Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date. http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?c2=1131

While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today. It costs more money to sit around whining than it does to get more ram than you know what to do with.

Profiles gone? I don't know what you're talking about. Start any modern firefox with the flags -no-remote to prevent opening another window of an existing firefox instance, and -profilemanager to open the profile management/selection window. I have all my shortcuts changed to start it that way by default.

My mobile has more ram than your computer.

To say that a right is "granted by our creator" is just a rhetorical trick to give legitimacy to a right that most people already agree with.

Let's take "free speech" as the right in question. The western religious zealots agree with it for the most part, but their religion prevents them from declaring arbitrary things to be of critical social importance. Everything true religious believers know and trust has to come from God. So you tell them their God is the source of this right, and all of a sudden they're on board.

Secular humanists or utilitarians or whatever you want to call them don't need that Creator BS, so they just ignore it and agree that free speech is a good idea.

If you pick and choose parts of scripture based on how well it gels with your own intuition, feelings, and with the mores of modern society, then your religion's "teachings" are merely a proxy for things which you already know.

In other news, the Church of Circular Logic wants everyone's holy books back.

Get off your high horse.

Where did someone say that the religions are the same, or compatible? The one comment I saw, which is I think the one you're referring to (since the parent post of your post doesn't talk about the sources of the religions), was that the *wizards* behind the three religions are the same.

Of course the religions are not compatible. That's why a lot of Muslims want Jews dead, Christians dislike Muslims and for the most part consider Jews harmless but misguided in matters of faith, etc. But, factually, the evolution of the three religions stems from the same original mythology, hence they are all three called Abrahamic religions, and they all developed around the same original God concept.

Baptists' invisible wizards discourage the teaching of important aspects of biology and thermodynamics and probability, not to mention discouraging the development of rational critical thought.

Ordering people to kill other people is not the only possible problem with religions.

That's why the model going forward is going to be something like

http://convergence.io/
http://perspectives-project.org/
http://patrol.psyced.org/

It's more than the initial bootstrapping. Almost all cities have semi-exclusive deals with one "cable" and one "telco" provider. Some cities have done away with those exclusive deals, but there's still the non-trivial matter of getting permits and right of way to dig up and install fiber.

Even if the city is not contractually forbidden from granting those rights to new telecom companies, they might still not grant right-of-way on the basis that digging up streets or alleys is a nuisance... and anyway don't people already have telecom service? They don't need another option.

Keep in mind that the people making those decisions on the city level are like the politicians at the federal level who make fun of people who criticize SOPA. Except city politicians are more corrupt and dumber.

I understand that from the viewpoint of local violence being diminished in favor of legal process, but there are two caveats:

First, lack of regular protests, even if they would sometimes turn violent, tends to make the populace unwilling to protest anything. As long as the government keeps the lights on, water running, and internet tubes flowing, pretty much any violation of the constitution or the founding principles or anything else will go unchallenged. Sure, people may write nasty letters to politicians, and in the worst cases politicians might be voted out in the next election. But if the next guy is nearly the same, nothing is gained.

Second, although violence is abhored as a resolution to issues domestically, the U.S. has no problem instigating wars or coups abroad, even if those arguably increase the net violence in those countries.

The standard recommendation I've seen is to overwrite at least 3, perhaps 5, 7, or even 9 times[0], often with a final all-zero overwrite[1] at the end (since an all-zero nominal image might discourage someone from looking harder, while a disk full of random-looking data can only result from a random overwrite or a full-disk encryption system).

The "kill it with fire" technique is more a question of speed and when you can afford to destroy disks. I've heard the NSA burns their disks, and Google physically mangles disks, but consider that those organizations are going to get rid of disks either when the device using them is past its useful lifetime, or when the disk starts failing. At that point the future value of keeping the disk around is low. It's more cost effective to use a quick method that prevents data recovery (of the desired level depending on threat model), rather than tying up computers and personnel in lengthy overwrite procedures when the disk is probably going to be thrown out anyway.

The reason for multiple overwrites is that if you look at absolute magnetic readings from the disk at each bit storage position, it's not digital. Instead of "1" or "0", you might see .998 or .005.

The one in-depth article I read a while back said that an overwrite moves the charge roughly 90% of the way to the opposite value. If a bit was "1" and is overwritten with "0", the new value would be 0.1 Subsequent overwrites similarly attenuate past data. Given disk error rates today, I think 90% is optimistically high.

For the sake of simplicity, if each overwrite pass changes the data value exactly 90% of the way from the current value to the target value, every bit on the disk is going to be either between 0 and 0.1 or between .9 and 1.0. More specifically, there are four possibilities for each bit. If the reading is close to the range 0.00 to 0.01, both the current and last image stored a zero. If the reading is close to the range 0.09 to 0.10, the current image is zero and the last image was a 1. Similarly for 0.90 to 0.91 and 0.99 to 1.00 ranges.

With a perfectly accurate magnetic detector and a HDD write mechanism that is perfectly accurate, and a perfectly linear and resilient magnetic layer on the disk, you could discover past images one by one... once you determine the last image logical value, you apply a function, possibly a linear map, to strip out the computer-visible layer and derive the exact magnetic reading as it would have been before the last overwrite. Repeat, wash, rinse...

The objective of overwriting several times is to push the magnetic differences caused by the last "real" stored data into the range where it's obscured by noise, either noise of the magnetic imager used to take raw magnetic readings, or much more likely, noise of the HDD writing mechanism (it isn't writing a perfect "1" value each time), or noise or imperfections of the magnetic substrate leading to imperfect magnetic storage.

I think recommendations for 35 overwrites, or even 9 overwrites, may be overestimating the capabilities of an adversary. Not because of anything the adversary does, but because of modern hard drives. Data is crammed into such small magnetic wells that the absolute magnetic readings are less consistent than ever before. Given the error rates of modern TB-sized disks, I would expect many blocks with unrecoverable (2+ bit errors per block) read errors upon reconstruction of even the second to last magnetic image. Repeating the process, I would expect errors to increase non-linearly. My WAG is that before 9 overwrites you're in a situation where even a perfect magnetic detector is reading only low-level noise from the drive. (I'm talking about noise from the non-perfect magnetic layer on the disk surface, and fluctuating magnetic field write strength from the drive head.)

[0] see, for instance, http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/310128

[1] An all-zero overwrite simply provides a surface layer of plausible deniability if nobody uses a magnetic imager and instead uses commodity hardware to check drive contents. A disk area filled with statistically random data, AFAIK, has only two causes: 1. a full-disk encryption program in a mode that doesn't use a header (e.g. Truecrypt's hidden containers), or 2) a secure overwrite pass. Both might draw unwanted attention in certain instances, where an all-zero disk might be mistaken for an unused drive.