The Nokia hack seems pretty legit from what I've heard. It's not quite the kind of deal that would be repeatedly mentioned in your average newspaper, so that might explain the lack of follow-up coverage.
Considering the requirement of secrecy in voting, it's almost impossible to build a secure yet useable online solution for it. A member of the mob (or spouse) could always be standing behind you to make sure you're doing it right. What might work could be a platform you can define (and change) your vote at any time leading up to a deadline and the selection is cast for all users at this deadline. This would require one person to make sure each vote's cast to the right candidate. (After the deadline, your selection wouldn't be displayed anymore). Still leaves the gap of selling your password to the highest bidder open.
Maybe a wide-angle webcam to which you show a form of picture identification, with face recognition software to check if you're who the id says you are. Unfortunately we don't have the face recognition software to do that (that's okay, replace it with a human operator); faking an id for webcam quality is trivial (welcome; national databases of piccies and finger prints) and again; your mob friend may be watching on the second screen out of the cam's angle.
Bleh. Let's try one more: Screw (online) voting and elect me as your supreme dictator for life, puny peoples of this world. This solves all problems. yes. >.<
There's a solution to the problem you described, called mTAN (Mobile Transaction Authorization Number):
You register your mobile number with your bank. Whenver you're making a transaction, the bank texts you the confirmation key plus the target account number and/or amount you're transferring. If everything seems kosher, you type in the confirmation key (only valid for this specific transaction) and are good to go.
There's three main attack vectors:
Attacker changes stored cell # to his; extends your MITM scheme to include sending forged confirmation keys via his own SMS gateway. Difficult if the cell # can't be changed online but only by writing with your signature. Also requires somewhat local (same country) presence to not appear too fishy. Attacker is visible to the bank and traceable.
Attacker listens to your incoming SMS and confirms the transaction. This will get the victim suspicious pretty quickly, but one or two transactions might get through. Requires very local presence (eavesdropping on your GSM or the cell's uplink connection). A variant of this; using old Nokia 1100s (which can be duped into logging on as any cell #) is pretty popular right now.
Attacker gets his hand on your cell and perhaps even the ebanking password. All two-factor authentication/authorization schemes have the same troubles with that.
First of all, as Penguinoflight already said, a power supply's efficiency per power drawn would look somewhat like a (ideally very wide, steep-sided and flat-topped) bell curve. Drawing 400 W from a 700 W PSU might draw 450-500 W (80-90% efficiency) from the grid; a 400 or 450 W unit near it's peak would probably drop in efficiency, drawing more like 550 W or so.
Moving on, the more high-performance hardware in a PC, the wider it's power draw will vary. If you've got one (standard) CPU, one (standard) GPU, one hard drive and an optical drive (plus the obvious rest), you may get an idle power draw around 150 W or so. Having the *PUs peak and both drives spin up at the same time might increase the power draw to 200, 250 W tops.
In a more high-end gaming rig you may find two quad-core CPUs, two GPUs, one or two optical drives plus a few (one to three) system drives (SSD, 10k RPM hds) plus several (two to many) storage drives (5.4-7.2k RPM hds). Idling along, this may draw some 250 W or so. Peak draw is more tricky here, though. Most of the hardware will put itself into low power modes when unused (drives spin down; CPUs and GPUs move to a lower clock/voltage state). As soon as there's some processing load, it'll all start sucking power like a black hole would suck footballs through a gardening hose. Full load power draw can easily be triple that of the box sitting idle.
The key is as much of the components spending as much time as possible in the deepest sleep (and power saving) states whenever possible. A quad-core 3 GHz proc and max draw of 100 W may be more efficient than a low-power single-core 1.5 GHz with 20 W max draw; assuming deep sleep at 1 W: The latter may spend, for example, 8 seconds out of 10 processing a given task and spend only 2 s in sleep (8 s * 20 W = 160 Ws + 2 s * 1 W = 162 Ws) while the former would finish in a second, then sleep (1 s * 100 W = 100 Ws + 9 s * 1 W = 109 Ws).
You seem to have never used any recent small-screen device's (Android, Opera Mobile, iPhone) browser. Web sites will generally be rendered like they would using an average desktop resolution, then scaled down to fit the smaller screen. Zooming in/out will zoom in on any part of the page, treating it like a picture. See this for a demo.
Predictable as a swiss clockwork, that's how I likes me my fanboys.
Anyhow, back to the topic at hand:
The Xperia is newer than the TX, but there have been a few others similar to it before. Think HTC TyTn (II); the 8000 series Blackberries. Most of them lacked something or another, but they will at least predate the iPhone.
The hardware is, in my opinion, great. I got mine a few days after release and, spending my time in the local army ever since, gave it constant abuse from day one. It hasn't complained.
Performance-wise, it's the most responsive Windows Mobile device I've had the pleasure of using. Just that, no more but no less either. The display is sharper than any display I've seen before. 800 Pixels width packed in less than 7 cm, what's there to say?
Software selection is great. After a few hours of messing around, it runs HTC's TouchFlo 3D (latest version) plus it's original Panel interface. The Browser (Opera Mobile, not Mini as I'm guessing you're running) is great. There's lots of apps available, many of them free and a lot of the others are worth their price.
Something I do take exception with: that Palms were never cool.
They weren't. The features you listed are cool to the crowd who reads slashdot, writes programs, manages networks and plays around with arduinos in their spare time. That's an entire demographic built right around not being cool.
The cool I'm talking about is the one made up from opinions by people who mistake the intertubes for a big truck and are responsible for Yahoo being #2 and Slashdot being #2006 on Alexa; the kind of people who will install the Alexa toolbar. That kind of "cool"; the general public's; just doesn't involve "geeky".
Looking forward to all the hate I'll be getting for this, but:
I own a Sony Ericsson Xperia. It does almost everything you'd get in an iPhone (calling, messaging, browsing the web, Google Maps, listening to music, watching movies,...), a Pre (multitasking, slide-out keyboard, facebook integration), a "classic" Palm (all the PIM you'll ever need, bluetooth keyboards) or a G1 (running lots of apps from unsigned sources, if you tell it to) and more.
It runs Windows mobile.
Devices similar to it have been around quite a bit longer than first-generation iPhones. Just like most any palm, they've never been cool, though. So even if Palm would've gotten out a TX cell, it's extremely unprobable that this would've changed anything. They might've gotten a few percentage points out of RIM's market share. Maybe some of Microsoft's. But an Apple product's hype isn't based on features, or the price, or the design. It's marketing coupled with hordes of rabid fanboys.
Huh? The bank charges 2 SEK per transaction, so that'd put the potential gains in the 60m SEK range rather than 30m. Then there's that 1000 transaction limit. I'd guess they might have used up some of those before, so we're getting even closer to 60m SEK. Moving on, while receiving 30m SEK, they'll get charged 60 SEK. That's an $3.75m hit on their account. Do they have that kind of money on hand? I don't really see a business case to do so; so probably not. And *that's* where it gets real fun to the bank. Subtract 30m SEK from, say, 5m SEK and we're in a delicious little overdraft situation. That's where the fees start raining down like a cuddly blizzard made of negative cash. Now at some point, they'll probably reach their overdraft limit. Depending on how the bank handles their transaction billing, this is either going to be somewhat gracefully (e.g. transaction cost is subtracted immediately, no more transactions below 2 SEK accepted at absolute zero) or may have the potential to put the firm into really deep shit (i.e. transaction costs may be subtracted at the end of the month. Think 60m SEK transaction cost; 35m SEK balance and 5m SEK overdraft limit. The bank/will/ find a way to charge those 20m SEK, and the debtor might not like the additional charges and interest).
Then, after all of that, there's the distinct possibility of a slightly changed case outcome in the appeals process. Let's be optimistic and call TPB "not guilty". -20m SEK minus another 30m SEK of legally very binding (possibly even preferred through a bankrupcy process) returns is quite a bit less than zero or absolute zero.
Unfortunately, the world's a boring place and apart from a few transactions by die-hard fans nothing is going to happen. Anyways, it's been a fun thought-experiment. Good night:]
All the users i knew of did not have prescriptions.
...kinda makes you wonder how the fuck they got that stuff anyways. Adderall is Schedule II, accordingly it ought to be as well-controlled as Cocaine, Morphine or Metamphetamine. (Provigil is only Schedule IV along with, for example, Ambien and Valium.)
Here, I disagree. One person's "alarm or distress" is another person's "freedom of speech." We can generally agree in this case, but where do we draw the line? It isn't very far from this to "don't depict Mohammed in a cartoon."
We can probably isolate three people doing potentially wrong things here.
Firstly, whomever leaked the image to the public. Without knowing the motivation, we can't say much about that. You can argue in their favor and say this was done as a wakeup call to the public about the dangers of reckless behaviour or you could look at it as pointless shocker imagery. I, for one, would go with the free speech argument.
Then, there's the person captioning the image as described in TFS. Freedom of Speech and satire on one hand, impiousness and causing alarm or distress on the other. Again, I'd argue in favor of FoS, as long as this isn't presented in a deceptive, shocker site fashion.
Lastly, there's sick bastards attempting to deceive people into viewing this under the pretense of legitimate content, like property listings. I'm not quite sure how one could possibly argue in favor of that. To me, this seems very fucking sick and absolutely unnecessary. This is where people should, in my opinion, be prosecuted.
You're right. GMail, Outlook and so on block external images because they can be used to track which addresses are active and which aren't. If the image data is sent right with the email, there's no harm done in displaying it.
This has worked for the past ten years or so, it's just not that popular because it noticeably increases the message's size. Not a problem if you're sending one or two of 'em, but quite a bit of a difference in the millions.
There aren't too many reasons for which somebody would approach a merchant ship in international waters in a Zodiac or some related kind of cheap, fast and unmarked vessel. Also, no bum is gonna try and clean your bridge's windows. Doesn't happen in the open seas;)
The coast guards have no business outside the 12 mi zone; leisure cruises (talking about small boats, not fully grown cruise ships) tend not to happen in piracy-endangered region (or international waters) and navies... well, even a drunk sailor ought to be able to recognize a destroyer if he sees one.
Having that cleared up, even though I usually disagree with any unnecessary kind of weapon use and/or violence: Stock a bunch of 5.56 mm assault rifles with some clips each on most merchant ships. Get the semi-automatic kind, they aren't as legally problematic (in some areas) as fully automated ones, easy to handle and easy on your joints (not that much recoil). Train them sailors in pointing-and-shooting and even if only 80% of all vessels have any arms, the high-seas kind of piracy will quickly die down.
More standards means more work for everybody, so don't fix what's not broken, and especially don't fix it with lots of extra work.
If you ask me, those fucking brilliant people aren't that much at fault. The space limitation wasn't their idea, still they have to deal with it. Now if Twitter were to transparently replace links that lead to 301/2s with their actual target as the href, implementation work would be limited to the Twitter people who caused the potential linkrot in the first place. Everybody else just carries on.
Using your own linkshrink you can only save on the path, not on the domain. http://mysite.org/shorty, for example, can be compressed another 40% to (working) http://y.ly/acs.
[...]encouraged by the actions of the Federal Reserve.
"The Fed's task is to supply enough reserves to support an adequate amount of money and credit, avoiding the excesses that result in inflation and the shortages that stifle economic growth." (Source, via
'pedia
In financially dire times, like right now, offering extremely little interest is just the right thing to do. On one hand, this benefits entrepreneurs who can borrow at lower rates and attemt to fight recession from their side, on the other hand it actively discourages people from saving (which is good in that situation). Seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? The idea goes like this: If you're saving up your money now, the market will continue to shrink. Companies will probably lower their prices in order to convince any buyers to buy more product. Now, prices all around will be tumbling. What you could buy for $20 weeks ago is now only $15. Deflation sets in. Your money's getting more and more valuable and just because of that, you'll hold back with spending. Instead of buying something now for $500, you'll wait a week for it to arrive at $400. Then another week for $300 and so on.
At some point, just cutting down on the margins will not be enough. Now jobs will be cut and salaries shrunk. As usual, this will mostly affect people easy to replace. Salespeople, manufactoring personnel, accountants, lower, perhaps middle management.
Since it's all recession, crisis and less money now, you'll spend even less. Instead of brand food and eating out once a week it's Tesco's Value and one brand meal per week at home. The whole circle goes on until in the end the economy actually shrinks into non-existence.
In order to avoid that: Spend healthily. Save up enough for a nice retirement, but don't overdo it. All the wealth we currently have only exists through this fragile system of (a little) inflation. Money needs to travel in order to create additional wealth. Spend it (along with everybody else) and you'll get back more (through bigger paychecks).
"the" virtualization software? Just be sure to keep the vm's disk an actual partition and you can swap your virtualization software in no time.
Alternatively, go the matryoshka way. Run Win95 in (for Example) VMWare 5 on current Ubuntu now, wrap that in Xen on Ubuntu 12.4 LTS, wrap that in the 2016 Edition of Virtualooz on vanilla Lunix 28.6.19 and that in some deep fried beer batter. Processor speed will keep up.
Uh, no it doesn't?
I've been hot-swapping el-cheapo sata drives for years now; SATA supports hot-swapping.
I even recall having to unplug all of the data hard drives in an old frankenputer, boot Windows 2003, then reattach the drives because Windows wouldn't boot with any disks attached to the RAID controller. Fun times. (SATA-1)
A good thing. A white hat hacker might break into a network out of curiosity, enrich his knowledge and then alarm the network operators of their problems and even help them with plugging those holes. Penetration testers are white hats too. A black hat would tend to publicize or sell the vulnerabilities without notifying potential victims. A cracker would destroy or alter files and generally wreak havoc.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nokia hack seems pretty legit from what I've heard. It's not quite the kind of deal that would be repeatedly mentioned in your average newspaper, so that might explain the lack of follow-up coverage.
Considering the requirement of secrecy in voting, it's almost impossible to build a secure yet useable online solution for it. A member of the mob (or spouse) could always be standing behind you to make sure you're doing it right. What might work could be a platform you can define (and change) your vote at any time leading up to a deadline and the selection is cast for all users at this deadline. This would require one person to make sure each vote's cast to the right candidate. (After the deadline, your selection wouldn't be displayed anymore). Still leaves the gap of selling your password to the highest bidder open.
Maybe a wide-angle webcam to which you show a form of picture identification, with face recognition software to check if you're who the id says you are. Unfortunately we don't have the face recognition software to do that (that's okay, replace it with a human operator); faking an id for webcam quality is trivial (welcome; national databases of piccies and finger prints) and again; your mob friend may be watching on the second screen out of the cam's angle.
Bleh. Let's try one more: Screw (online) voting and elect me as your supreme dictator for life, puny peoples of this world. This solves all problems. yes. >.<
That'd be "Sechs". It's just pronounced like "Sex".
There's a solution to the problem you described, called mTAN (Mobile Transaction Authorization Number):
You register your mobile number with your bank. Whenver you're making a transaction, the bank texts you the confirmation key plus the target account number and/or amount you're transferring. If everything seems kosher, you type in the confirmation key (only valid for this specific transaction) and are good to go.
There's three main attack vectors:
First of all, as Penguinoflight already said, a power supply's efficiency per power drawn would look somewhat like a (ideally very wide, steep-sided and flat-topped) bell curve. Drawing 400 W from a 700 W PSU might draw 450-500 W (80-90% efficiency) from the grid; a 400 or 450 W unit near it's peak would probably drop in efficiency, drawing more like 550 W or so.
Moving on, the more high-performance hardware in a PC, the wider it's power draw will vary. If you've got one (standard) CPU, one (standard) GPU, one hard drive and an optical drive (plus the obvious rest), you may get an idle power draw around 150 W or so. Having the *PUs peak and both drives spin up at the same time might increase the power draw to 200, 250 W tops.
In a more high-end gaming rig you may find two quad-core CPUs, two GPUs, one or two optical drives plus a few (one to three) system drives (SSD, 10k RPM hds) plus several (two to many) storage drives (5.4-7.2k RPM hds). Idling along, this may draw some 250 W or so. Peak draw is more tricky here, though. Most of the hardware will put itself into low power modes when unused (drives spin down; CPUs and GPUs move to a lower clock/voltage state). As soon as there's some processing load, it'll all start sucking power like a black hole would suck footballs through a gardening hose. Full load power draw can easily be triple that of the box sitting idle.
The key is as much of the components spending as much time as possible in the deepest sleep (and power saving) states whenever possible. A quad-core 3 GHz proc and max draw of 100 W may be more efficient than a low-power single-core 1.5 GHz with 20 W max draw; assuming deep sleep at 1 W: The latter may spend, for example, 8 seconds out of 10 processing a given task and spend only 2 s in sleep (8 s * 20 W = 160 Ws + 2 s * 1 W = 162 Ws) while the former would finish in a second, then sleep (1 s * 100 W = 100 Ws + 9 s * 1 W = 109 Ws).
You seem to have never used any recent small-screen device's (Android, Opera Mobile, iPhone) browser. Web sites will generally be rendered like they would using an average desktop resolution, then scaled down to fit the smaller screen. Zooming in/out will zoom in on any part of the page, treating it like a picture. See this for a demo.
Predictable as a swiss clockwork, that's how I likes me my fanboys.
Anyhow, back to the topic at hand:
The Xperia is newer than the TX, but there have been a few others similar to it before. Think HTC TyTn (II); the 8000 series Blackberries. Most of them lacked something or another, but they will at least predate the iPhone.
The hardware is, in my opinion, great. I got mine a few days after release and, spending my time in the local army ever since, gave it constant abuse from day one. It hasn't complained.
Performance-wise, it's the most responsive Windows Mobile device I've had the pleasure of using. Just that, no more but no less either. The display is sharper than any display I've seen before. 800 Pixels width packed in less than 7 cm, what's there to say?
Software selection is great. After a few hours of messing around, it runs HTC's TouchFlo 3D (latest version) plus it's original Panel interface. The Browser (Opera Mobile, not Mini as I'm guessing you're running) is great. There's lots of apps available, many of them free and a lot of the others are worth their price.
They weren't. The features you listed are cool to the crowd who reads slashdot, writes programs, manages networks and plays around with arduinos in their spare time. That's an entire demographic built right around not being cool.
The cool I'm talking about is the one made up from opinions by people who mistake the intertubes for a big truck and are responsible for Yahoo being #2 and Slashdot being #2006 on Alexa; the kind of people who will install the Alexa toolbar. That kind of "cool"; the general public's; just doesn't involve "geeky".
Ghost Busters?
Looking forward to all the hate I'll be getting for this, but:
I own a Sony Ericsson Xperia. It does almost everything you'd get in an iPhone (calling, messaging, browsing the web, Google Maps, listening to music, watching movies, ...), a Pre (multitasking, slide-out keyboard, facebook integration), a "classic" Palm (all the PIM you'll ever need, bluetooth keyboards) or a G1 (running lots of apps from unsigned sources, if you tell it to) and more.
It runs Windows mobile.
Devices similar to it have been around quite a bit longer than first-generation iPhones. Just like most any palm, they've never been cool, though. So even if Palm would've gotten out a TX cell, it's extremely unprobable that this would've changed anything. They might've gotten a few percentage points out of RIM's market share. Maybe some of Microsoft's. But an Apple product's hype isn't based on features, or the price, or the design. It's marketing coupled with hordes of rabid fanboys.
As long as there's no "Don't count pageviews towards top sites as long as this is enabled" porn mode switch, everything else seems rather risky to me.
Huh? /will/ find a way to charge those 20m SEK, and the debtor might not like the additional charges and interest).
The bank charges 2 SEK per transaction, so that'd put the potential gains in the 60m SEK range rather than 30m. Then there's that 1000 transaction limit. I'd guess they might have used up some of those before, so we're getting even closer to 60m SEK.
Moving on, while receiving 30m SEK, they'll get charged 60 SEK. That's an $3.75m hit on their account. Do they have that kind of money on hand? I don't really see a business case to do so; so probably not.
And *that's* where it gets real fun to the bank. Subtract 30m SEK from, say, 5m SEK and we're in a delicious little overdraft situation. That's where the fees start raining down like a cuddly blizzard made of negative cash.
Now at some point, they'll probably reach their overdraft limit. Depending on how the bank handles their transaction billing, this is either going to be somewhat gracefully (e.g. transaction cost is subtracted immediately, no more transactions below 2 SEK accepted at absolute zero) or may have the potential to put the firm into really deep shit (i.e. transaction costs may be subtracted at the end of the month. Think 60m SEK transaction cost; 35m SEK balance and 5m SEK overdraft limit. The bank
Then, after all of that, there's the distinct possibility of a slightly changed case outcome in the appeals process. Let's be optimistic and call TPB "not guilty". -20m SEK minus another 30m SEK of legally very binding (possibly even preferred through a bankrupcy process) returns is quite a bit less than zero or absolute zero.
Unfortunately, the world's a boring place and apart from a few transactions by die-hard fans nothing is going to happen. Anyways, it's been a fun thought-experiment. Good night :]
We can probably isolate three people doing potentially wrong things here.
Firstly, whomever leaked the image to the public. Without knowing the motivation, we can't say much about that. You can argue in their favor and say this was done as a wakeup call to the public about the dangers of reckless behaviour or you could look at it as pointless shocker imagery. I, for one, would go with the free speech argument.
Then, there's the person captioning the image as described in TFS. Freedom of Speech and satire on one hand, impiousness and causing alarm or distress on the other. Again, I'd argue in favor of FoS, as long as this isn't presented in a deceptive, shocker site fashion.
Lastly, there's sick bastards attempting to deceive people into viewing this under the pretense of legitimate content, like property listings. I'm not quite sure how one could possibly argue in favor of that. To me, this seems very fucking sick and absolutely unnecessary. This is where people should, in my opinion, be prosecuted.
You're right. GMail, Outlook and so on block external images because they can be used to track which addresses are active and which aren't. If the image data is sent right with the email, there's no harm done in displaying it.
This has worked for the past ten years or so, it's just not that popular because it noticeably increases the message's size. Not a problem if you're sending one or two of 'em, but quite a bit of a difference in the millions.
preeetty sure they got their pound of flesh even before selling any tickets. blue flesh to be precise. blue, hanging flesh.
There aren't too many reasons for which somebody would approach a merchant ship in international waters in a Zodiac or some related kind of cheap, fast and unmarked vessel. Also, no bum is gonna try and clean your bridge's windows. Doesn't happen in the open seas ;)
The coast guards have no business outside the 12 mi zone; leisure cruises (talking about small boats, not fully grown cruise ships) tend not to happen in piracy-endangered region (or international waters) and navies... well, even a drunk sailor ought to be able to recognize a destroyer if he sees one.
Having that cleared up, even though I usually disagree with any unnecessary kind of weapon use and/or violence: Stock a bunch of 5.56 mm assault rifles with some clips each on most merchant ships. Get the semi-automatic kind, they aren't as legally problematic (in some areas) as fully automated ones, easy to handle and easy on your joints (not that much recoil). Train them sailors in pointing-and-shooting and even if only 80% of all vessels have any arms, the high-seas kind of piracy will quickly die down.
More standards means more work for everybody, so don't fix what's not broken, and especially don't fix it with lots of extra work.
If you ask me, those fucking brilliant people aren't that much at fault. The space limitation wasn't their idea, still they have to deal with it. Now if Twitter were to transparently replace links that lead to 301/2s with their actual target as the href, implementation work would be limited to the Twitter people who caused the potential linkrot in the first place. Everybody else just carries on.
"Shortest URLs on Earth" my ass. /.
http://y.ly/s is just as short and works on
Using your own linkshrink you can only save on the path, not on the domain. http://mysite.org/shorty, for example, can be compressed another 40% to (working) http://y.ly/acs.
Which, obviously, is very fucking smart, since we can't already do <a href="http://www.somesite.com/longurl/to/whatever">y.ly/acr</a>.
10-15p per 140 bytes is more like £749 to £1123.50 per MiB.
"The Fed's task is to supply enough reserves to support an adequate amount of money and credit, avoiding the excesses that result in inflation and the shortages that stifle economic growth." (Source, via 'pedia
In financially dire times, like right now, offering extremely little interest is just the right thing to do. On one hand, this benefits entrepreneurs who can borrow at lower rates and attemt to fight recession from their side, on the other hand it actively discourages people from saving (which is good in that situation). Seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? The idea goes like this: If you're saving up your money now, the market will continue to shrink. Companies will probably lower their prices in order to convince any buyers to buy more product. Now, prices all around will be tumbling. What you could buy for $20 weeks ago is now only $15. Deflation sets in. Your money's getting more and more valuable and just because of that, you'll hold back with spending. Instead of buying something now for $500, you'll wait a week for it to arrive at $400. Then another week for $300 and so on.
At some point, just cutting down on the margins will not be enough. Now jobs will be cut and salaries shrunk. As usual, this will mostly affect people easy to replace. Salespeople, manufactoring personnel, accountants, lower, perhaps middle management.
Since it's all recession, crisis and less money now, you'll spend even less. Instead of brand food and eating out once a week it's Tesco's Value and one brand meal per week at home. The whole circle goes on until in the end the economy actually shrinks into non-existence.
In order to avoid that: Spend healthily. Save up enough for a nice retirement, but don't overdo it. All the wealth we currently have only exists through this fragile system of (a little) inflation. Money needs to travel in order to create additional wealth. Spend it (along with everybody else) and you'll get back more (through bigger paychecks).
"the" virtualization software? Just be sure to keep the vm's disk an actual partition and you can swap your virtualization software in no time.
Alternatively, go the matryoshka way. Run Win95 in (for Example) VMWare 5 on current Ubuntu now, wrap that in Xen on Ubuntu 12.4 LTS, wrap that in the 2016 Edition of Virtualooz on vanilla Lunix 28.6.19 and that in some deep fried beer batter. Processor speed will keep up.
Uh, no it doesn't?
I've been hot-swapping el-cheapo sata drives for years now; SATA supports hot-swapping.
I even recall having to unplug all of the data hard drives in an old frankenputer, boot Windows 2003, then reattach the drives because Windows wouldn't boot with any disks attached to the RAID controller. Fun times. (SATA-1)
A good thing. A white hat hacker might break into a network out of curiosity, enrich his knowledge and then alarm the network operators of their problems and even help them with plugging those holes. Penetration testers are white hats too.
A black hat would tend to publicize or sell the vulnerabilities without notifying potential victims.
A cracker would destroy or alter files and generally wreak havoc.
As usual, Opera has done it before and done it better: Quick Find paragraph.