On the plus side, it means everyone on Slashdot gets a discount by spoofing a cheaper user agent.

Morgan Greywolf,

Your friends at MediaSentry have detected numerous illegal downloads of your post from around the world! We have logged several hundred IP addresses accessing your content via the popular post-sharing site "Slashdot." We at MediaSentry take copyright infringement very seriously and would like to see every man, woman, child, and printer responsible brought to justice.

We accept all major credit cards and most souls (sorry, major deities only).

Wow...that's amazingly bad design. So, a vista laptop hibernating in some kind of hibernate-y place such as a laptop bag can decide to turn on. For updates. I wonder how far it will get before, fans going full tilt, it shuts off due to a scary thermal reading.

Idiots.

Yes

I noticed it on Intrepid but not Hardy. I assumed it was an isolated issue with my touchpad...

I'd like to see an incredibly stealthy virus - one that stays out of the way to the point that it isn't detected for some number of years.

Have it patch key parts of the Windows kernel to degrade performance in subtle but believable ways...
Lobotomize the scheduler so that context switches occur much less often than they should for responsiveness.
Kick up the swappiness from Ridiculous (stock setting) to We've-gone-plaid
Divide the given buffer length for each I/O operation so that CPU usage goes up and throughput goes down.

I wonder if we'd _ever_ notice.

...that they didn't use X in the first place. It's heavy. It'd also be a huge pain in the ass to get power management and wakeups under control

IMHO the biggest mistake with Android was the decision to invent their own (shitty) set of UI widgets. The interface designer is a joke. They should have ported the relevant bits of Qtopia.

Applets are second/third class citizens these days - the sandboxing is a joke now too.

But it's not dying on the server. Not anytime soon.

The fact that the compromise of a PDF reader leads to compromise of the entire user account is a failure of the operating system, and Linux/Mac/BSD/Windows all fail equally here.

And since time is money, you can always just switch tabs.

I especially like the recent addition of movie trailers or whatnot as an ad option - as in, before the video starts playing you pick "long boring trailer and no ads" or "all ads, no trailer." I always pick the trailer if given the option, it means I have several _minutes_ to kill on another site, and I flip back when I hear the familiar series intro.

Consumer hardware is pants. Bits flip and stuff randomly breaks - sometimes one leads to the other. It's a miracle that this messaË even reaches you at allËÎÏ

I've personally taught it a few new tricks, you can thank me if you wish.

Not all that much really. Easy enough to run a spambot with user privs. Any of the data you want to steal is in ~. If you last long enough without detection, you can grab the user's password with an X keylogger and start doing extra naughty stuff with root.

This idea intrigues me.

I've been saying that for a long time. People are living in a fairy land right now as far as any desktop OS being 'more secure.'

Would I trust a default Ubuntu install over Windows? Yes.

Does the Ubuntu kernel turn on the NX bit on 32bit? No.
Can users inadvertently run something which will take them from behind? Yes.
Will more marketshare soon lead to legions of zombie Linux desktop machines? Certainly.
Are the above three points excusable? I think not.