Back in the day you weren't cursed with GUIs made in Gtk+

Yes, there's a pun in there. ;-)

In the case of software patents and Copyright idiocy, the USA sure leads the charge.

cf. "Under the EPC, and in particular its Article 52,[1] "programs for computers" are not regarded as inventions for the purpose of granting European patents,[2] but this exclusion from patentability only applies to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to a computer program as such.[3] As a result of this partial exclusion, and despite the fact that the EPO subjects patent applications in this field to a much stricter scrutiny [4] when compared to their American counterpart, that does not mean that all inventions including some software are de jure not patentable." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I agree its incredibly odd. I might stick with examples from over 25 years ago to avoid actual current patents as much as possible.

And as stated, is no more invulnerable to remote attacks than password data (which has already been shown to be frequently all too easily accessible).

The OTP data must be accessible to the service you're connecting to which in turn is open to attacking from the outside. OTPs are not special when you use them with online services that aren't fully hardened.

In fact, I don't think it would be hard to argue that the traditional randomly-generated key system protected by public keys is in fact more secure because of its lack of replayability when properly implemented.

You don't hit ESC plus another character all the time, you just tap it and return to the home row.
With Ctrl keys, you have to hold it and another character at the same time; that's completely different.

Personally speaking, hitting 'i', 'e', 'esc' isn't that hard. I'm much more likely in those cases to have run the text through spell check and fold with 'v' and '!'.

That's called emacs. Go try it.

The rest of us like knowing that when we're in insert mode, nothing we type will be interpreted as anything but data -- unless we hit ESC.

This kind of thing works from time to time when the original developers really aren't in sync with what's wanted or needed by the public. It worked with gcc -> egcs for instance, but most of the time its a waste of code and effort.

I love VIM because I can guide a user remotely through exactly what to type and know exactly what response they'll get without depending on them to click on the right button or highlight the correct piece of text.

Ever edited /etc/ppp/chat-secrets with an accountant over the phone blind?

As much as I love forwarded X11 apps, its rarely efficient over moderate to slow links. I can't justify using over 1Mbit of uplink traffic just to use my editor over the wire when even a VNC session is more efficient.

FYI, I've often run vncserver on a remote machine, forwarded 5900 over my SSH session and then viewed it locally to launch X11 apps. This has the advantage of not killing the apps if the link goes down. It saddens me a lot that X11 isn't as powerful or useful in these scenarios as VNC.

Importantly, this is also where we get into that root cert problem for companies that people complained about in a recent /. story because a lot of companies just use their own internal CA to authenticate the certs for both users and wireless devices which requires installing their root CAs on the machines and trusting them.

And then just like a password attack, someone cracks their database and dumps all the OTP data and you're no longer secure.

No, that's SSL.

I played hours and hours of 4-way Warhawk with friends. Everyone did that at least once, and then memorized which corner of the screen they were in. Its not that hard.

I truly miss the 4-player split screen fun I had with Warhawk for years on my PS3. I wish a lot more games would do full 2 and 4-way split-screen modes.