Spot on. You left out the insurance scam companies.

Sounds like a threat, like he knows there will be an attack. Perhaps he is correct, because he has inside info.

Agree with your main points. However, I would not call how we have arrived here a mistake. It is just the result of doing the wholesale conversion from 32 bit to 64 bit without considering performance impact, especially at the cache level. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, no?

99% of the public is not even aware of a what a criss-cross directory is and how it can be used or abused.

Well, when you use Windows, it probably really doesn't matter what kind of security policies you have since you are using proven insecure systems in the first place!

Yeah, I can see the NSA doing that.

Earlier this month. Link

Checkpoints were conducted Friday morning, Friday night and Saturday night at three different locations in St. Charles County, said sheriff’s Lt. Dave Tiefenbrunn.

...

Tiefenbrunn said even though the survey was voluntary he acknowledged that the public might not have thought they had any choice but to obey the officers. Because of that, he said, his department would not participate in such surveys in the future.

“It doesn’t give the public the impression that it’s voluntary if there’s a uniformed officer out there, so we would avoid that circumstance in the future,” he said.

...

In its statement, NHTSA said that it had been conducting such surveys for more than 40 years in roughly 10-year cycles.

The agency said more than 60 communities nationwide were participating this year, including St. Louis County, where checkpoints were conducted in September.

In 2007, more than 9,000 drivers were interviewed in 60 jurisdictions.

In all of these cases, there is no mention of how much money the jurisdictions involved received from the feds for allowing these actions to occur.

Overtly, true. Subvertly, you have no way to know. Windows can update the BIOS firmware, and you will not even noticed that it happened.

You are missing the fact that Windows can update the BIOS firmware.

Bush v. Gore

It has always been possible ever since the time that you no longer had to create a floppy to update your bios firmware.

What one needs to consider is a BIOS backdoor, loaded via the same vector.

See #badBIOS for example.

So, likely, what occured is that some skunkworks group inside the NSA found the exploit hole in Windows, and they got Microsoft to patch it.

It likely still exists in XP and will never be fixed.

Blaming China is Standard Procedure these days for NSA.
There always has to be a bogeyman so NSA can justify their 'programs'.

> I have a mouse that's 22 years old

...and only requires a serial-to-PS/2 and a PS/2-to-USB adapter to actually work on a modern computer...

Show is broadcast in Dolby, but commercial is in stereo.

How about Google provides the cash to the city, the city buys up the AT&T poles (via eminent domain).

Doubtful. Most likely, as part of the "settlement", there was a license agreement, a contract.

Not only would it be difficult to overturn in court, it would also be embarrassing to admit they were snookered.