holes), can all (help to) account for missing mass. The search for drak matter seems to be a search for the least intuitive, most bizarre method of accounting for things that we can't see. (A bit like string theory in effect...) But I daresay if all of the string theory constants get eventually tweaked, it might be useful...
Straying into the debatable zone, any miniscule variations in the charge distributions of gas/plasma clouds will cause EM forces to become involved, which may also help to account for the discrepancy. Across such vast distances, involving vast amounts of matter, assuming absolutely perfect and total charge distribution seems slightly naïve to me, particularly as plasma streams such as the solar wind are known to be charged, and the solar wind has been measured as such.
If I remember correctly certain fungal toxins cause temperature inversion... I don't know about a feeling of loose teeth though. In general with fungals its some combination of nausea, dehydration, convulsions, vomiting, delirium, thirst, coma in some cases, etc. etc. and/or death if untreated, in 8-24 hours...
I daresay that when/if ICANN develops a systm for unicode domain names, they/someone else will also develop a system for typing them using a US accentless keyboard. ie. (this is a random address) spis-mer-kjøttkake.no --> spis-mer-kj%00F8ttkake.no or something... No doubt the different browsers will have their own (mutually incompatible) methods for inserting URL characters in odd scripts if required and for pointing out obvious scam accent/charset domain names, ie. ggle.com (the os are 0x043E Cyrillic...) So a change such as this will not result in the end of the internet, and will (hopefully) actually allow us to access sites using different charset domain names, which are currently hosted off of non-compliant DNS nameservers, and hence not really accessible.
Multicast in in current form will simply not work on the global internet. Period. It requires that routers store lots of state information for each route, which is not viable in a mesh layout, and multicast addresses (in IPv4) are a limited number of (class D?) addresses. IP multicast is only useful for local LANs/private networks in its current form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multicast
Systems like X-Cast look more tenable for the public internet too me. (Info is spread thinly, use google). In this sort of scheme the list of destination is encoded as unicast addresses within the packet header, and routers replicate the packet when there is a fork in the routing for the destinations.
"this appears to confirm the Electric Universe hypothesis that comets are not sublimating dirty snowballs, but rather electrical phenomenon."
Why mod you down when I can point you here? [wikipedia.org]
The article neither proves nor disproves either theory. What isn't mentioned in that wikipedia article is the arc between the probe and the comet just before impact. If you think about it, the comet is passing through a charged region of space (solar wind), hence it will be equalise potential to the surrounding plasma. Hence as a probe with a different potential approaches (similar to that of the Earth), an arc discharges between the two. The comet is an electrical phenomenom in exactly the same sense that anything else in the (charged) solar wind is. (It's gets more interesting as the comet moves closer and further away from the sun, etc. but that's another issue).
As for being sublimating snowballs, etc. other texts I have read about that space mission indicated virtually no ice at all. It would make some sense, why would cold ice emit a X-rays as comets do (look it up, if you don't believe me).
I've always found the dirty snowball theory amusing, but that is just me.
As for the EU theory in general, while there are many crackpots and imbeciles who act as you suggest, I have yet to the scientists who know what they are talking about refuses quantisisation of the EU or the relate theories.
Magnetic reconnection does not exist and does not explain why the corona is hotter than than the sun's lower level (photosphere? I forget). The explanation is indeed due to the electromagnetic nature of plasma, and the large potential differences and EM fields around the sun. However this is no need to gratuitously break several laws of physics by implying that field lines actually exist (they don't, they only represent the direction of a continuous unbreakable field), and that these so called lines can break and then reconnect, which is complete BS. A magnetic field is a continuous force field created about the motion of moving charge, not some open-ended spaghetti.
If magnetic field lines can break, then you'd better throw Maxwell, Einstein, Gauss, and a whole bunch of other scientists' work into the bin...
I've read Donald Scott's book the Electric Sky, and nowhere does it state or imply the existence. of magnetic field breakage or reconnection. (That book also gives a good, reasonable explanation of what is going on, using simple plasma dynamics). I don't have the book with me (not mine), and I don't remember the details well enough to post them on/. (haven't read it for ages).
Web 2.0 is just another meaningless marketing term to describe a bunch of seemingly wonderful javascript, blog and wiki, pages, invented by redundant, marketing imbeciles, in order to hoodwink incompetent.com "company" managers.
Anybody who declares their page as Web 3.0, (or even Web 2.0, for that matter), should have their page DRDoSd off of the internet. >:(
Especially as these so called Web 2.0 pages are simply over-bloated, badly-designed, poorly-laid-out, standards-incompliant, overrated, over-hyped, excessively-resource-intensive, specimens of electronic refuse, often totally devoid of useful content, and consisting of enough images and poorly written code to electrically power a small town.
Note how people who run frugal and efficient blogs, ajax pages, etc. NEVER refer to their page as Web 2.0, they are too wise to demean themselves so.
For the sake of the internet, web designers, please don't either copy these "sites", or pay art drop-outs to design your website, as doing so, will lead to the spread of this miasmic "Web 2.0", clogging up our screens and the networks with redundant and meaningless trifle.
The meteorite doesn't have to be hot to throw a lot of debris and water vapour up into the air. The meteorite presumably has a significant (relatively speaking) mass and relative velocity to make such a large crater. As the kinetic energy of such a collision is equal to 0.5mv^2, a large v will cause a significant energy transfer upon impact. Much of this goes into tossing debris (including water with arsenic) into the air, and some localised heating, (along with noise, ground tremors, deformations, etc.). Water thrown into the air and perhaps partially heated, may have a tendency to evaporate/vaporise, along with the constituent arsenic, which presumably in hydrated ion form, will quite happily be suspended in any water droplets in the air. So that when all the folks from nearby rush in and start hyperventilating when they see the hole, they breath in some arsenic contaminated vapour, which then ends up getting into their lungs and bloodstream, and playing havoc with their internal bits...
Just my extrapolated reading of TFA, + common sense.
That's probably because the arsenic is already in the ground in the first place, makes sense really... Water can leech it up as well as digging machines.
The Win9x OSs will do better on the web, simply because nobody targets them anymore.
I would take any NT based OS over a Win9x anyday, simply because of the screwed up memory architecture. In effect MS implemented the win9xs upside-down, with the 32 bit layer on top, the 16-bit layer in the middle, and DOS at the bottom. This throws in all sorts of arbitrary resource limitations, and performance issues, when using 32-bit apps. As they have to thunk down to a 16-bit segmented layer to get anything done, which meant that really you were running an extended windows 3.1. Whereas in WinNT both the DOS and 16-bit layers go away, and reappear as sensibly contained virtual-mode/emulated subsystems. Which means that the 32-bit layer can just sit on the hardware, without having to tortuously filter down through legacy holdovers. (There are problems in winxp as well, but in general you have to try quite hard, or install 3rd party shit drivers to actually crash the machine to a blue screen, I haven't seen one for about a year, when I installed some crap nVidia northbridge drivers, which required a reinstallation of windows:( )
Further-more in win98, badly written apps (not even drivers) could crash the OS completely.
I once made an error in a user-mode 32-bit app I was writing, stack underflow, win98: BSOD, winxp: a little box telling you how your program failed to comply with the rules. Once I even managed to crash/hang a win98 box to a black screen by (accidentally) not saving edi in a window procedure. XP couldn't care less.
I know what I'm talking about here, my Mother, to this day, runs Win98 on her desktop, and XP on her laptop. ---
As for internet security, XP is really OK if you just turn off DCOM, half of the services, and install a competent firewall (ZoneAlarm), I don't even run antivirus on this (winxp) box. (Although I do have dozens of utilities, ie. Process Explorer, rootkit revealer, advanced process termination, etc., to spot and delete any suspiciousness if I notice that something has managed to get on; nothing has ever got on this box since I inherited it 1.5 years ago).
--
Note, I am not an M$ fanboy. This box is a dual-boot/colinux combo with Slackware 12.0...
It can't be that hard to send an automated email to a certain address on boot with the IP or to just make a certain request to a server, which will then log the IP, from the init/boot scripts. If you have a connected desktop as well, even something like ping, netcat, etc. to that machine, could be used. There are plenty of command-line programs which will send an email (via online servers, etc.). This could be done via a bash or perl script. Linux/BSD/Unixy OSs are setup to allow this sort of simple scriptable configuration...
The only snag is if they just boot off of a CD and wipe the hard-drive:/, but that's not very likely, knowing the relative tech skills of your average gun-toting thief...
Skype itself is (mostly) blameless, how can they be expected to protect users from this sort of attack (perhaps by pointing out to users that the link/download they're clicking on is a screensaver exe..., but Windows ought to tell you that anyway...) Naming it a worm is a minor overstatement as well. It propagates by user incompetence, not by a technical flaw...
These sort of malware executables circulate on email lists (and I daresay, other IM networks) already, so it's no surprise that Skype has "joined the club" of being big enough to attract unwanted attention...
Even if every single technically-aware firefox user blocked all ads forever more, the revenue decrease by ad corporations/websites would not be catastrophic. Who clicks ads the most anyway: clueless, naïve or foolish IE users. As about 80% (69% of statistics are made up on the spot) of the internet falls into this category and will keep on clicking on ads regardless of common sense, and these are the vast majority ad revenue source anyway, where is the problem. The IE folks can view and click the ads, the FF/tech crowd can block them, and the ads/websites get the (not especially reduced) revenue from the clicks of the former group...
Just about the only operation blocked is network share authentication, and that is easy to enable with no password (Local Security Policies...).
IMO There is absolutely no point in having a login password for stand-alone machines as it is TRIVIAL to bypass with something as easy as a boot CD/floppy that just resets the passwords, as long as you have physical access to the box, (or just yank out the hard drive and remount somewhere else). Passwords are only really useful for network-type arrangements or full-disk encryption if you're especially paranoid...
Story is irrelevant, and the title is a contradiction. It's hardly "underground" if it's on/. and every man and his dog can read all about it. This story sounds like a gaggle of teenage Wow/second life-types plotting little games from their mums' basements...
Slashdot Mirror
A little mercury released over the volume of 1 room is more of an issue to you than much more mercury spread over half a river.
Getting a face-full of mercury is an issue, having much more mercury spread over an immensely larger area of environment is not as big an issue (for hypothetical you, with a broken bulb).
So it is an issue, (if you're idiot enough to break one).
Then no doubt you'll have some cretin child break a bunch of bulbs and be exposed to hazardous mercury levels.
Cue: think of the children, bad publicity, people staying with incandescents (or getting something else entirely), and the whole panic...
How effing lazy are you Americans (or how lazy do your omnipotent corporate overlords think that you are)?
How difficult is it to pick up the remote and press a button upon entry of the room in order to trigger an event?
Do you need technology to pre-empt and fulfil your every intent?
This is almost an insult to the customers (spoon-fed consumers), who are perfectly capable of changing the channel/customisations when and if they see fit.
If the ads get more insidious, the ad-blockers will get better...
Within a few days (ish) of the introduction of such a "feature", the geek forums and technically-minded sites would be swarming with ways of blocking/limiting most of the ads or limiting the targetability.
Then an effective block will get be written into an ff extension and dumped on mozilla (or merged with adblock+ or some other adblocking ff extension) and the problem (for the tech-savvy) is gone (for a while).
Leaving Joe & Co. (the real user base), free to point their internet exploders elsewhere and/or complain about the shitty adverts being sprayed all over the videos people being imbeciles on camera...
Ultimately harming the less-savvy users and eventually the corporation.
Google would have to be either have to be stupid or very greedy (charging advertisers the earth) to implement such a thing.
IE8 appears to be basic...
That is to stop the CPU chip from permanently destroying itself by overheating (which it would do within seconds if the heat sink was removed, it could last a few minutes without a fan).
It will not affect the heat production of the rest of the system (PSU, motherboard chipsets, drives, etc.)
Furthermore, the performance drop when CPUs do this is so horrific you would do better to pull the plug on the machine, that way there a much more significant heat production drop.
Turning off a section of your machines is better than having them all/more of them effectively hung, and still producing heat...
While MOND may or may not be a valid possibility, it is worth someone following up on it in case it turns out to have some validity.
As for missing matter, I am often amused by the inferance that it is some kind of über-special new matter (ocaisionally characterised by ridiculous fictional particles: eg. MACHOS, WIMPS, google them).
Neutrinos, underestimations of the amount of inobservable gas/plasma between stars, bodies which don't radiate and aren't visible (not just black holes), can all (help to) account for missing mass.
The search for drak matter seems to be a search for the least intuitive, most bizarre method of accounting for things that we can't see. (A bit like string theory in effect...)
But I daresay if all of the string theory constants get eventually tweaked, it might be useful...
Straying into the debatable zone, any miniscule variations in the charge distributions of gas/plasma clouds will cause EM forces to become involved, which may also help to account for the discrepancy.
Across such vast distances, involving vast amounts of matter, assuming absolutely perfect and total charge distribution seems slightly naïve to me, particularly as plasma streams such as the solar wind are known to be charged, and the solar wind has been measured as such.
Dzhugashvili, wasn't that the surname of Josef Stalin?
I used to live there, that is one of the things I was referring to...
Like all laws in Italy which are unpopular and/or unenforceable they will be totally ignored by law-enforcement and people alike...
Although I'd be surprised if this law makes it through parliament without being heavily diluted, or at all...
2000 gone, another 8000 to go...
Keep up the good work!
If I remember correctly certain fungal toxins cause temperature inversion...
:)
I don't know about a feeling of loose teeth though.
In general with fungals its some combination of nausea, dehydration, convulsions, vomiting, delirium, thirst, coma in some cases, etc. etc. and/or death if untreated, in 8-24 hours...
Isn't nature great
I daresay that when/if ICANN develops a systm for unicode domain names, they/someone else will also develop a system for typing them using a US accentless keyboard.
ie. (this is a random address) spis-mer-kjøttkake.no --> spis-mer-kj%00F8ttkake.no or something...
No doubt the different browsers will have their own (mutually incompatible) methods for inserting URL characters in odd scripts if required and for pointing out obvious scam accent/charset domain names, ie. ggle.com (the os are 0x043E Cyrillic...)
So a change such as this will not result in the end of the internet, and will (hopefully) actually allow us to access sites using different charset domain names, which are currently hosted off of non-compliant DNS nameservers, and hence not really accessible.
Multicast in in current form will simply not work on the global internet. Period.
It requires that routers store lots of state information for each route, which is not viable in a mesh layout, and multicast addresses (in IPv4) are a limited number of (class D?) addresses. IP multicast is only useful for local LANs/private networks in its current form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multicast
Systems like X-Cast look more tenable for the public internet too me.
(Info is spread thinly, use google).
In this sort of scheme the list of destination is encoded as unicast addresses within the packet header, and routers replicate the packet when there is a fork in the routing for the destinations.
"this appears to confirm the Electric Universe hypothesis that comets are not sublimating dirty snowballs, but rather electrical phenomenon."
Why mod you down when I can point you here? [wikipedia.org]
The article neither proves nor disproves either theory.
What isn't mentioned in that wikipedia article is the arc between the probe and the comet just before impact.
If you think about it, the comet is passing through a charged region of space (solar wind), hence it will be equalise potential to the surrounding plasma. Hence as a probe with a different potential approaches (similar to that of the Earth), an arc discharges between the two.
The comet is an electrical phenomenom in exactly the same sense that anything else in the (charged) solar wind is.
(It's gets more interesting as the comet moves closer and further away from the sun, etc. but that's another issue).
As for being sublimating snowballs, etc. other texts I have read about that space mission indicated virtually no ice at all. It would make some sense, why would cold ice emit a X-rays as comets do (look it up, if you don't believe me).
I've always found the dirty snowball theory amusing, but that is just me.
As for the EU theory in general, while there are many crackpots and imbeciles who act as you suggest, I have yet to the scientists who know what they are talking about refuses quantisisation of the EU or the relate theories.
Magnetic reconnection does not exist and does not explain why the corona is hotter than than the sun's lower level (photosphere? I forget).
/. (haven't read it for ages).
The explanation is indeed due to the electromagnetic nature of plasma, and the large potential differences and EM fields around the sun. However this is no need to gratuitously break several laws of physics by implying that field lines actually exist (they don't, they only represent the direction of a continuous unbreakable field), and that these so called lines can break and then reconnect, which is complete BS. A magnetic field is a continuous force field created about the motion of moving charge, not some open-ended spaghetti.
If magnetic field lines can break, then you'd better throw Maxwell, Einstein, Gauss, and a whole bunch of other scientists' work into the bin...
I've read Donald Scott's book the Electric Sky, and nowhere does it state or imply the existence. of magnetic field breakage or reconnection. (That book also gives a good, reasonable explanation of what is going on, using simple plasma dynamics).
I don't have the book with me (not mine), and I don't remember the details well enough to post them on
It sounds to me like they mean:
The read latency of the quantum receiver is/will be too high.
Hence throughput speeds will be limited.
Therefore someone should find a way to reduce this latency, such that transmission speeds can be increased.
Bah, humbug!
.com "company" managers.
Web 2.0 is just another meaningless marketing term to describe a bunch of seemingly wonderful javascript, blog and wiki, pages, invented by redundant, marketing imbeciles, in order to hoodwink incompetent
Anybody who declares their page as Web 3.0, (or even Web 2.0, for that matter), should have their page DRDoSd off of the internet. >:(
Especially as these so called Web 2.0 pages are simply over-bloated, badly-designed, poorly-laid-out, standards-incompliant, overrated, over-hyped, excessively-resource-intensive, specimens of electronic refuse, often totally devoid of useful content, and consisting of enough images and poorly written code to electrically power a small town.
Note how people who run frugal and efficient blogs, ajax pages, etc. NEVER refer to their page as Web 2.0, they are too wise to demean themselves so.
For the sake of the internet, web designers, please don't either copy these "sites", or pay art drop-outs to design your website, as doing so, will lead to the spread of this miasmic "Web 2.0", clogging up our screens and the networks with redundant and meaningless trifle.
The meteorite doesn't have to be hot to throw a lot of debris and water vapour up into the air.
The meteorite presumably has a significant (relatively speaking) mass and relative velocity to make such a large crater. As the kinetic energy of such a collision is equal to 0.5mv^2, a large v will cause a significant energy transfer upon impact. Much of this goes into tossing debris (including water with arsenic) into the air, and some localised heating, (along with noise, ground tremors, deformations, etc.).
Water thrown into the air and perhaps partially heated, may have a tendency to evaporate/vaporise, along with the constituent arsenic, which presumably in hydrated ion form, will quite happily be suspended in any water droplets in the air.
So that when all the folks from nearby rush in and start hyperventilating when they see the hole, they breath in some arsenic contaminated vapour, which then ends up getting into their lungs and bloodstream, and playing havoc with their internal bits...
Just my extrapolated reading of TFA, + common sense.
That's probably because the arsenic is already in the ground in the first place, makes sense really...
Water can leech it up as well as digging machines.
The Win9x OSs will do better on the web, simply because nobody targets them anymore.
:( )
I would take any NT based OS over a Win9x anyday, simply because of the screwed up memory architecture.
In effect MS implemented the win9xs upside-down, with the 32 bit layer on top, the 16-bit layer in the middle, and DOS at the bottom. This throws in all sorts of arbitrary resource limitations, and performance issues, when using 32-bit apps. As they have to thunk down to a 16-bit segmented layer to get anything done, which meant that really you were running an extended windows 3.1.
Whereas in WinNT both the DOS and 16-bit layers go away, and reappear as sensibly contained virtual-mode/emulated subsystems. Which means that the 32-bit layer can just sit on the hardware, without having to tortuously filter down through legacy holdovers. (There are problems in winxp as well, but in general you have to try quite hard, or install 3rd party shit drivers to actually crash the machine to a blue screen, I haven't seen one for about a year, when I installed some crap nVidia northbridge drivers, which required a reinstallation of windows
Further-more in win98, badly written apps (not even drivers) could crash the OS completely.
I once made an error in a user-mode 32-bit app I was writing, stack underflow, win98: BSOD, winxp: a little box telling you how your program failed to comply with the rules. Once I even managed to crash/hang a win98 box to a black screen by (accidentally) not saving edi in a window procedure. XP couldn't care less.
I know what I'm talking about here, my Mother, to this day, runs Win98 on her desktop, and XP on her laptop.
---
As for internet security, XP is really OK if you just turn off DCOM, half of the services, and install a competent firewall (ZoneAlarm), I don't even run antivirus on this (winxp) box. (Although I do have dozens of utilities, ie. Process Explorer, rootkit revealer, advanced process termination, etc., to spot and delete any suspiciousness if I notice that something has managed to get on; nothing has ever got on this box since I inherited it 1.5 years ago).
--
Note, I am not an M$ fanboy.
This box is a dual-boot/colinux combo with Slackware 12.0...
It can't be that hard to send an automated email to a certain address on boot with the IP or to just make a certain request to a server, which will then log the IP, from the init/boot scripts.
:/, but that's not very likely, knowing the relative tech skills of your average gun-toting thief...
If you have a connected desktop as well, even something like ping, netcat, etc. to that machine, could be used.
There are plenty of command-line programs which will send an email (via online servers, etc.).
This could be done via a bash or perl script.
Linux/BSD/Unixy OSs are setup to allow this sort of simple scriptable configuration...
The only snag is if they just boot off of a CD and wipe the hard-drive
BIOS trackers anyone?
Skype itself is (mostly) blameless, how can they be expected to protect users from this sort of attack (perhaps by pointing out to users that the link/download they're clicking on is a screensaver exe..., but Windows ought to tell you that anyway...)
Naming it a worm is a minor overstatement as well.
It propagates by user incompetence, not by a technical flaw...
These sort of malware executables circulate on email lists (and I daresay, other IM networks) already, so it's no surprise that Skype has "joined the club" of being big enough to attract unwanted attention...
Even if every single technically-aware firefox user blocked all ads forever more, the revenue decrease by ad corporations/websites would not be catastrophic.
:) )...
Who clicks ads the most anyway: clueless, naïve or foolish IE users. As about 80% (69% of statistics are made up on the spot) of the internet falls into this category and will keep on clicking on ads regardless of common sense, and these are the vast majority ad revenue source anyway, where is the problem.
The IE folks can view and click the ads, the FF/tech crowd can block them, and the ads/websites get the (not especially reduced) revenue from the clicks of the former group...
Everybody wins (especially us
Just about the only operation blocked is network share authentication, and that is easy to enable with no password (Local Security Policies...).
IMO There is absolutely no point in having a login password for stand-alone machines as it is TRIVIAL to bypass with something as easy as a boot CD/floppy that just resets the passwords, as long as you have physical access to the box, (or just yank out the hard drive and remount somewhere else).
Passwords are only really useful for network-type arrangements or full-disk encryption if you're especially paranoid...
Story is irrelevant, and the title is a contradiction. /. and every man and his dog can read all about it.
It's hardly "underground" if it's on
This story sounds like a gaggle of teenage Wow/second life-types plotting little games from their mums' basements...
Hardly: "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"