Killing off hope now, instead of just characters. Well played, sir, well played.

Adding a registry entry to remap keys is pretty trivial, too.

You need to be an administrator to do that. That makes it pretty non-trivial.

is running a different OS which doesn't treat Ctrl+Alt+Del in a special way

Now your suggesting what exactly? That the attacker is going to throw in a linux live CD, boot it, run his 'fake login screen' that looks like the usual windows screen?

Ok... yes I guess that is a theoretically possible attack; although you'd probably get caught as soon as the user isn't actually able to log-in and IT gets called in...

Usually the fake login screen attacks "fail" with a you got your password wrong message, and then quietly disappear and throw the -real- lock screen up so the unwitting user tries again... gets in to what he expects and assumes he must have fat fingered his password.

Well, depends on the use case. If you want to ensure your software will run on real DOS, you're right. However, in many cases, DOSBox will work better than native DOS. Run on DOSBox and never worry about not having enough conventional memory!

DOSBox will even let me install Win 3.11 drivers.

That's a good example of lagging development, actually. I have that need, but VirtualBox doesn't have Guest OS Additions for Win9x, which means incredibly slow and awkward performance. VMWare does have guest additions for Win9x, so I tend to use VMWare Player for that use.

Yeah, I suppose that's pretty nice. I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used that feature, but it sounds great.

Huh? DOSBox uses a folder on your box as it's C drive. Just copy that folder over to the new box, and you're done. No need to export or import anything. It's not like DOS has a registry to figure out what's installed, it just has config.sys and autoexec.bat, and whatever folders you installed things at. All of the DOSBox specific settings are really only about what hardware the DOS software sees, it has nothing to do with the host hardware (especially since the settings file now detects the CPU type you have and there's an auto setting for throttling cycles that works reasonably well). So you can copy the DOSBox settings file as well. If you use one of the many frontends, you can have a different configuration file for each game, which is another advantage over native DOS. I remember having an actual DOS Machine with a Turbo button because old games relied on clock cycles for their timing.

Again, sounds impressive.

Can't vouch for it again, but sounds nice.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

--Tom Lehrer, "Wernher von Braun"

Well, if they're different species, then by definition they don't mate. That means that releasing the modified mosquitos of the dangerous species won't affect the harmless ones, and hopefully as you suggest the benign ones will take over.

I think you're confusing the user vs administrator distinction with the userland-vs-kernel-mode distinction... but never mind...

Deliberately conflating, but not confused.

What I'm saying is that the "Ctrl+Alt+Del protects your password" claim is overblown; the suggestions you give only amplify that, as they are even more ways to circumvent it...

But none of them are trivial to do. Especially if I am not already an administrator on the system.

I can trivially run a program to throw up a screen that looks like the login screen on a PC at work. TRIVIALLY.

the "Ctrl+Alt+Del protects your password" claim is overblown

Its like door locks. Nobody anywhere claims they make your house secure, but it does stop people from being able to literally just wander into your house.

In the real world door locks prove to be highly effective at keeping people out of places. From hotel supply closets and building electrical rooms to the bosses office to your bathroom stall while your taking a crap.

Nobody here is arguing ctrl-alt-delete is some magical super thing, its just a door lock. But its enough of a hassle to get around, that its plenty to stop all kinds of casual intrusions and mischief.

Ctl-Alt-Delete is the same way.

From the article most of the spending is on things that are beneficial to society as a whole, not just NSA. These include K-12 funding for science fairs, math clubs, and STEM summer camps. Unless the NSA is influencing these in harmful ways, such as pushing ideology beyond the normal "if you do well in school, you could do cool spy work for us" recruiting I don't see a problem with taking their money. Same for the research grants and conferences, which all result in publicly published fundamental research, that help the entire cryptographic and big data communities as a whole. The only program I would have a problem with are any classified research and the sabbaticals to do classified work at the NSA.

Meh, I abandoned it when it started refusing to run because there was a symlink in the path to its binary. It was less work to just move to virt-manager, which is just a wrapper around KVM which means I'm now running on a fully stock kernel as a bonus. Took a bit of effort to get networking working right, but it wasn't a big deal and the same setup works well for containers also.

If people can't afford the price of things they need to live, then they should receive public assistance. The solution isn't to try to manipulate the market (unless it is subject to monopolistic behavior, or externalities, neither of which was the case here). Just mail everybody affected by the hurricane a check for $1000, and then let the price of gas be what it needs to be. Let the market operate efficiently, and don't try to use it as some kind of meals on wheels program.

That stuff isn't the result of the free market so much as the fact that we rely on the free market to address everybody's needs.

The free market is NEVER going to take care of a mentally retarded quadriplegic. That isn't a problem with the free market. The problem is with idiots who expect it to do so.

The solution is to just give everybody a basic income, or other social safety net. Leave the market alone. If people want to work for 5 cents an hour, let them. But, if they don't work they should still have food and shelter. Companies would quickly find that it is hard to hire people who are well-fed for the wages they offer the desperate.

The last Galaxy Nexus update was made available on July 24th, 2013. But, whatever, if you bought the phone in Oct 2012 (when it was last available for purchase) you'd have gotten updates for 9 months, or maybe a year if you want to argue that a phone that it was still supported until Oct 2013.

And I debunked that particular side argument readily with facts by listing things in which Parliament factually gained powers. Which means that your admission remains the admission of increase of democratization.

P.S. If you really want to measure parliament's relative power increase, the recent debacle with the Commission President post was a great example of just how much more powerful Parliament got after Lisbon. Under previous treaties, there was no way that it would have gotten Juncker as head of Commission against the will of British PM.

And now, it was able to mobilize and effectively brutally push Juncker through crushing the opposition from Great Britain.

I want to emphasize my point again. There is a lot of work ahead to democratize the Union. But Lisbon was a step in a right direction because it shifter power from elite-chosen Commission and Council to the directly democratically elected Parliament which saw its power and influence increased significantly. That is the undeniable reality.
Now, the progress must continue, and in this regard Eurospeptics of the populist kind seem to be shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of getting involved with decision-making and shaping the Union closer to their ideals, they go for Anglo-style "all or nothing" argument. And then they lose, because overwhelming majority of Europe has a culture of being ruled by consensus and outliers who are unwilling to compromise get left out.

Which is a problem in my opinion, one that my country handled quite well by effectively forcing our anti-European populist party that gained prominence to come and work with the rest. Consensus and having to work with those you are ideologically opposed to tames the extremists in those parties and brings them closer to the mainstream, while at the same time giving them actual power over what will happen.

It's not 23% of your income. It's under 0.05% of the GDP. You do realise that you eat food, right? You do realise that climate change will drastically affect our agriculture industries, reducing crop production and moving suitable ground away from the people who are capable of farming it (and that's the best-case scenario - the worst case is the climate suitable for raising the crops we need will be in places which have the worst soil for it).

Your ignorance is staggering, and the fact you seem happy with it is bewildering. You deserve the future you get.