Juvenile records are sealed when you reach the age of majority (18), and can neither be looked at (theoretically) nor used against you (again, theoretically) as an adult.
That may be true in some places, but it's not guaranteed to be true - even in the US. I talked to a court clerk in my hometown about this (no, I don't have a record myself), and was told that if I did have a record and wanted it sealed, I'd have to appear before a judge to request the sealing.
Since you're not getting the netlists, what electron microscope are you planning to put the chips in?
You don't need an electron microscope to reverse-engineer ICs. Have a look at the interesting photos over at Flylogic. Once you know the physical design, even in a worst-case scenario someone could manually inspect the photos to figure out exactly how it worked.
MESS has really crappy support for a lot of games, it was a great idea but quite a let down from my experience.
What did you run into trouble with?
I've thrown a bunch of Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Intellivision, and Sega Master System games at it and they all worked great. I haven't tried some of the more obscure consoles though.
I don't understand the hatred for Bonjour. It's a discovery protocol, used by Macs for ages. All it does is to make it possible to find other computers.
The only reason I have iTunes installed is because I couldn't find a Quicktime download that didn't come with it. The only reason I have Quicktime installed is because of people who only make their content available as Quicktime files for whatever reason.
*Why* would I want Quicktime to be able to discover other devices on my network? Even if I did, why would I want a service running all of the time as opposed to once every few months when I go to play a Quicktime file?
I can only speak for myself, but that's why *I* hate Bonjour. I wanted Apple's poorly-coded (for Windows at least) proprietary video player. In order to get it, I had to get a bunch of extra software I most definitely didn't want.
I already tried Quicktime Alternative. It wasn't able to play the newest Quicktime variants.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
While I think it's true that the children of the wealthy are more likely to get a better education, I don't think that's the main force at work here.
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I suspect that children who "learn to read online" are going to have an even worse attention span than I do (and mine is pretty terrible). I also suspect that they will have a much more superficial understanding of the things they've read, and that their comprehension of spelling and grammar will be abysmal.
Going forward, I don't think constant internet connectivity is an unreasonable expectation.
Do you live in an urban area? Because most of the people I know with that opinion do. Outside of cities and their suburbs, the US is a pretty different story.
Plainly not directly, but by some musical flanking maneuver -- like using the sounds from a Speak and Spell, or other electronics (circuit bending), to make something entirely new and unforeseen.
I suspect it would be difficult or impossible to get this software to go outside of its boundaries.
I haven't tried it myself, but from the demo video it seems like an evolved version of the auto-accompaniment systems that have been in consumer musical keyboards for something like two decades.
Those work more or less by having the rhythm pattern (for all parts) preset, and a note-number-sequence type thing - basically a more complicated arpeggiator that plays the same pattern, but based on the chord you play on the keyboard. Play different chords, and the music changes key, but it's still the same music really.
One of the first keyboards I saw like that back in the early 90s took it one step further, and would work based on playing a single note - although of course in that case it was limited to a major scale, because without more than one note at once you can't specify a scale.
I assume Songsmith is based around a similar principle. The song types probably have a default scale (major for "uplifting", minor for "Arcturus cover song", etc.). If it's a bit smarter, it may keep track of the notes you've sung to try to guess if you're signing a scale other than the default.
I've used similar (though less-advanced) systems before and about the weirdest you could get them to do would be some quasi-Schoenberg/Cage atonality (which I don't really care for, myself).
They're really just toys. They won't "destroy music" any more than karaoke destroyed singing as an art or profession.
I do have to dispute the slams against the demo song lyrics. That was the best part of the video. I imagine it took several takes for the singer to do it with a straight face.
People pull old Trash-80's or whatever out of closets and get them to work, and that's been 15-20 years maybe. Assuming the storage is kept cool and dry, I can't see any reason why the hardware wouldn't be usable after 50 years.
The reason is tin whiskers. Electronic devices and components made before RoHS requirements will far outlast anything made since then.
In other words, it's highly unlikely that in 15-20 years, anyone will pull a working PS3 or Xbox 360 (or Core 2 Duo-based PC) out of the closet.
No, they don't...but if they get a call from the new president saying "gosh, I'd love to use a Blackberry, giving you rocking publicity, if only it could be nice and secure..." I have a feeling they'll work closely with the secret service on getting it right,
The BlackBerry model by design is insecure (from a national security perspective). All of the data communication is routed through systems owned by a Canadian corporation (RIM). They claim it's encrypted end-to-end. I've seen enough of their backend applications (in the form of the BlackBerry "Enterprise" Server) to suspect that even if the communication is encrypted, it would be trivial for someone at RIM to decrypt it.
But can you say how long that disk might sit around after it leaves your control before someone uses the new Quantum Disk Snarfing tool on it?
If the data is overwritten, how would it even theoretically be recovered (technology being no object, other than working within the limits of physics as they are currently known)? I've had this discussion before and never gotten a solid answer.
I've heard people talk about looking at the analogue value of each bit. OK, so a bit is 0.9 instead of 1. Does that mean that it was 0 before the last 1 was written to it, or that it was e.g. 0 twice and then 1 twice? IE something else that makes it "not quite 1". Or maybe there was a blip in the current or voltage to the write head, and a 1 is all that's ever been written to it.
You can use statistics to guess at known values (e.g. if the 7th byte of a file could be an ASCII J and the 8th could be an ASCII F, then there is a good chance that the 9th and 10th are ASCII IF), but that doesn't tell you anything about the unknown values, which is what you care about.
Except in cases of national security, or where peoples' lives are literally at stake, I can't see the point in effectively throwing out working hardware.
I remember reading deleted data from a floppy disk on my Apple II boxes using Tricky Dick and other disk utilities, and you can set the drive to read to the "side" of each track.
Was it deleted, or was it overwritten? Reading deleted data is generally very easy, but reading overwritten data is generally not. Although based on your relatively low UID, I expect you already knew that.
They actually have an example if you use AD as back end authentication on a web site you have to buy a CAL for ever user, or magic uber-CALs for the web server.
Not only that, but it gets more complicated depending on how many MS server products you use.
For example, if you have a SharePoint system accessible on the internet that users can log into, you need a SharePoint CAL, a SQL Server CAL, and a Windows CAL for each of the users.
I've even read a Gartner paper that claims it's not just AD users, but users who log in using credentials of any kind. IE if you run an online store on IIS, you need to purchase a user CAL for each of your customers (assuming they can log in), whether you write your own auth system or give them AD accounts. Alternately, you can purchase a very expensive blanket CAL that covers them all. Either way, those CALs are going to cost more than most small businesses ever make off of single transactions from casual customers.
Compare to antivirus, which is not very good protection against threats that don't matter if you know what you're doing.
Have you disabled (in the registry) autorun/autoplay for all drives? Because if you haven't you are still vulnerable to a virus from e.g. an infected USB drive.
I used to think along the lines of what you're describing, until my Vista PC got infected by a virus which came from the factory on a USB mp3 player.
1 - It still doesn't disable autorun/autoplay from writeable media by default. This is totally inexcusable these days. In fact, I would argue that autorun/autoplay in general is inexcusable. At most there should be a popup asking if you want to explore the volume or run the autorun/autoplay program. 2 - File copies are ridiculously slow. Unzipping files using the built-in handler is unbelievably slow compared to e.g. 7-zip. 3 - Apparently I can't share arbitrary folders as writeable, only the Users\Public folder. Everything else gets the "read-only" box checked as soon as I close the properties window regardless of the NTFS and share permissions. 4 - In order to allow write access to the Public folder, I have to use the asinine "Network and Sharing Center", the most pointless piece of crap middleman "utility" ever invented by Microsoft. 5 - The only view I ever want to use in Explorer is Details. So like every other version of Windows, the first thing I did was to set the view to Details for a folder, go into the Folder Options, and tell Windows not to use unique views for each folder. Despite doing this many times, Vista will still randomly pick other views that it thinks are better (even though they're worse) for some folders some of the time. It also refuses to remember the sort order I choose for my Documents folder, and every time I go into it, it's sorted by Type, not Name. 6 - I still have to reboot after nearly every set of patches. 7 - It's bogged down with DRM. 8 - Because of the new driver models, support for a bunch of still-useful legacy hardware was dropped. Should I really have to buy a new analogue video capture card, for example? S-Video and composite haven't really changed much in the last few years. 9 - UAC. At least I can turn this off. 10 - As others have suggested, changing things for the sake of changing things (as opposed to making them better). E.g. the Office ribbon-style UI, the aforementioned Network and Sharing Center, etc. 11 - The stupid split-token behaviour for administrators if UAC is enabled (although I can't remember offhand if this is just in Server 2008 or Vista as well, because I turn off UAC on my personal system). If you're going to copy (K)Ubuntu, please do it right, MS. 12 - There's still no true equivalent of a root account. Even if you use psexec to start up a command line in the context of the system account, there are things it's not allowed to do.
I've been using Vista for about two years now, so these are not first impressions. The only reason I've stuck with it for so long is the volume of data I have on this system and not wanting to have to reconfigure everything by going back to XP.
There were a few things I thought were clever at first, like the "smart" sort order for directories. But even that seems like more of a headache than it's worth to me at this point.
I had really hoped that when I saw Server 2008 and Windows 7, I would see that MS had backpedaled after realizing what a bunch of jerks they'd made themselves look like with Vista. Sadly they haven't, and so my next desktop is going to run Kubuntu as the primary OS. I've been using it on a secondary system for awhile now and while it's a little rough around the edges, I vastly prefer it to Vista.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't.
All of you complainers are looking at this totally the wrong way.
Think of the hidden benefit for those of us who won't be driving these cars even if most other people are - install a fighter jet-style radar-reflective chaff launcher on the back of your car, and suddenly you have a "stop tailgating me - immediately" button on your own dashboard.
Have you ever actually *seen* collisions of large SUVs and trucks with light cars? The SUVs AND their passengers fare significantly better than the other car and its passengers, by far most of the time.
I imagine it depends on which SUV and which light car are involved.
I saw the results of a collision between an SUV and a convertible BMW sports car about ten years ago: the SUV used the BMW as a ramp, launched into the air, rolled 180 degrees and landed on its roof, killing the driver. The driver of the BMW walked away, although I imagine he was pretty shaken after having an SUV do that with only a windscreen (not even a roof) between it and himself.
According to the font of dubious knowledge, 1601 is (in the Gregorian calendar) a common year starting on a Monday. It's also the most recent first year of a century prior to 2001 that meets that criteria.
I suspect someone picked that date for that reason, and/or because it was back far enough in time to allow the date/time of most most historical data and business records to be represented.
One of the potential dangers I've read about with this type of malware is that the google-bombed links don't just display popups - they also include things like hidden embedded PDF files that exploit vulnerabilities in older versions of Adobe [Acrobat] Reader to install the rest of the malware components. So even if you don't do anything wrong - even if you're running Firefox instead of IE, as long as you have an old version of Reader installed you're vulnerable. I suspect this can be mitigated by turning off the "display in browser" option for PDF files, but I don't know for sure.
Antivirus setting the automatic wakeup to turn the computer on at a specific time, and that causing the blown fuses.
Aha! Interesting. I hadn't thought of that - I've always been fortunate enough to live in places which weren't teetering on the edge of electrical collapse, and I've never had a PC with automatic wakeup enabled. But yes, now that you mention it, I have known people who e.g. couldn't run their TV and microwave at the same time, so that would make a lot of sense.
This article reeks of being written by low-level tech support who think they know more about computers than they actually do.
Obviously antivirus software isn't going to blow an electrical fuse. Obviously the user who thought he'd found a virus in a specific chip on his motherboard was a bit off. A DVD-ROM drive with infected firmware seems unlikely but is certainly within the realm of possibility. The rest are all perfectly plausible.
Someone with a rootkit popping open notepad remotely and typing a message? Viruses that change system sounds? How are those symptoms at all a reason to immediately dismiss the reports?
If there's one thing that grates on my nerves, it's people who work in tech support and therefore think they know everything about computers.
I'd hate to see how the people who wrote this article would respond to a report of the symptoms of a trojan horse/rootkit that I saw firsthand this last weekend. It intercepted all communication with Google (and Yahoo Search) and replaced the first page of results with spam/malware site links. In any browser used on the system, not just IE. MalwareBytes and Avast detected nothing - I had to boot off of a CD and manually move the files somewhere else before Avast detected some (but not all) of them as part of a rootkit.
Also, it takes a bit of reading documentation, but editing the xorg.conf file by hand isn't that hard
It's not editing it that's hard. It's figuring out what to put in it. Especially if it's broken your GUI so you can't use a web browser to search for the arcane settings that your monitor requires. No, lynx doesn't count.
What surprises me is that there doesn't seem to be a utility/online database of various monitors and their specs. If the autodetection doesn't work, you're basically on your own and have to track down the horizontal sync and vertical refresh rate ranges, which is stupid.
It is not something that you can produce in bulk, store it, distribute it, and tap a burst when you need it.
Could you not build the electric equivalent of a gas station, which used a bank of ultracapacitors as a buffer between the power grid and the ultracapacitors in the end-users' cars?
Or for remote locations, use the same permanently-installed bank of ultracapacitors, but charging from one of those multi-decade no-maintenance fission power modules the Japanese are developing.
Slashdot Mirror
And is now a 201(k).
For some people, it's turned into a -273.15(c).
Guess what? If you're going to try to use a gun against the government, the government will use many more against you.
While that's generally true, if there were a truly popular uprising, the government and the military would be vastly outnumbered.
Juvenile records are sealed when you reach the age of majority (18), and can neither be looked at (theoretically) nor used against you (again, theoretically) as an adult.
That may be true in some places, but it's not guaranteed to be true - even in the US. I talked to a court clerk in my hometown about this (no, I don't have a record myself), and was told that if I did have a record and wanted it sealed, I'd have to appear before a judge to request the sealing.
Since you're not getting the netlists, what electron microscope are you planning to put the chips in?
You don't need an electron microscope to reverse-engineer ICs. Have a look at the interesting photos over at Flylogic. Once you know the physical design, even in a worst-case scenario someone could manually inspect the photos to figure out exactly how it worked.
MESS has really crappy support for a lot of games, it was a great idea but quite a let down from my experience.
What did you run into trouble with?
I've thrown a bunch of Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Intellivision, and Sega Master System games at it and they all worked great. I haven't tried some of the more obscure consoles though.
I don't understand the hatred for Bonjour. It's a discovery protocol, used by Macs for ages. All it does is to make it possible to find other computers.
The only reason I have iTunes installed is because I couldn't find a Quicktime download that didn't come with it. The only reason I have Quicktime installed is because of people who only make their content available as Quicktime files for whatever reason.
*Why* would I want Quicktime to be able to discover other devices on my network? Even if I did, why would I want a service running all of the time as opposed to once every few months when I go to play a Quicktime file?
I can only speak for myself, but that's why *I* hate Bonjour. I wanted Apple's poorly-coded (for Windows at least) proprietary video player. In order to get it, I had to get a bunch of extra software I most definitely didn't want.
I already tried Quicktime Alternative. It wasn't able to play the newest Quicktime variants.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
While I think it's true that the children of the wealthy are more likely to get a better education, I don't think that's the main force at work here.
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I suspect that children who "learn to read online" are going to have an even worse attention span than I do (and mine is pretty terrible). I also suspect that they will have a much more superficial understanding of the things they've read, and that their comprehension of spelling and grammar will be abysmal.
Going forward, I don't think constant internet connectivity is an unreasonable expectation.
Do you live in an urban area? Because most of the people I know with that opinion do. Outside of cities and their suburbs, the US is a pretty different story.
Plainly not directly, but by some musical flanking maneuver -- like using the sounds from a Speak and Spell, or other electronics (circuit bending), to make something entirely new and unforeseen.
I suspect it would be difficult or impossible to get this software to go outside of its boundaries.
I haven't tried it myself, but from the demo video it seems like an evolved version of the auto-accompaniment systems that have been in consumer musical keyboards for something like two decades.
Those work more or less by having the rhythm pattern (for all parts) preset, and a note-number-sequence type thing - basically a more complicated arpeggiator that plays the same pattern, but based on the chord you play on the keyboard. Play different chords, and the music changes key, but it's still the same music really.
One of the first keyboards I saw like that back in the early 90s took it one step further, and would work based on playing a single note - although of course in that case it was limited to a major scale, because without more than one note at once you can't specify a scale.
I assume Songsmith is based around a similar principle. The song types probably have a default scale (major for "uplifting", minor for "Arcturus cover song", etc.). If it's a bit smarter, it may keep track of the notes you've sung to try to guess if you're signing a scale other than the default.
I've used similar (though less-advanced) systems before and about the weirdest you could get them to do would be some quasi-Schoenberg/Cage atonality (which I don't really care for, myself).
They're really just toys. They won't "destroy music" any more than karaoke destroyed singing as an art or profession.
I do have to dispute the slams against the demo song lyrics. That was the best part of the video. I imagine it took several takes for the singer to do it with a straight face.
People pull old Trash-80's or whatever out of closets and get them to work, and that's been 15-20 years maybe. Assuming the storage is kept cool and dry, I can't see any reason why the hardware wouldn't be usable after 50 years.
The reason is tin whiskers. Electronic devices and components made before RoHS requirements will far outlast anything made since then.
In other words, it's highly unlikely that in 15-20 years, anyone will pull a working PS3 or Xbox 360 (or Core 2 Duo-based PC) out of the closet.
No, they don't...but if they get a call from the new president saying "gosh, I'd love to use a Blackberry, giving you rocking publicity, if only it could be nice and secure..." I have a feeling they'll work closely with the secret service on getting it right,
The BlackBerry model by design is insecure (from a national security perspective). All of the data communication is routed through systems owned by a Canadian corporation (RIM). They claim it's encrypted end-to-end. I've seen enough of their backend applications (in the form of the BlackBerry "Enterprise" Server) to suspect that even if the communication is encrypted, it would be trivial for someone at RIM to decrypt it.
But can you say how long that disk might sit around after it leaves your control before someone uses the new Quantum Disk Snarfing tool on it?
If the data is overwritten, how would it even theoretically be recovered (technology being no object, other than working within the limits of physics as they are currently known)? I've had this discussion before and never gotten a solid answer.
I've heard people talk about looking at the analogue value of each bit. OK, so a bit is 0.9 instead of 1. Does that mean that it was 0 before the last 1 was written to it, or that it was e.g. 0 twice and then 1 twice? IE something else that makes it "not quite 1". Or maybe there was a blip in the current or voltage to the write head, and a 1 is all that's ever been written to it.
You can use statistics to guess at known values (e.g. if the 7th byte of a file could be an ASCII J and the 8th could be an ASCII F, then there is a good chance that the 9th and 10th are ASCII IF), but that doesn't tell you anything about the unknown values, which is what you care about.
Except in cases of national security, or where peoples' lives are literally at stake, I can't see the point in effectively throwing out working hardware.
I remember reading deleted data from a floppy disk on my Apple II boxes using Tricky Dick and other disk utilities, and you can set the drive to read to the "side" of each track.
Was it deleted, or was it overwritten? Reading deleted data is generally very easy, but reading overwritten data is generally not. Although based on your relatively low UID, I expect you already knew that.
They actually have an example if you use AD as back end authentication on a web site you have to buy a CAL for ever user, or magic uber-CALs for the web server.
Not only that, but it gets more complicated depending on how many MS server products you use.
For example, if you have a SharePoint system accessible on the internet that users can log into, you need a SharePoint CAL, a SQL Server CAL, and a Windows CAL for each of the users.
I've even read a Gartner paper that claims it's not just AD users, but users who log in using credentials of any kind. IE if you run an online store on IIS, you need to purchase a user CAL for each of your customers (assuming they can log in), whether you write your own auth system or give them AD accounts. Alternately, you can purchase a very expensive blanket CAL that covers them all. Either way, those CALs are going to cost more than most small businesses ever make off of single transactions from casual customers.
Compare to antivirus, which is not very good protection against threats that don't matter if you know what you're doing.
Have you disabled (in the registry) autorun/autoplay for all drives? Because if you haven't you are still vulnerable to a virus from e.g. an infected USB drive.
I used to think along the lines of what you're describing, until my Vista PC got infected by a virus which came from the factory on a USB mp3 player.
What was wrong with Vista?
Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:
1 - It still doesn't disable autorun/autoplay from writeable media by default. This is totally inexcusable these days. In fact, I would argue that autorun/autoplay in general is inexcusable. At most there should be a popup asking if you want to explore the volume or run the autorun/autoplay program.
2 - File copies are ridiculously slow. Unzipping files using the built-in handler is unbelievably slow compared to e.g. 7-zip.
3 - Apparently I can't share arbitrary folders as writeable, only the Users\Public folder. Everything else gets the "read-only" box checked as soon as I close the properties window regardless of the NTFS and share permissions.
4 - In order to allow write access to the Public folder, I have to use the asinine "Network and Sharing Center", the most pointless piece of crap middleman "utility" ever invented by Microsoft.
5 - The only view I ever want to use in Explorer is Details. So like every other version of Windows, the first thing I did was to set the view to Details for a folder, go into the Folder Options, and tell Windows not to use unique views for each folder. Despite doing this many times, Vista will still randomly pick other views that it thinks are better (even though they're worse) for some folders some of the time. It also refuses to remember the sort order I choose for my Documents folder, and every time I go into it, it's sorted by Type, not Name.
6 - I still have to reboot after nearly every set of patches.
7 - It's bogged down with DRM.
8 - Because of the new driver models, support for a bunch of still-useful legacy hardware was dropped. Should I really have to buy a new analogue video capture card, for example? S-Video and composite haven't really changed much in the last few years.
9 - UAC. At least I can turn this off.
10 - As others have suggested, changing things for the sake of changing things (as opposed to making them better). E.g. the Office ribbon-style UI, the aforementioned Network and Sharing Center, etc.
11 - The stupid split-token behaviour for administrators if UAC is enabled (although I can't remember offhand if this is just in Server 2008 or Vista as well, because I turn off UAC on my personal system). If you're going to copy (K)Ubuntu, please do it right, MS.
12 - There's still no true equivalent of a root account. Even if you use psexec to start up a command line in the context of the system account, there are things it's not allowed to do.
I've been using Vista for about two years now, so these are not first impressions. The only reason I've stuck with it for so long is the volume of data I have on this system and not wanting to have to reconfigure everything by going back to XP.
There were a few things I thought were clever at first, like the "smart" sort order for directories. But even that seems like more of a headache than it's worth to me at this point.
I had really hoped that when I saw Server 2008 and Windows 7, I would see that MS had backpedaled after realizing what a bunch of jerks they'd made themselves look like with Vista. Sadly they haven't, and so my next desktop is going to run Kubuntu as the primary OS. I've been using it on a secondary system for awhile now and while it's a little rough around the edges, I vastly prefer it to Vista.
Also, I seem to remember that Win2k notepad could handle Unix line endings, but the feature disappeared in WinXP.
As far as I know, Wordpad has supported Unix linebreaks since 2000. I've never seen a version of Notepad that does.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't.
All of you complainers are looking at this totally the wrong way.
Think of the hidden benefit for those of us who won't be driving these cars even if most other people are - install a fighter jet-style radar-reflective chaff launcher on the back of your car, and suddenly you have a "stop tailgating me - immediately" button on your own dashboard.
Have you ever actually *seen* collisions of large SUVs and trucks with light cars? The SUVs AND their passengers fare significantly better than the other car and its passengers, by far most of the time.
I imagine it depends on which SUV and which light car are involved.
I saw the results of a collision between an SUV and a convertible BMW sports car about ten years ago: the SUV used the BMW as a ramp, launched into the air, rolled 180 degrees and landed on its roof, killing the driver. The driver of the BMW walked away, although I imagine he was pretty shaken after having an SUV do that with only a windscreen (not even a roof) between it and himself.
It's related to an ANSI standard, according to MS documentation.
According to the font of dubious knowledge, 1601 is (in the Gregorian calendar) a common year starting on a Monday. It's also the most recent first year of a century prior to 2001 that meets that criteria.
I suspect someone picked that date for that reason, and/or because it was back far enough in time to allow the date/time of most most historical data and business records to be represented.
One of the potential dangers I've read about with this type of malware is that the google-bombed links don't just display popups - they also include things like hidden embedded PDF files that exploit vulnerabilities in older versions of Adobe [Acrobat] Reader to install the rest of the malware components. So even if you don't do anything wrong - even if you're running Firefox instead of IE, as long as you have an old version of Reader installed you're vulnerable.
I suspect this can be mitigated by turning off the "display in browser" option for PDF files, but I don't know for sure.
Antivirus setting the automatic wakeup to turn the computer on at a specific time, and that causing the blown fuses.
Aha! Interesting. I hadn't thought of that - I've always been fortunate enough to live in places which weren't teetering on the edge of electrical collapse, and I've never had a PC with automatic wakeup enabled. But yes, now that you mention it, I have known people who e.g. couldn't run their TV and microwave at the same time, so that would make a lot of sense.
This article reeks of being written by low-level tech support who think they know more about computers than they actually do.
Obviously antivirus software isn't going to blow an electrical fuse. Obviously the user who thought he'd found a virus in a specific chip on his motherboard was a bit off. A DVD-ROM drive with infected firmware seems unlikely but is certainly within the realm of possibility. The rest are all perfectly plausible.
Someone with a rootkit popping open notepad remotely and typing a message? Viruses that change system sounds? How are those symptoms at all a reason to immediately dismiss the reports?
If there's one thing that grates on my nerves, it's people who work in tech support and therefore think they know everything about computers.
I'd hate to see how the people who wrote this article would respond to a report of the symptoms of a trojan horse/rootkit that I saw firsthand this last weekend. It intercepted all communication with Google (and Yahoo Search) and replaced the first page of results with spam/malware site links. In any browser used on the system, not just IE. MalwareBytes and Avast detected nothing - I had to boot off of a CD and manually move the files somewhere else before Avast detected some (but not all) of them as part of a rootkit.
Also, it takes a bit of reading documentation, but editing the xorg.conf file by hand isn't that hard
It's not editing it that's hard. It's figuring out what to put in it. Especially if it's broken your GUI so you can't use a web browser to search for the arcane settings that your monitor requires. No, lynx doesn't count.
What surprises me is that there doesn't seem to be a utility/online database of various monitors and their specs. If the autodetection doesn't work, you're basically on your own and have to track down the horizontal sync and vertical refresh rate ranges, which is stupid.
It is not something that you can produce in bulk, store it, distribute it, and tap a burst when you need it.
Could you not build the electric equivalent of a gas station, which used a bank of ultracapacitors as a buffer between the power grid and the ultracapacitors in the end-users' cars?
Or for remote locations, use the same permanently-installed bank of ultracapacitors, but charging from one of those multi-decade no-maintenance fission power modules the Japanese are developing.