Last time I looked, forwarding was a show-stopper. Sender rewriting was complicated, and user's mail client configs would be broken if they used a local SMTP server at home or while travelling.

http://www.lrwc.org/documents/Civil.Disobedience.Guide.November.20.2009.F.pdf This "protesters guide to civil disobedience" was discussed recently on CBC Radio. Interesting tidbits about assaulting a police officer. I suspect career criminals don't have this trouble - they figured out at 14 how to deal with law enforcement :-7

Interesting interview on CBC radio recently with Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She used to work for the CBC, a fairly buttoned-down workplace. When she was asked about the culture differences, and hiring people, she noted that by the time you've seen 500 drunken party photos, you realize that you can't find any young hires that don't have some nonsense in their past. Like the recent study on the effects of porn that could not find any controls (guys who've never consumed any). So a blameless life experience starts to look fishy - either it shows a lack of initiative or courage, or it's been doctored in some way.

Doubt and skepticism are the basis of the scientific method. You don't trust some theory just because the proposer got tenure, you go out and do an experiment to prove it. Then everyone says your experimental data is flawed until two other guys have replicated the effect and got the same result. With climate change, enough other guys have reproduced the results in enough different fields that all the serious doubt was over years ago. Now they are arguing over whether uncertainty in cloud modelling means we get 2C rise in temperature or 3C. BTW, some of the climate models are available for download for those that want to play

Yes, that's how to make a nonprivileged exploit (mess with .bash_profile etc.) Ideally, the .deb package should have been digitally signed, and the person who signed it should have checked to make sure it was safe. Then if you only install packages from trusted repositories and check the sigs, you are safe (unless the signing keys are hacked, which happened to Fedora. Or they were playing safe, in that they might have been hacked. I forget) In practice, that only works for corporate deployment (protection against autohacking of the entire client PC base). People will always download toys without checking the provenance.

I concur. On some Firefox versions I think there was a separate box "encrypt passwords". Use it. Apart from ease-of-use, this method is proof against keyloggers (since you are not actually typing the website password). It also makes it less of a headache to use a different password for each website. The question you should ask is, "Do I trust molewhacker.com with my day-trading password?" and so on. I recently changed most of my online passwords to unique random 20-character strings - only the odd glitch where a site truncated it, or did not accept certain punctuation. To be sure, it's a pain to transfer them to a different computer (I use a GPG encrypted textfile), and my bank uses a method that the browser won't remember (so it still has a short more memorable passphrase...)

It's still interesting, but yeah, the title's misleading. See http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Much as I love Niven, James Hogan, Roger McBride Allen etc. etc., if you want to attract *all* ability levels, try some stuff they are already reading, like Marvel comics. "Iron Man" and Batman are basically Sci-Fi. There's also the whole Japanese anime genre. Not really my thing, though the video "Howl's Moving Castle" was pretty cool (steampunk/anime, maybe). Some of the classics are a bit dated in style (Jules Verne, Asimov, even Heinlein) and are a bit hard to read for the modern generation. Stick to more recent works in the same style, even if they are acknowledged retreads. The Jupiter series by Hogan, Pournelle etc. is Heinlein's Space Cadet etc. rewritten for a new readership. http://www.webscription.net/p-956-the-jupiter-novels.aspx

Of course, it's not just root that gets bruteforced. Quietly search this for your "unguessable" password. Anyone using "3tm31ns1de" ? http://andrew.triumf.ca/ssh_pass_file2.html

OK - I see http://www.inavx.net/ has real NOAA charts, plus a smattering for other countries. Garmin has most of the world I think - certainly a full set for the Canadian west coast. So for me, apart from not having an iPhone, inavx would not be useful. Maybe NMEA could be got to work on Iphone; pcables.com say they had/will have RS232 cables and that often works, although NMEA is supposed to have opto-isolators. On my Nokia tablet (and Linux desktop) there's Navit which can read Garmin vector maps. Unfortunately all the marine charts are licensed and need a decryption key per GPS set :-(

A phone is not going to replace my Garmin, because there are no charts (or NMEA). For a boater, that could be life-and-death (MV Queen of the North, no-one checking GPS), or thousands of dollars damage, or maybe just being stuck for 8 hours waiting for the tide (been there, done that, mostly pre-GPS or without the right chart). Google terrain won't cut it because it doesn't show enough detail underwater. Granted, Garmin/Magellan etc. could licence their charts to the phone makers, and the best GPS (or camera) is the one you have with you. On the other hand, for wandering around the city or just breadcrumbing a hike, a smartphone can replace a pocket GPS, plus it's networked. I use my Nokia tablet with (cached) Google Maps in Maemo Mapper, and push routes to it from my PC. A big-screen set would be safer in the car, though (less need to take eyes off the road and fiddle with tiny buttons) and a waterproof/vibration-proof set would be better on my motorcycle (where a GPS sure beats messing with paper maps!)

As I recall, Harry Harrison's short story (SF) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Robots addressed this issue. The underground bunkers used by the opposing generals to control the robot armies became uninhabitable due to enemy action, so they plugged in a robot officer and evacuated. The war continued, even though the humans had stopped fighting, and it was no longer possible to contact the robots in charge.

Troll Ebay for the same laptop with a different part broken. Then spend 5 hours with a lens and tiny screwdrivers putting the good bits together. Or, drive around the suburbs for 30 min and grab a free VDT off the sidewalk and plug that in the back.