Lots of people have commented on how incredibly stupid these people are. I don't think it's quite that simple.

I think that they're just scared. There's so much fear in our culture, people are scared of health care, scared of a black president, scared of terrorists, scared of oil prices, scared of cell phone companies, scared of pirates (the Somalian kind), scared of pirates (the MPAA kind), scared of the RIAA and MPAA, scared of swine flu, scared of unemployment, scared of having a job that doesn't pay a living wage, scared of peanuts, scared of global warming, scared of pollution, scared of home invasions, scared of floods, earthquakes and fires, scared of nuts with guns, scared of the government taking away everyone's guns.

Fear makes you irrational. It suppresses the "carefully think about the situation" part of your brain, and supercharges the "fight or flight" part. If people stopped to think rationally about it, they would realize it is fiction. But the fear prevents them from thinking rationally.

We live in a constant state of fear, and our culture (or our media, depending on how you look at it) keeps giving us more reasons to be afraid.

What we need is more reason to be hopeful, not fearful. If we remove the irrational fears about health care, presidents, terrorists, MPAA, pirates, global warming, etc., then we would also have fewer irrational fears about the planet Nimbus crashing into Earth on December 21st, 2012.

I agree. I haven't tried all the others, but I use and am happy with PasswordSafe. It's native Windows only, but there is a Java version by someone else which works just fine on Linux x86 (and x64 with some hacking). I don't think the Java one works on other Linux platforms, since it uses JNI and requires some native libraries.

And that's exactly what the problem is. Call the media companies, the same ones that have a huge financial incentive to back a "copyright" law which gives the media companies unprecedented powers to take and keep our money. The media organizations are the ones that have been lobbying for this kind of power. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot by telling the public about it?

People keep saying "We'll just tell the general public, and the general public will revolt!" That's silly. The general public is very strongly influenced by media, advertising, propaganda. The people who are the best at producing this propaganda as well as the communicaiton channels are under the control of those who have a financial stake in getting more and more control.

Asking "the media" in general to work against stricter copyright controls is like asking Fox News to work against the Republican party. It ain't gonna happen.

Godwin's law has just trumped Asimov's laws.

<quote><p>"Yes, if your primary concern is 'how do I share my mobile internet connection with others,'"</p><p>Well, if that's not your primary concern, why bother with a Wifi router? </p></quote>

Because the ExpressCard or USB dongle is Windows only, and you use a Mac or Linux machine.
Or there are x86 Linux drivers, and your Linux laptop is ARM based.
Or your laptop is Windows 64-bit, and the only drivers available are 32-bit.
Or your company's laptop is configured to not let you install device drivers.
Or you only get good cell reception near the window, but the comfortable chair is close to the fireplace.
Or the only way to get cell reception at your cabin in the woods is to attach your MiFi router to a balloon and suspend it 300' in the air.
Or the router may include a firewall, which makes it a little harder for the evil ones to own your machine.

The word for that is "sacntions", not "terrorism". And I think that, in general, history does not agree with Isaac Asimov. See Cuba for example.

However, you do raise a good point about "things that affect them directly". I think terrorism, to be effective, requires people to think that it could have affected them. So a random car bomb that kills 10 people is terrifying, because people think they could have been one of those people. On the other hand, thousands of people dying each year because they drink and drive is not frightening, because everyone thinks "I don't do that, so I'm safe".

So terrorism is all about large things that affect other people who are just like you, and make you think it could have affected you just as easily.

Windows is generally not happy about allowing applications to write to the boot sector, partly to avoid viruses, and partly because it just isn't designed to support that information changing while it is running. Basically, Windows will happily swap out info which it thinks will never change, and re-read it when needed. If you've changed it by installing a boot loader, it gets very confused (blue-screen).

It may be possible to do this through the "do cool stuff during boot up" API (which is used for scandisk and some defrag tools), but it wouldn't be very easy.

Even if you don't have a CD burner and blank CD, you can boot from a USB drive as well. I usually download the 50 MB Debian "netinst" image onto a USB flash drive, boot it, and then run the net install.

I disagree. None of those situations you describe are terrifying. They are annoying. Disrupting the banking system means people don't get access to their assets for days or even weeks until it's straightened out. But it is eventually straightened out, and rational people know that. They also know that losing their money is not the same as literally losing an arm and a leg (as happens when you stand too close to an exploding bomb).

Even things like shutting down power or communications can cause deaths, but they are secondary deaths (e.g. people freeze to death because of no power, or preventable deaths happen because first responders didn't get there in time), and that just doesn't have the same emotional impact.

Causing crashes of mass transit is the only situation you described which I think qualify as terrorism, since it involves blood, gore, flames and people who are obviously and undeniably dead because of this action.

The thing we forget is that terrorism is NOT about killing the maximum number of people. It is about terrifying people so much that they lose all hope and stop wanting to fight back. Annoying people (even if it does cause some deaths) makes people want to fight more, and thus goes against the purpose.

"Terrorism" requires terror, not inconvenience or annoyance.

A few years back, we had an accidental shutdown of the power supply of most of the eastern North America. It was very inconvenient, and it cost a huge amount of money, and it even resulted in the loss of some lives. But it wasn't terrifying. It was just annoying.

It's not about the amount of damage, it's about the effect. A cyberterror event like a power or communications failure could result in hundreds of deaths, but there's nothing to focus on. A car exploding next to a bistro may only kill two or three people, but it is far more effective terrorism.

For terrorism to be effective, it has to produce terror. That's an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. And to get that emotional reaction, there has to be real tangible threats, like flames, blood and gore, falling rocks, etc.

We tried positive visualization, prayer beads, and yelling really loud at the routers. Nothing worked. I guess we'll have to implement traffic shaping now.

Nonsense. The Linux machine will still be booted up, because Linux doesn't require you to reboot it every day if you want it to continue to work. The Windows 7 fish will be staring at them from the inside of a virtual machine. They will continue to use Linux for all their productivity work, and mouse over that VM window every once in a while when they want to play a game or run that one useful program which only runs under Windows.

It's quite common for depression to begin late in life, after you have already had children.

Also, for men at least, a trait that has a small chance of great success can be valuable. If there is a trait that will kill 90% of the men who have it, but make the remaining 10% so spectacularly attractive to women that each of those men father 15 or 20 children (ideally to be raised by some other guy who thinks he is the father), then that genetic trait is evolutionally successful, even though it kills 90% of the men.

It's the same idea as risk-taking in men being an evolutionary advantage. It doesn't matter if a trait is good for an individual, it matters if it is good for the entire group which has that trait.

PS: I notice that the parent post didn't actually mention evolution, so I may be answering a completely different question. But I think it's an interesting answer, even if it doesn't apply to the question asked. :-)

It is not hypocritical at all (although it may be a bit ironic). A hallmark of civilization everywhere is the idea that the state, as embodied by the government, has a monopoly on violence. Only the state can use violence against someone. If a citizen has a disagreement with another citizen, they must bring that disagreement to the state (the police or courts), and if appropriate, the state will use violence to resolve it.

It is perfectly normal and reasonable for a government to use violence for its own ends, and at the same time take measures to prevent its citizens from using violence for their ends.

I'm not saying Chavez's use of violence is just, fair, or even sensible. I'm also not saying the idea of restricting video games is reasonable or likely to be effective in reducing violence. I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with Chavez' government attempting to reduce violence by citizens.

In other words: the plan is stupid, but not hypocritical.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't have problems getting support on Linux from the Linux community.. Debian Ubuntu has the greatest and friendliest support people in the world.

Can you prove you got poor or non-existing support for Linux? Show us screen-shots, chat logs, and e-mail exchanges, or we won't believe you.

You want to hear about poor support? Try calling Microsoft tech support. They completely suck. I once called Microsoft tech support and I was on hold for 13 hours, and then I got connected to some loser who can't speak English. Of course I only called to swear at him, so I yelled abuse at him and hung up. But I had to wait 13 hours first. That sucks. If you want to yell abuse at a Linux support person, you can call Linus himself any time of the day or night, and he'll thank you for your suggestion.

The Linux community is great. I think you don't have any problems getting support for Linux, or if you do, it is because you are rude, stupid, and useless.

The article itself started out by oversimplifying the test. It would be an astounding coincidence if the test had both a 10% false-positive and a 10% false-negative rate. In fact, any normal test has a very different false-positive and false-negative rate. People who describe the test should mention both, not this meaningless "90% accurate" number.

The BBC article, while claiming to want to reduce confusion, actually perpetuates the problem by using the meaningless "90%" number instead of the specific positive and negative failure rates. If every article describing tests would quote both failure rates, that would go a long way to getting people to understanding the situation.