The 'War on Terror' will prove to be ineffective as the 'War on Drugs'.
Depends on how you look at it. Relative to its stated purpose, yes, of course. Relative to its actual purpose (keeping people fearful, distracted and obedient; grateful, even), I'm sure it'll do just fine.
Ever since I, somewhat reluctantly, started using Facebook, I have followed the simple policy of making everything I post as public as possible, while simply not posting anything I don't want any random web surfer to see. If this change will make more people snap out of their false sense of Facebook privacy, all the better, I say.
You are overlooking the fact that intelligence agencies are, also, usually tasked with preventing (as much as possible) foreign countries from collecting intelligence about the U.S. government. If Windows has a back door that the NSA can use, how would they prevent foreign intelligence agencies from using it?
What you're saying is that it wouldn't be smart for the NSA to put a backdoor in Windows. But what we're discussing here is whether or not they may actually have done it. The way I see it, the two are completely different.
I don't think so, since the double slashes only apply to Internet schemes anyway. RFC1738 says:
Yeah, I could be wrong. Thanks for the reference; I used to read a lot of RFCs but haven't done much of that recently. And unfortunately, like I said, I don't remember what sources I used or where I heard that bit about the network protocol. RFC1738 is dated Dec. -94 and presumably wasn't even available for much of the time I spent working on that thesis.
Back when I wrote a thesis on dissemination of company-internal information via the world-wide web, in 1994 or so, I remember stating that originally, an indication of which network protocol to use was meant to go between the slashes. But since, in the real world, the network protocol was always TCP/IP, this was made the default and whatever was once put between the slashes was dropped.
Of course, I don't remember the source or anything.
In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.
Sounds a bit like DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System. Or at least like my wishful-thinking fantasies about DIBS, since I haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet.
And what, use a fresh drive image every time you boot up the virtual machine?
Sure, why not? Or better yet, use an immutable drive image. E.g., in VirtualBox:
I'm sure other virtualization packages have similar features.
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.
