I might be wrong but I think the poster is talking about crypto export restrictions which made it illegal to export strong encryption in software for a while. They developed a way around it using ActiveX controls that were downloaded by the site rather than built into the browser, that of course only work in IE. When everyone else was switching to other browsers, all the infrastructure used IE only stuff (for encryption, internet banking, etc) therefore IE didn't lose it's spot at the top because no other browser worked with all that stuff.

Again, this is just going by memory, but I think that's about what happened.

Boot sector virus protection is available on most motherboards as far as I can tell. It prevents things from writing to the MBR without confirmation. Windows 7 also seems to popup UAC asking whether you really want to let something write to that area of the HDD from my experience.

Wrong university. OSU is beavers, not ducks (Ducks are UO).

That said, OSUOSL does provide mirrors for a lot of the distros I've downloaded. They apparently host a lot of other stuff for open source projects too.

But if you leave the country, they'll just arrest you and bring you back.

Joking...
(only sort of)...
It's really depressing hearing about cases like this.

That was somewhat true with WEP which used a shared key, but with WPA/WPA2 the attacker must capture the handshake at the beginning of the connection in order to get the session key, so just having access to the network doesn't automatically give someone access to all the data anymore. If you're that paranoid about wifi though, a VPN shouldn't hurt. A VPN also protects from attackers on the wired network too (until it gets to the endpoint).

I think that's probably the size of the web page and all the extra elements in it that's making it feel like 56K. Looking at the article page's it's 102KB for the main page size and 900KB of inline elements. That's a MB of data for rendering what's mostly text.

I get the benefits of the whole dynamic content thing that's been going on a while now but sometimes I just wish it was more of a static page. For someone on a slow connection, it kind of sucks to have all this extra stuff download. The fact that handheld devices now use "screen" instead of "handheld" probably makes it worse by not being able to have separate low-bandwidth styles for mobile (as far as I know, with knowing basic html/css/javascript).

I see two problems with the ink thumb print method:

1. As far as I can tell, ballots in the US are supposed to be secret (as in not linkable to an individual) and having a uniquely identifying piece of information like a thumbprint doesn't fit well with that.

2. Do you really trust the government not to collect all those ballots and run them through some kind of criminal database to "catch criminals", or "protect the children", or even just for the sole purpose of adding more people to the database for tracking? Just look at what's happened to the DNA database being expanded to searches for familial matches. If you give anything like that to the government, they will abuse it.

Namecoin

Looking at that, it looks like it could actually work if adopted. They've got most of the basics down as far as I can tell, and what they really need now is user-friendly interfaces (currently CLI only).

s/you're/your/g

And if you're patent is on a standard, such as video encoding where you must use the required technology in order to be compatible?

As in, the US Gov seizes trademark because they don't like it, then they use the trademark to try to take it down.

From what I can tell, that's what the whole "fragments" thing that Google is trying to introduce into android is about. It seems to me like the ability to make separate sections and display more if the screen size allows. Like instead of getting a list of articles, selecting one, then viewing it, it could just have the list on the left and the viewing on the right if the screen was larger (a tablet) while still using separate ones for small screens (a phone).

Have you seen how large OS and Application updates are now? Pretty much everything seems to require a fast connection. Even slashdot has bloated (58,633 B for an article with 898,406 B of inline elements, adding up to almost 1MB for a single page). It seems that slow connections are no longer really considered that much when people design stuff. Even slow DSL (although still "broadband") is now causing problems with not being fast enough sometimes.

Therefore I would say the people who just don't happen to have fast internet are screwed.

And how many addons/extensions are you using in Firefox?