Not good enough. Lexical analysis, dictionary analysis, etc produce enough information to be used as a piece of evidence in court and have been used in court for decades long before the Internet.

They are not reliable enough by itself, but taken together with other indirect evidence they can tip the scales towards a conviction.

Do we like it or not with the mobile market we for the first time have a set of places where stats can be collected from (usually for some money). Outside mobile market it is a complete jungle with most stats based on guesswork and secondary evidence.

SMS in its classic form is justified to be expensive. It does not travel as mere data. It on the network as Intelligent Network messages which are transactional and reliably transmitted on a per-hop basis taking in each case signalling processing resource. Once it gets through the core network to the radio it once again travels on the signalling channels where the capacity is extremely limited and is at premium. It is once again reliably transmitted and the acknowledge once again goes back with hop-per-hip reliable transmit to the SMSC. If the sender has enabled message receipts, that repeats twice just for good measure. In all cases it uses signalling capacity and signalling processing which costs an arm, a leg and a prosthetic because it is originally designed to deal with voice call setup, billing, mobility, authentication - all things that need to work 100% of the time.

If you want to design the most expensive technical way to transmit a message in a mobile network that is SMS. It was designed as a "cool, see what we can do with it" and nobody had a clue how popular it will become. If the people who designed it had an idea of how popular it will be they would have never designed it that way.

Now at some point someone devised as nice scam by making it possible for handsets to use GPRS to transmit/receive SMS messages straight from the SMSC. That is a scam because it costs under 1% of what SMS costs to transmit while it is being billed the same. However, I have so far seen only one operator to enable this feature. Most just stick with good old signalling capacity for this because it gives them a technical justification to charge the premium for it. You see - it actually costs us to transmit it that much.

It is the same story as with not using divert to temporary ISDN numbers in international roaming which has been in the GSM standard for 15 years now. If it is used a call between two roaming handsets in the same country will not need to be routed back to the home country. So there will be no justification to charge an exorbitant roaming premium from dolts arranging where to get and get hammered while gunning down the piste at 40mph. However, because it is not enabled by any operator, they can happily charge crazy roaming fees for such calls and these charges make up a very tidy sum for operators in tourist countries like Austria, Spain or Greece.

The assumption is that a troll has mood disorder so cognitive therapy works.

1. That assumption may be wrong. Some trolls genuinely believe that they are right and will troll so that they can express their righteous beliefs. Reasoning with them is pointless because they do not listen to the voice of reason. They believe in something religiously and will troll for a chance to proselytize. So they are not trolling for flames, they are trolling for listeners.

2. Even if it is right, life is to short. Dealing with a mood disorder through cognitive therapy, psychoanalysis or any other similar technique requires the patience of a python and all the time in the world. Most of us have none of that.

Wrong question, wrong answer.

All major Taiwanese manufacturers have been shipping ARM based devices for years. The only difference as far as they are concerned is that instead of WinCE 3 years ago and Android today they will be shipping Win8. They are not the ones who support the end product and do the software development for it so they could not care less what it actually runs.

There is no ninth amendment in the land of the Magna Charta.

Get a court order and Slashdot quite gladly will.

That is why I post under my real name. In this day and age anyone with sufficient resources can trace any post to you anyway.

The Internet has stopped being anonymous something like 10 years or so ago.

It depends funnily enough.

Try running your PC at different HZ for the OS-es that support it (hint - BSD). You get some very interesting results with unusual HZ like 2000-3000 and when using ACPI timers. Very unusual. In fact so unusual that if you are running the MB "bare" on a desktop with no EM shielding and have audio kit nearby you may want to stick some earplugs in your ears first.

Tested with a Via EPIA motherboard by the way. I needed high HZ and spent half a day swearing until I found a frequency which was good enough and did not wreak havoc around the kit.

I have run motherboards for the last 20 years without grounding them on a regular basis. It is kind'a safe from that perspective. It is better for the motherboard if it is grounded properly, but most work fine anyway. Same for cards, adapters, drives, etc - very few rely on getting a proper ground from the bracket fixings or the fixing bolts.

I am more worried about the cardboard. Is this one properly treated with a flame retardant? If the MB or any of the components smokes for whatever reason is it going to burn merrily or fizzle out.

Big forensic shops do not just use custom firmware. They actually disconnect the head + platter assembly from the original electronics and connect it to a set that has the firmware preloaded. If that fails, there is kit that can recover off the physical platters. Some of this costs an arm, a leg, a tail and a prosthetic.

All of this investment however is wasted on a flash drive. You cannot access flash drives in any other way but via their normal interface at this point. There is simply not enough information out there about the new controllers to build a proper forensic rig that replicates the functionality. However, even access through the controller is enough to recover all "spare sectors" straight away via custom firmware and I bet that the people who "have to have" such firmware already have it.

The do not completely erase when you hit them with a commercial erase tool because the commercial erase tool does not give the drive a chance to "take a breath". If you hit it with a DOD wipe instead of overwriting old blocks the drive will give you new until it runs out of spares and after that will slowly overwrite some old. At the end some data will remain.

You need to hit it with short write bursts which are alternated by rest periods so that the controller can reorganise the flash especially if you use the TRIM ATA command to mark stuff as "really deleted". As a result the data will be wiped to a standard which no hard drive can achieve.

I can write a perl 10-liner that feeds DD to do that in about half an hour. So any geek can erase one. However the commercial and most importantly certified by banking and govt tools cannot just yet. They definitely will as there is no rocket science here. Until this happens you will hear both sides of the story depending who you talk to.

By the way the same will apply to overlapping recording and drives with flash cache. A "dumb" wipe will not wipe them. At the same time a script any sysadmin can write in his spare time can wipe them so effectively that no forensics can get the data back.

In a lot of places around the western world nowdays.

This is a natural result of our "civilisation" frowning on and outright prohibiting parents allowing children to meet Ms Danger and get acquainted with it. It is better to get swindled out of your pocket money a couple of times instead of being swindled out of your salary and life savings a few decades down the road.

I know that I am going to be modded into oblivion, but it is a statement of the fact - there were much less nerds and social misfits in the days when I went to school. Despite the fact that I went to a high school that specializes in sciences and math, the number of nerds we had was nothing out of the ordinary. Today that would have been (and actually is) nerd central. 20 years ago it was a school like any other with the usual 1-2 slightly nerdier kids per each class of 25. However even they boozed, did silly things, partied and made their fair share of social mistakes on par with everyone else.

A Pentium 4 based system from 2003 - 150W+. Probably 200W+ if it is a gaming rig from those days.

An Athlon or Core2 with modern power management and Cool-n-Quiet (or Centrino scaling) used by the OS, modern video card with dynamic clocking, modern disks, etc - sub-60W most of the time (my Athlon with a 2x1TB RAID and an Nvidia Quadro NVS in it measures 50W in idle).

At the retail price for electricity in the UK the difference between that and a 2003 P4 makes 60+ pounds per year for 9-5 use and 120+ pounds for 24x7 use.

P3, Via c3-c7, even K6 are worth being used till this day as they have sub-25W for the motherboard itself on par with a modern Atom or Fusion APU. They can still do a very good job where performance is not crucial especially if coupled to a modern power supply. Pre-2006 P4 as well as Athlons from before the introduction of C&Q are not worth keeping unless they are used like once a year at a summer house or as a spare of last resort. It is cheaper to upgrade the motherboard, RAM and CPU than to keep them on electricity costs alone.

This needs a comparative test via AMD GeoDe with a decent video adapter and Via.

I strongly suspect that it will end up delivering very similar performance to AMD Geode (with proper Video and not the SiS used on most of them). I got a few of those - they pretend to be Athlons, but perform at a fraction of the Athlon speed. They outperform Atom as well despite being 4y old designs.

If you graft one of these onto an on-chip GPU and add a modern chipset support this is what you would get as a result. Not impressed. AMD could do better. It does the job of delivering a competitor to Atom, but as AMD knows that it s not enough. They have to _KILL_ performancewise to be able to compete with Intel.

Also, the benchmarks lack Via just for laughs. Last time I benched its AES it was faster than the best Core (that was before they introduced AES support).

Sigh... That makes what? 4 or 5 different APIs.

Original XvMC
Via XvMC VLD extension
Nvidia - three options - legacy, their bitstream and using CUDA
Intel

Sigh... Can't we just get along and agree on a single standard?