I've had 4 such flights this year, 2 of which were 11 hours long. I don't see enough benefit in reclining my seat 15 degrees to inconvenience the person behind me.

All of Slashdot can use the AC account, while only a subset of Slashdot (often only one person) can use any given named account. People leak information when they type, and if the same person or small group of people can be identified by an anonymized identifier like a username, then you can glean information about whoever's using that name.

It's like the databases of "anonymized" information. Gather enough information, and eventually you'll have enough data points to uniquely identify an individual. That's pretty far off from "just as anonymous", provided someone wants to actually do the work to datamine someone else's old /. posts.

Why not Royal Crown spiked with Crown Royal?

One of my recently replaced cards is chip and signature, and I think that's what most US-issued smart cards are using. Security-wise, it's kind of a half measure, but at least it's a step forward from complete reliance on the magstripe.

I have 19 open, organized by task (the last 3 are just general browsing, most of the rest are references for a project I'm working on). Related things are close together. 18 of the 19 are currently visible in the bar, with the titles legible. It's a little more convenient than having them down in the taskbar would be. If I have multiple activities that each need a large number of tabs, that's why God invented tab groups.

I think it's convenient, for my case. If I'm on my Linux machine but I'm looking at Steam's page, I'm most likely trying to buy games for my Windows machine (or one that I've read runs well under Wine). The search box ought to have an "only for my platform" checkbox/dropdown, and maybe it should warn you prior to purchase if your browser's user-agent indicates that there's a platform mismatch, but I'd much prefer being shown everything available.

In college, my grandparents provided a computer, parents provided a cell phone and my food and lodging. I didn't smoke (most people don't, here) and didn't drink. That, plus no car and only occasional employment? You better believe that I pirated a fair amount of stuff while almost fooling myself that I was justified for doing it. My family wasn't impoverished, but legal additions to my game catalog were limited to a couple times per year, and the in-dorm network share starts looking mighty appealing when your roommates invite you to play a game you don't own.

Another thing about the NES: its output was purely composite video, even through SCART.

That should be easy to test; sha1sum a bunch of the installers, and compare the results to someone else's list. I've got some DOS games, both on the original CD and via GOG; the game files themselves weren't modified in those cases, so any watermark would have to be contained elsewhere, in the GOG-provided files (which aren't strictly necessary to run the games, if you provide your own DosBox and configuration).

The last Windows PC I bought didn't come with any crapware installed (other than Windows itself), just the OS and the device drivers necessary to support the hardware. "Fact is" if you're willing to do your research beforehand and maybe buy from a less well-known vendor, you don't necessarily have to deal with bloat.

The ISP has customers paying for bandwidth, and those customers have decided to stream video. That's data that the customer has already paid for. If the ISP sold bandwidth to their customers, and the network is congested because the ISP can't provide the level of service that it sold, then why should it get rewarded by charging for the same data twice, rather than punished for false advertising?

Battlestar Galactica turned out so much better for humanity than Terminator did.

I agree that force is necessary, but I disagree that jailtime is always the ultimate expression of that force. So, I suppose thanks for forgetting what the focus of your argument was.

It seems like your argument is that a government doesn't have any authority over banks or employers. Both of those are licensed by the government (in most places). If the bank doesn't comply, their license can be suspended, and they won't be able to do things like hold deposits for their customers. If a business' license is suspended, they won't be permitted to operate in that jurisdiction. If they continue to do so anyhow, the government will shut them down by force.

The employer has more to lose than the employee; they'll garnish the employee's wages or risk being shut down. The bank is in the same situation.

Now, if the offender doesn't have a job, bank accounts, or other financial assets that could be seized to pay off the fine, then some alternative method of punishment could apply. Governments are experts in applying various kinds of force effectively, and they generally don't like getting "no" as their answer.

What I was imagining was that the phone gets shipped with a manufacturer-signed and device-specific bootloader, and the first time the key is written (by the end-user of the device), the firmware encrypts the entire contents of the storage, including the bootloader.

Write a known key? OK, the bootloader is illegible, and you can't replace it because you don't have the manufacturer's signing key. Verification key is burnt into the silicon so you can't replace that. Analyze the signal coming out of the decryption chip? Maybe the crypto, storage, and SoC are sealed in epoxy.

The manufacturer could send out a phone where they already set the key (as well as signing the bootloader), but why would an informed customer buy that?