End goal: change the constitution. We need a start. It's easy to see how hard this will be and to give up early, but some of us feel the imperative to fight for it. We can change things. The vast will of the masses (corporation political donations are not equivalent to the free speech we enjoy as individuals) needs to be strategically gathered. Critical mass could take decades, as with things like gay marriage.

FreeDOS gets used in several pre-built computers. HP is one example - HP EliteBook comes with a FreeDOS option. And Dell used to do this, don't know if they still do. There are a bunch of vendors (especially in Europe and Asia) that pre-install FreeDOS, too.

Alas, these pre-built computers have FreeDOS on them mainly as a clever way to get around a licensing agreement with Microsoft. I understand that Microsoft put a term in their Windows OEM license that prohibits system builders from selling "naked" computers - systems without operating systems. If you want to get the huge discount on Windows OEM licenses, so you can sell pre-built computers with Windows already installed, you may not also sell these "naked" computers.

But there are plenty of people out there who don't want an operating system pre-installed (I presume these people are like me who prefer free software, and who would install a Linux distribution on their new computer) so system builders started shipping computers with FreeDOS pre-installed. I think the premise is that customers will reformat the drive and install Linux anyway, but the system builder didn't technically sell a "naked" computer.

I actually think this is very clever and I like the idea. A few users do keep FreeDOS installed on their system; occasionally I get emails from people who decided to keep FreeDOS installed (and probably dual-boot into Linux) so they could use FreeDOS to play old DOS games.

Yes, you can run FreeDOS in a VM! I usually recommend installing FreeDOS in a VM, especially if you don't plan to commit that computer to FreeDOS full-time. For Windows, I think most people prefer QEMU or VMWare or VirtualPC. On my Linux laptop, I run DOSemu.

Yes, pocket change in a national election. But as Larry said, they're only trying to influence a few Congressional races this year, and more of them in 2016.

For those who don't know: At the bottom of every page there's a link from "Beta" to the real Slashdot site.

The transcript for this video was a little late, but it's up now.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm... (search for "SEED encryption", with the quotation marks to get similar results).

Here's another algorithm indicating identity exposure (SEED's keying system is specifically designed to *always* expose identity, which means that a lot of sites aren't very secure, since they can know who the culprit was, they don't figure they need to secure them):

http://privacy-pc.com/articles...

I'm pretty sure the demo was by Chae Jong Bin, if that helps.

Also illegal, so far... It's illegal to use something other than the ActiveX plugin authorized by the Korean government to do online banking in South Korea. The current president promised to change things, but so far, nothing has changed. Here's his promise being reported:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/So...

The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).

Here are some other articles about where the plugin is required to establish secure communications channels:

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/intern...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Neonicotinoids can cause problems for pollinators by concealing their metabolism.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ne...

They claim a patent is pending.

"That's a nice tax bracket you have there... it'd be a shame if it got audited for the last seven years, and every year from here on out, into the foreseeable future"