Are you suggesting...to RTFA? Oh No! ;)

... due to lack of physical access. :-(

If they continue to make it difficult for me to enjoy video at home without advertising or other ridiculous restrictions, I'll read a book instead. Besides, a lot of the movies / TV shows today aren't really worth watching anyways. I can read some of the classics, and many of those are in the public domain. :)

You're absolutely right about how businesses must be regulated after they get to be a certain size. Just look at the gilded age. There was a whole bunch of new manufacturing technology, and businesses saw an opportunity to make a shit ton of $$ on it. They abused the system, and people got pissed off and demanded reforms, which led into the progressive era.

I think that we're going through a similar phase with computers. Right now, there is little regulation, and the companies are taking full advantage of that. However, I think that more and more people will get pissed off at the tracking and invasion of privacy. Many people fought very hard to bring in the reforms of the progressive era. I hope people today will fight to bring in the reforms needed to keep up with today's tech.

My solution is:

$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/6.0.6/amd64/iso-cd/debian-6.0.6-amd64-netinst.iso

Ubuntu has served me well in the past, but I find it's easier to install just what I want in Debian (and I know exactly what I'm getting) than trying to remove all of the extra stuff in Ubuntu these days.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/927/

I disagree - I think it's easier than ever to get started with programming. The kids of today have an entire Internet full of programming tutorials. It's much easier to Google a question than it is to try to look it up in a book, which is what one had to do in the 80's.

I've been running 64-bit firefox on Linux for years and I've had no issue with plugins. I've run both packaged installations (when I ran Ubuntu) and stand-alone (unzipped from the .tar.bz2 file) installations. Neither have had problems with addons.

davidshewitt@DSH-Computer:~$ file /opt/firefox/firefox
/opt/firefox/firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, stripped

Stability.

A year or so ago, I was able to see all of the downloaded flash videos in /tmp, and it was so convenient! Then flashplayer was updated and I can't find them anymore. Do you know how to get them into /tmp again? I'm running Firefox 13 and Debian Squeeze (if that info is useful).

When my dad was young, he build radios and other electronic devices from kits (including ones made by HeathKit). When I was in high school, I build a few computers, installed Ubuntu on them, and learned the basics of programming. Programming when my dad was in high school was inaccessible except to those at universities. Debugging was extremely hard, and programmers of that day did not have all of the useful libraries of code to choose from. Now, hardware and software have switched places in terms of accessibility. The components of modern hardware require specialized equipment to service, i.e. everything's too small for you to solder. On the other hand, anyone with interest can download an IDE and compilers for free and make use of the vast resources on the internet to teach themselves to program. All they need is a PC, which one can build/buy for just a few hundred dollars.

The other day, I was pondering using a universal system of public-key authentication for all financial transactions. Our current system is basically sharing a "secret" in order to authorize a transaction, whether it be a credit card number, a bank account number (in the case of checks or wire transfers), or a social security number (in the case of loans). Using a public key system (where the private key is difficult to compromise) to sign transactions would greatly limit the number of transactions that an identity thief could make, since the holder of the private key would have to be aware of the transactions. I'm not saying keeping the private key private is easy, but I think it is possible to find a solution that works well enough. (To give credit, I read about this idea somewhere; it's not mine.)

Back on topic, the government would probably be the entity to implement such a solution. While it would be great to reduce identity theft, there is also much potential for abuse. It could be required for access to the internet, for example. Even if a law was created saying that this system could only be used for financial transactions, we know how well that worked with Social Security numbers being only for Social Security. Any thoughts on this?

I looked on Hulu's Wikipedia page, and it said:

The wikipedia article cites the following NY Times article. The source is more credible, and there's a big difference between "Hulu to Require Viewers To Have a Cable Subscription" and "Fox to Limit Next-Day Streaming on Hulu to Paying Cable Customers."

I'd consider technet.microsof.com to be untrusted. Hackers love to take advantage of URL typos to post fake sites. This is just one more thing that users need to be aware of. Some DNS servers will auto-correct a mis-typed URL (by redirecting to the correct one), but until this practice is standardized, this will be a problem.

You mentioned that backtrack is "a distro specifically build for security and penetration testing." I agree that it's built for penetration testing, but it is a bunch of security tools. It is not a hardened operating system. When writing non-trivial software, especially operating systems, there will always be security bugs, and you will always wonder what has been missed. That's why testing is important, and the advantage of open source makes it easier to fix the bugs when they're found.

Reading the TFA (this is ./ I know ;) the vulnerability was in WICD, a daemon used to connect to wifi. I've seen WICD in other linux distros (as a matter of fact you can install it if you don't like network-manager), so those distros are vulnerable as well if they run the affected version. IMHO, I think that the bigger issue is that the other distros are vulnerable, as people running those distros on servers don't want people to get root access, whereas that isn't such a big deal with backtrack (although it's beyond me why anyone would want wifi on a server!).