Actually their first work was the Declaration of Independence, but your point still stands.

In the first place, his idea gives you seven years up front for free. When was the last time you used seven-year-old software?

These are from Wikipedia.

• Linux kernel: 1991
• Vim: 1992, first port to Unix
• Firefox: 2003. It's getting close. If you extend this to the Mozilla suite, then you're in the 1990s easily.
• Bash: 1987

In a case at our local Army post, Lt. Ehren Watada refused to deploy to Iraq, claiming that the war was illegal. (Whether he was correct is not relevant at this point; I'm not talking about that.) In his court martial, he was banned from using any defense on that ground, only being allowed to defend himself on the "I never refused" ground (which was obviously not the case).

Traffic violations are "preponderance of the evidence", at least in my state.

d) on teleconference with a handful more, whom he obviously could not see

And the original request was done over a teleconference. Bad idea. Of course, all of the passwords then found themselves in a public court document. Oops.

Said authorised individual should have already had access to those passwords. This guy was more interested in not giving them up to parties that he could not see over a teleconference, or at least that's what his defence will say.

Note that many modern file systems use journaling or copy-on-write, both of which have the effect that writing to the same file does not necessarily write to the same block. DBAN takes care of this problem, though.

Bless you.

IPMI is your friend. You can mount ISOs on bare hardware, and remotely push the power button.

So it would run Gentoo, then?

In fact, the "bizarre meeting" was actually split between two physical locations, so he couldn't see who was demanding the password at the other end. Even if you're required to give a password to another person, doing so in such a situation is a Very Bad Idea and that's why he wanted to give it directly to the mayor.

No, no, no. On the internet you must say "your a moran". It's like a natural law or something. Get with the program!

Remember, when asked for the passwords the first time it was over a teleconference with a large group of people whom he did not know. I don't care who's on the other line and what they're threatening; you don't give passwords in such a situation. That is why he wanted to speak with the mayor.