Its all of 1 keystroke in (for example) Visual Studio to build a project and start debugging it.
All right, that's F5 in VS, but most of the time in Emacs I wouldn't actually type "make"; my keystrokes would be:
Ctrl+X,S (to save the file)
Alt+Tab (to switch windows)
Up-Arrow (to get the last time I typed "make test" or whatever)
However, if I wanted to run compilation in emacs upon pushing F5, I'd add the following line to my.emacs:
(global-set-key [f5] 'compile)
Plus, the IDE indicated I had a syntax error as I was typing it, and the code completion prevented me from making another one; and when the class I was trying to instantiate didn't get colored as a 'type' by the syntax highlighter that I knew was correct I immediately knew I hadn't included it in this file.
I've never gotten code-completion to work in Emacs (except for typeless XML, with nxml-mode); but it has syntax-highlighting for a lot of languages. Code-completion is nice for large projects and using unfamiliar libraries, but it's also annoying sometimes, because the visual effects get in the way of my thought-pattern.
And when the app compiled there was a compiler warning; in the IDE a double click on the warning took me right to the source line in the editor, [...]
The Emacs "compile" commmand can do this.
[Not arguing with you in particular, because you never said that Emacs isn't an IDE; just mentioning my experience with it...]
Something similar happened with my brother-in-law as the alleged victim and his aunt as the dupe. Unfortunately, the criminals actually got some money out of her.
The site runs on PHPbb, which stores the IP address of the poster in the phpbb_posts table right along with the post metadata for each post. It also stores a user's e-mail address in the phpbb_users table to enable password reset, even if the address isn't made public in the user's profile. Both features are helpful for tracking down abuse.
It would be possible to erase the IP addresses and e-mail addresses with a simple manual SQL query; but that would take a deliberate effort, and remove those users' abilities to reset their passwords.
Of course, the court's ruling doesn't guarantee that those IP addresses and e-mail addresses are very easy to connect to the poster...
The USDA, like the FDA for humans, has the power to stop the sale of veterinary products that would give misleading or false results; so they could stop the sale of this teest for any other purpose. The reason they're doing this, however, is crazy; if the people deciding to take this stance are above the civil service, I hope we vote them out next month.
The last two presidential elections were given to Bush because of fraud.
The last two elections were very close, and Mr. Bush came into office both times because of technical details in the way the system worked; which is not fraud.
In 2000, Mr. Clinton's personal antics and his success at actually passing NAFTA made him a weak asset, and a lot of people didn't care about the president in the final months before the dot-com crash, when everything looked cheery.
In 2004, the Democratic primary produced a candidate who actually looked a lot like the sitting president. Perhaps a some voters thought it was better to leave Mr. Bush in office for four more years and let him dig his hole deeper, and then vote for real change. The biggest sins of the Bush administration are the detainments at GuantÃnamo bay, the over-zealousness to perform military action in Iraq (I won't call it "going to war" because we already had the no-fly zone, the embargo, etc.), and the sudden selective enforcement of immigration laws instead of giving time and real effort to a logical reform and legalization effort.
I supported Mr. McCain in the republican primary in Michigan; but I've since decided that I supported him only because he was the candidate most like Mr. Obama. I'm still glad McCain is running, however, because it will make the debates more interesting. I hope a lot of people watch the debates.
Some of the things a parliamentary body can do with a committee are pretty cool. A couple of examples:
1. In 1913, the dictator Victoriano Huerta was president of Mexico. He gave the congress an ultimatum: dissolve themselves, or he would dissolve them. The communication was read to a quorum of the body; they referred the matter to a committee and passed a motion to adjourn. Shortly thereafter most of the congressmen were arrested, but the congress was technically not dissolved because they had not acted on the motion.
2. Just a couple weeks ago, my city council voted unanimously to deny an application to erect a cell-phone tower in a certain residential neighborhood. After the vote, the chair of the committee stated that the committee had thought it might be a good idea to develop a master plan identifying areas that actually would be good locations for cell-phone towers within the city boundaries. The council president moved to "receive the report", which means exactly nothing.
Most governmental bodies (both legsilative and judicial) have a lot of different ways to not do something. Sometimes that's a good thing; both sides in a dispute can be angry at the government until they both grow up, or move to another city, or something.
I used to use perl one-liners for simple arithmetic. Then I used bsh. Then I used JavaScript. Eventually I discovered that python had the least startup time and the easiest syntax in interactive mode. I do less simple arithmetic now that GNUcash supports expressions in numeric fields.
Speaking of Wine, I don't use it a lot. I have some Windows foreign-language-study programs that run just fine under it. Some Windows games run all right under it; the occasional crash is part of the fun:). The one application I'd like to see working better is Personal Ancestral File, but the Linux alternatives are competitive. I use OpenOffice or Koffice or emacs for office stuff, and write new software in perl or Java or C#, all of which are cross-platform.
If you redirect email for your domain name to Hotmail, chances are good that it will disappear without a trace. (No NDR, not in the spam box either.)
If you have a DynDNS account, chances are good that you don't forward all your e-mail to a HotMail account. In fact, you might run your own mailserver; in that case, you can make sure that your own server returns whatever bounce messages you feel are appropriate. Even the forwarding service will normally be pointed at RFC-compliant servers, which may choose to generate bounce messages in some cases.
In other words, if someone misdirects e-mail to my.handle@my.vanity.domain instead of my.h4ndle@my.vanity.domain, it might get lost with no error-message... but since it's your domain, you can define as many e-mail addresses as you want within it. On the other hand, if someone starts sending a lot of mail to bogus addresses at your domain with forged return addresses, they gain no information and DynDNS doesn't generate annoying misdirected bounces to a lot of third parties.
I am a happy DynDNS customer, but I don't use any of their mail services at the moment.
See, the reason I don't like your analogy is because, unlike math, English (or whatever your native language may be) is something you are constantly exposed to, and you will use it every single day of your life, [...]
You cannot make the same argument for math. It is rarely used by anyone; only a small subset of people use it for their professions, and another small percentage find it of personal interest. But the majority of people never encounter math beyond arithmetic outside the classroom -- and because of that, they forget what they allegedly learned.
There are a lot of opportunities for the typical adult in a modern, democratic society to use math:
Balancing a checkbook; writing a budget; making change (it's true that this part is just arithmetic)
Do-it-yourself home and vehicle repairs (trigonometry)
Calculating risk and future rates of return for personal finance (the relevant statistical and growth formulae can be calculated using arithmetic, but they are easier to understand or re-derive after studying calculus)
Understanding population growth, global warming, the national debt
Evaluating statistical arguments when serving on a jury
The calculus is a beautiful system; but the students in a calculus class also get to review arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry, and might see some statistics in passing.
Now perhaps it's true that only video-game programmers, physicists and (civil, mechanical, electrical) engineers need to use calculus in their jobs. However, anyone who manages money or people (whether as a small-business owner, a supervisor, an accountant, a politician, or in a position of trust in a non-profit organization) can use all the mathematical training provided by a rigorous 4-year high-school math curriculum.
Getting back to quadratic equations: I think that part of algebra is widely used as a "weeder" subject. First students are taught to solve quadratic equations by a mixture of guesswork, intuition and algebraic manipulations. After a few chapters (or perhaps even a couple years, in a non-college-prep curriculum) students are taught a big formula that can solve any quadratic equation. In trigonometry and calculus (including 3rd-semester college calculus), many of the homework and test problems reduce to... quadratic equations. One reason is that quadratic equations really do describe a lot of possible situations in plane geometry and simple physics; but another reason is that a certain set of students have learned to quickly derive an exact solution to a large class of quadratic equations, perhaps because they were good at arithmetic in elementary school or perhaps (like me) because they had fun solving mathematical problems at some point and decided to stick it out through all the rough spots. I think I had to solve a quadratic equation exactly once during graduate school, in a qualifying exam. I have not yet solved one since.
I imagine network TV companies would be VERY offended if advertisments were inserted over, in or around their own presented material and web based business should be expected to have the same offense taken.
Have you watched TV recently? It's very common for a broadcaster to insert their logo in one corner of a broadcast, or do announce the next show as a voice-over during the credits. Network shows are shown mixed with local ads. This could be viewed as the same sort of thing.
On the other hand, there are a lot of other low-skilled jobs that Mexican men who have contacts in this country (possibly after working as migrants for part of the time) are taking:
Grounds maintenance
Construction
Fast food
Truck driving
The nature of migrant labor is that it's not year-round; perhaps some workers take a six-month unemployed "vacation" in Mexico every year during the off season, but I'm sure many of them have other jobs, either here or there.
Some UNIX systems are configured with a umask of 022, which means that, by default, new files are readable by all users and everyone. I remember having an account on a university computer science department's shared instructional system that was so configured. Now, as far as I know, that system was not running an HTTP server that made home directories available on a public IP address (just the public_html folder), but if I had put an MP3 file in my home directory, anyone in the department could have copied it using SSH.
I think the system administrator eventually changed the settings on that system to cut down on plagiarism; but there are a lot of ways to share a file, and may of them do not necessarily involve a single defining act that everyone would naturally think of as "putting" or "publishing".
If you already have hundreds of heterogeneous systems, you don't want to add another authentication system, another logging system, and a whopping security hole. Better to see if existing tools can do the job, as much as possible.
I've been thinking about doing a project like this. I would probably use rdist+ssh/nfs/samba to copy the files to a central host, and run a cron job that calls a Perl script to check in changes regularly, only if something has changed; perhaps along with selections from the logfiles of the machine where the change happened. I would probably use SVN as the version-control system. However, those are the just the tools that I'm most familiar with; I'm sure many other tools could be used to accomplish this task.
I can tell you read the patent. However, I'm not sure how compiled-in breakpoints are more useful than the ability of most debuggers to replace just about any instruction with a breakpoint. It might be helpful to avoid triggering spurious bugs during debugging on highly-pipelined instruction sets;...
I also noticed that the patent-writer listed gcc as a compiler that could (with suitable modifications) produce code that would be a use of the patent. Talk about adding insult to injury!
I should probably go look in the Wine debugging macros and see if any of them could be considered prior art for this...
Right now my laptop's boot procedure after being accidentally unplugged is roughly as follows:
Lilo prompt shows up - 1 sec.
Select "Linux", or wait for timeout - 3 to 10 sec.
Load kernel, mount the ext3fs root partition - 3-4 sec.
fsck a VFAT partition - 20 sec.
wait for me to select what network I'm connected to - 3 sec (no timeout)
modprobe the network adapter, mount network drives, etc. - 2 to 12 sec.
start daemons (MySQL, VMware, Apache) - 10 sec.
start X and kdm - 20 sec.
start fvwm and gnome-panel - 3 sec
move gnome-panel back to the bottom of the screen - 5 sec
start Iceweasel and restore crashed session - 5 sec
There are a number of things here I could probably optimize; on the other hand, if I actually used standard GNOME or KDE, it might take more like 20 seconds to start all the applets and desktop-daemons upon login.
If I restore from suspend-to-disk instead of booting cold, the display shows garbage for about 30 seconds while all programs get loaded from the swap file.
It's been a while since I had Windows 2000 running on this same model of laptop. I seem to remember that the boot procedure was faster initially, but it took time closer to this when I installed MySQL and Apache to run as system services and made other software changes.
The fastest login I've ever seen (to a real desktop environment, not just a raw X server) was CDE on a SparcStation. The slowest login I've ever seen was Windows 2000 in a university library where all accounts were heavily locked down using group policy and profiles.
Linux could probably load and log in just as fast as Windows on similar hardware if the X server were started directly from init, instead of waiting for a couple-dozen daemons to load first.
In the last apartment I lived in, we had outages of both the cable modem and the land-line phone at different times. I carry a cell phone for emergencies.
During one interview for my current job, I stated that I read Slashdot for the news of new technology, and I still got hired. Not that I read it regularly at work or anything...
You actually can register a domain with a PO box and an e-mail address at the same domain. If you have a good relationship with your hosting-company, you can list their phone number as the tech-contact phone. What really annoyed me when I used to try finding the sources of fraudulent spam on a regular basis was the domains that had been registered with an unrelated third party's address--- possibly just randomly pulled off the 'net. You don't even need a valid postal address to register a domain; you can flip open to a random page of the White Pages and borrow someone's identity, and some registrars will let you keep the domain for at least a month or two even in the face of repeated complaints.
Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?
I think that, because of the history of the United States, it has always been necessary to work with people who held other beliefs to actually get anything done in government. The "George-W-Bush-ish" attitude that U.S. Social Security, the U.S. military, IAEA-regulated nuclear power and a Southern Baptist minister praying at political conventions are what every country needs will probably die after the next election; but the younger generations have a high number or religious believers who also express political opinions. Contrary to the (joking) OP's opinion, I think those politically- and religiously-active younger people would rather see a devout Muslim in public office than an atheist, or even than a Sunday-only "Christian" politician.
The PGP protocol is designed for encrypting entire messages, not single keystrokes;
A lot of places with public-access computers don't want people plugging in their own keyboards; or at least such activity would look suspicious;
There is no way to securely read the response if it contains confidential information (like a bank balance or internal memo)
Now, there might be a use for a device that pgp-encrypts a message and sends it to a keyboard-dongle so so the encrypted text can be entered in a random webmail account. Said device could also be designed to self-destruct after repeated attempted use by someone who doesn't know the passphrase. I don't know how big the market for such a device would be, when most of the problems it could solve would be better solved by a laptop running a security-hardened operating system, and used laptops can be had pretty cheaply.
Even a lot of their non-security issues would be solved by separate user accounts, so that they could have individual bookmarks, email client configs, etc.
Per-user accounds are nice, and an important part of security (keeping each person accountable) in an enterprise environment; but there are reasons why someone might not want them at home:
Added hassle of logging on/off (and it might take a lot of time on an older computer)
Lack of knowledge about how to share data-files that really need to be shared (Mom and Dad both want to look at and make entries in the checkbook; everyone should have at least read-only access to the geneaology database)
Sometimes, a program doesn't run properly in a multi-user environment. For instance, SimCity 2000 stores the registration-key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software, and so it thinks it's unlicensed if run from a user acount other than the one used to install it.
It makes it harder for Mom and Dad to make sure Johnny isn't looking at pr0n or planning some illegal or dangerous activity. "Why is 'www.sexkittens.com' in the history-list of [the web browser]?" Now, the real solutions to this are 1 - prior education/good example and 2 - transparent proxy with logging and filtering on the firewall, but there might be a perception that a child would get into trouble easier with a personal account.
It makes it harder to share a cool bookmark or desktop-photo with a loved-one.
I still think per-user accounts are best-practice even in a home environment, but the best time to sell them to someone is with a new computer or operating-system, and it's certainly possible to have a secure shared account on a family computer. Others have already pointed out the difference in expected time-to-own1ng based on an insecure OS, an unsecured OS or a physically unsecured home, so I won't repeat their statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
All right, that's F5 in VS, but most of the time in Emacs I wouldn't actually type "make"; my keystrokes would be:
However, if I wanted to run compilation in emacs upon pushing F5, I'd add the following line to my .emacs:
(global-set-key [f5] 'compile)
Plus, the IDE indicated I had a syntax error as I was typing it, and the code completion prevented me from making another one; and when the class I was trying to instantiate didn't get colored as a 'type' by the syntax highlighter that I knew was correct I immediately knew I hadn't included it in this file.
I've never gotten code-completion to work in Emacs (except for typeless XML, with nxml-mode); but it has syntax-highlighting for a lot of languages. Code-completion is nice for large projects and using unfamiliar libraries, but it's also annoying sometimes, because the visual effects get in the way of my thought-pattern.
And when the app compiled there was a compiler warning; in the IDE a double click on the warning took me right to the source line in the editor, [...]
The Emacs "compile" commmand can do this.
[Not arguing with you in particular, because you never said that Emacs isn't an IDE; just mentioning my experience with it...]
Something similar happened with my brother-in-law as the alleged victim and his aunt as the dupe. Unfortunately, the criminals actually got some money out of her.
It would be possible to erase the IP addresses and e-mail addresses with a simple manual SQL query; but that would take a deliberate effort, and remove those users' abilities to reset their passwords.
Of course, the court's ruling doesn't guarantee that those IP addresses and e-mail addresses are very easy to connect to the poster...
Hey, I played that game when I was a kid! I spent a lot of time trying to beat it! (I never did finish a level)
The USDA, like the FDA for humans, has the power to stop the sale of veterinary products that would give misleading or false results; so they could stop the sale of this teest for any other purpose. The reason they're doing this, however, is crazy; if the people deciding to take this stance are above the civil service, I hope we vote them out next month.
The last two elections were very close, and Mr. Bush came into office both times because of technical details in the way the system worked; which is not fraud.
In 2000, Mr. Clinton's personal antics and his success at actually passing NAFTA made him a weak asset, and a lot of people didn't care about the president in the final months before the dot-com crash, when everything looked cheery.
In 2004, the Democratic primary produced a candidate who actually looked a lot like the sitting president. Perhaps a some voters thought it was better to leave Mr. Bush in office for four more years and let him dig his hole deeper, and then vote for real change. The biggest sins of the Bush administration are the detainments at GuantÃnamo bay, the over-zealousness to perform military action in Iraq (I won't call it "going to war" because we already had the no-fly zone, the embargo, etc.), and the sudden selective enforcement of immigration laws instead of giving time and real effort to a logical reform and legalization effort.
I supported Mr. McCain in the republican primary in Michigan; but I've since decided that I supported him only because he was the candidate most like Mr. Obama. I'm still glad McCain is running, however, because it will make the debates more interesting. I hope a lot of people watch the debates.
1. In 1913, the dictator Victoriano Huerta was president of Mexico. He gave the congress an ultimatum: dissolve themselves, or he would dissolve them. The communication was read to a quorum of the body; they referred the matter to a committee and passed a motion to adjourn. Shortly thereafter most of the congressmen were arrested, but the congress was technically not dissolved because they had not acted on the motion.
2. Just a couple weeks ago, my city council voted unanimously to deny an application to erect a cell-phone tower in a certain residential neighborhood. After the vote, the chair of the committee stated that the committee had thought it might be a good idea to develop a master plan identifying areas that actually would be good locations for cell-phone towers within the city boundaries. The council president moved to "receive the report", which means exactly nothing.
Most governmental bodies (both legsilative and judicial) have a lot of different ways to not do something. Sometimes that's a good thing; both sides in a dispute can be angry at the government until they both grow up, or move to another city, or something.
Speaking of Wine, I don't use it a lot. I have some Windows foreign-language-study programs that run just fine under it. Some Windows games run all right under it; the occasional crash is part of the fun :). The one application I'd like to see working better is Personal Ancestral File, but the Linux alternatives are competitive. I use OpenOffice or Koffice or emacs for office stuff, and write new software in perl or Java or C#, all of which are cross-platform.
If you have a DynDNS account, chances are good that you don't forward all your e-mail to a HotMail account. In fact, you might run your own mailserver; in that case, you can make sure that your own server returns whatever bounce messages you feel are appropriate. Even the forwarding service will normally be pointed at RFC-compliant servers, which may choose to generate bounce messages in some cases.
In other words, if someone misdirects e-mail to my.handle@my.vanity.domain instead of my.h4ndle@my.vanity.domain, it might get lost with no error-message... but since it's your domain, you can define as many e-mail addresses as you want within it. On the other hand, if someone starts sending a lot of mail to bogus addresses at your domain with forged return addresses, they gain no information and DynDNS doesn't generate annoying misdirected bounces to a lot of third parties.
I am a happy DynDNS customer, but I don't use any of their mail services at the moment.
See, the reason I don't like your analogy is because, unlike math, English (or whatever your native language may be) is something you are constantly exposed to, and you will use it every single day of your life, [...]
You cannot make the same argument for math. It is rarely used by anyone; only a small subset of people use it for their professions, and another small percentage find it of personal interest. But the majority of people never encounter math beyond arithmetic outside the classroom -- and because of that, they forget what they allegedly learned.
There are a lot of opportunities for the typical adult in a modern, democratic society to use math:
- Balancing a checkbook; writing a budget; making change (it's true that this part is just arithmetic)
- Do-it-yourself home and vehicle repairs (trigonometry)
- Calculating risk and future rates of return for personal finance (the relevant statistical and growth formulae can be calculated using arithmetic, but they are easier to understand or re-derive after studying calculus)
- Understanding population growth, global warming, the national debt
- Evaluating statistical arguments when serving on a jury
The calculus is a beautiful system; but the students in a calculus class also get to review arithmetic, geometry and trigonometry, and might see some statistics in passing.Now perhaps it's true that only video-game programmers, physicists and (civil, mechanical, electrical) engineers need to use calculus in their jobs. However, anyone who manages money or people (whether as a small-business owner, a supervisor, an accountant, a politician, or in a position of trust in a non-profit organization) can use all the mathematical training provided by a rigorous 4-year high-school math curriculum.
Getting back to quadratic equations: I think that part of algebra is widely used as a "weeder" subject. First students are taught to solve quadratic equations by a mixture of guesswork, intuition and algebraic manipulations. After a few chapters (or perhaps even a couple years, in a non-college-prep curriculum) students are taught a big formula that can solve any quadratic equation. In trigonometry and calculus (including 3rd-semester college calculus), many of the homework and test problems reduce to ... quadratic equations. One reason is that quadratic equations really do describe a lot of possible situations in plane geometry and simple physics; but another reason is that a certain set of students have learned to quickly derive an exact solution to a large class of quadratic equations, perhaps because they were good at arithmetic in elementary school or perhaps (like me) because they had fun solving mathematical problems at some point and decided to stick it out through all the rough spots. I think I had to solve a quadratic equation exactly once during graduate school, in a qualifying exam. I have not yet solved one since.
Incidentally, the word is "mnemonic".
Have you watched TV recently? It's very common for a broadcaster to insert their logo in one corner of a broadcast, or do announce the next show as a voice-over during the credits. Network shows are shown mixed with local ads. This could be viewed as the same sort of thing.
- Grounds maintenance
- Construction
- Fast food
- Truck driving
The nature of migrant labor is that it's not year-round; perhaps some workers take a six-month unemployed "vacation" in Mexico every year during the off season, but I'm sure many of them have other jobs, either here or there.Some UNIX systems are configured with a umask of 022, which means that, by default, new files are readable by all users and everyone. I remember having an account on a university computer science department's shared instructional system that was so configured. Now, as far as I know, that system was not running an HTTP server that made home directories available on a public IP address (just the public_html folder), but if I had put an MP3 file in my home directory, anyone in the department could have copied it using SSH. I think the system administrator eventually changed the settings on that system to cut down on plagiarism; but there are a lot of ways to share a file, and may of them do not necessarily involve a single defining act that everyone would naturally think of as "putting" or "publishing".
I've been thinking about doing a project like this. I would probably use rdist+ssh/nfs/samba to copy the files to a central host, and run a cron job that calls a Perl script to check in changes regularly, only if something has changed; perhaps along with selections from the logfiles of the machine where the change happened. I would probably use SVN as the version-control system. However, those are the just the tools that I'm most familiar with; I'm sure many other tools could be used to accomplish this task.
I also noticed that the patent-writer listed gcc as a compiler that could (with suitable modifications) produce code that would be a use of the patent. Talk about adding insult to injury!
I should probably go look in the Wine debugging macros and see if any of them could be considered prior art for this...
- Lilo prompt shows up - 1 sec.
- Select "Linux", or wait for timeout - 3 to 10 sec.
- Load kernel, mount the ext3fs root partition - 3-4 sec.
- fsck a VFAT partition - 20 sec.
- wait for me to select what network I'm connected to - 3 sec (no timeout)
- modprobe the network adapter, mount network drives, etc. - 2 to 12 sec.
- start daemons (MySQL, VMware, Apache) - 10 sec.
- start X and kdm - 20 sec.
- start fvwm and gnome-panel - 3 sec
- move gnome-panel back to the bottom of the screen - 5 sec
- start Iceweasel and restore crashed session - 5 sec
There are a number of things here I could probably optimize; on the other hand, if I actually used standard GNOME or KDE, it might take more like 20 seconds to start all the applets and desktop-daemons upon login.If I restore from suspend-to-disk instead of booting cold, the display shows garbage for about 30 seconds while all programs get loaded from the swap file.
It's been a while since I had Windows 2000 running on this same model of laptop. I seem to remember that the boot procedure was faster initially, but it took time closer to this when I installed MySQL and Apache to run as system services and made other software changes.
The fastest login I've ever seen (to a real desktop environment, not just a raw X server) was CDE on a SparcStation. The slowest login I've ever seen was Windows 2000 in a university library where all accounts were heavily locked down using group policy and profiles.
Linux could probably load and log in just as fast as Windows on similar hardware if the X server were started directly from init, instead of waiting for a couple-dozen daemons to load first.
In the last apartment I lived in, we had outages of both the cable modem and the land-line phone at different times. I carry a cell phone for emergencies.
During one interview for my current job, I stated that I read Slashdot for the news of new technology, and I still got hired. Not that I read it regularly at work or anything...
You actually can register a domain with a PO box and an e-mail address at the same domain. If you have a good relationship with your hosting-company, you can list their phone number as the tech-contact phone. What really annoyed me when I used to try finding the sources of fraudulent spam on a regular basis was the domains that had been registered with an unrelated third party's address--- possibly just randomly pulled off the 'net. You don't even need a valid postal address to register a domain; you can flip open to a random page of the White Pages and borrow someone's identity, and some registrars will let you keep the domain for at least a month or two even in the face of repeated complaints.
I think that, because of the history of the United States, it has always been necessary to work with people who held other beliefs to actually get anything done in government. The "George-W-Bush-ish" attitude that U.S. Social Security, the U.S. military, IAEA-regulated nuclear power and a Southern Baptist minister praying at political conventions are what every country needs will probably die after the next election; but the younger generations have a high number or religious believers who also express political opinions. Contrary to the (joking) OP's opinion, I think those politically- and religiously-active younger people would rather see a devout Muslim in public office than an atheist, or even than a Sunday-only "Christian" politician.
- The PGP protocol is designed for encrypting entire messages, not single keystrokes;
- A lot of places with public-access computers don't want people plugging in their own keyboards; or at least such activity would look suspicious;
- There is no way to securely read the response if it contains confidential information (like a bank balance or internal memo)
Now, there might be a use for a device that pgp-encrypts a message and sends it to a keyboard-dongle so so the encrypted text can be entered in a random webmail account. Said device could also be designed to self-destruct after repeated attempted use by someone who doesn't know the passphrase. I don't know how big the market for such a device would be, when most of the problems it could solve would be better solved by a laptop running a security-hardened operating system, and used laptops can be had pretty cheaply.Slashcode probably uses a MySQL "MEDIUMINT UNSIGNED" column to hold the parent id.
Per-user accounds are nice, and an important part of security (keeping each person accountable) in an enterprise environment; but there are reasons why someone might not want them at home:
- Added hassle of logging on/off (and it might take a lot of time on an older computer)
- Lack of knowledge about how to share data-files that really need to be shared (Mom and Dad both want to look at and make entries in the checkbook; everyone should have at least read-only access to the geneaology database)
- Sometimes, a program doesn't run properly in a multi-user environment. For instance, SimCity 2000 stores the registration-key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software, and so it thinks it's unlicensed if run from a user acount other than the one used to install it.
- It makes it harder for Mom and Dad to make sure Johnny isn't looking at pr0n or planning some illegal or dangerous activity. "Why is 'www.sexkittens.com' in the history-list of [the web browser]?" Now, the real solutions to this are 1 - prior education/good example and 2 - transparent proxy with logging and filtering on the firewall, but there might be a perception that a child would get into trouble easier with a personal account.
- It makes it harder to share a cool bookmark or desktop-photo with a loved-one.
I still think per-user accounts are best-practice even in a home environment, but the best time to sell them to someone is with a new computer or operating-system, and it's certainly possible to have a secure shared account on a family computer. Others have already pointed out the difference in expected time-to-own1ng based on an insecure OS, an unsecured OS or a physically unsecured home, so I won't repeat their statistics.