It'll continue, too. In 2 weeks 11-11-11 falls on Friday. And the week after that is the full Minecraft release at Minecon. Buncha loonies (or is that blockheads?) there, too.

Well, the first part of your prediction came true. They are claiming it generated 473 kW for 5.5 hours in self-looping mode. Not near 1 MW, as you predicted.
http://pesn.com/2011/10/28/9501940_1_MW_E-Cat_Test_Successful/

I'll believe this one when Al-Jazeera starts picking it up...

And the 4th amendment comes into play for unreasonable search and seizure. I can see the seizure up to a point, but a lot of times the assets are disposed of at auction before there is a trial, which is just plain conversion.

they've finally found an accurate name for big media copyright holders. e-Parasites indeed.

I see a great future for this technology in the porn industry and in strip clubs.

Nothing there says he's a denier. Most /. threads are wankfests, and copyright and global warming threads are wankier than most.

...they just cozy up to different industries. Republicans favor raw materials and insurers,Democrats favor the entertainment and tech industries. They both suck up to big pharma.

It used to be that when a new party came into power, they'd spend a couple of years investigating the corruption in the previous administration before getting deep into the trough themselves. Nowadays the waiting period is over. Corruption is the one thing they DON'T attack each other over, except on the campaign trail.

If you are doing windows boxes and you are already paying for new Windows OEM / System Builder licenses, I'm pretty sure it's legal for you to use WinPE or a similar tool to install a recovery partition. If you're using pre-existing Windows licenses on the boxes, it might still be legal.

But the easiest option may be to ship the clonezilla image you are already using with a bootable clonezilla partition. Basically instead of installing clonezilla to a flash drive or a DVD, put it on the recovery partition. Put some scripting in the clonezilla partition to configure the clonezilla settings so that it is setup to restore the image to the main OS partition as the default action. This would work for Windows or Linux.

Good stuff. Too bad you got buried as "Anonymous Coward".

The big problem with dLink is their abysmal tech support. If you know what you're doing as far as setting up the router and the wireless they're fine. I've had 2 dLinks (but not Wireless-N) and the first one had wireless drop issues that were resolved by a firmware flash update, and the other has never given me any trouble at all.

One requirement that you don't mention is IPV6 support. Don't just assume that any home router sold nowadays supports it. Many still don't, or are you planning on getting that support from DDWRT or openWRT? Supposedly dLink is one of the better brands for IPV6 support, although that is just from random news articles (regurgitated press releases?) I've seen around the net.

If they were concerned about cracking and virus creation, they would have proposed this legislation a couple of years ago. The only thing that is different this year has been the summer of networked civil disobedience: it's about Egypt, Tunisia, Anonymous and LulzSec, and keeping the public from realizing how ill-clothed the emperor really is. Sure the public will benefit if the ID theft rings are shut down, but that's not the whole agenda.

Not only do I think they will use this in cases like Anon, I think the law is being pushed BECAUSE of cases like Anon and LulzSec. Not to mention the identity theft rings and the botnet masters. But the botnets and ID theft have been around for years, and it's only after the Anon attacks came in that this law gets proposed. Maybe this was in the pipeline already, but it certainly has more support now than it would without Anon, etc.

There's a core of Anon that is politically driven, but there are enough people in it for the lulz that there might be some effect of this legislation. Anon wouldn't be killed off, but their DDoS attacks wouldn't be so effective without the non-political hangers-on/trolls. And those are the ones likely to drop off if the risk gets too high for the joke to be funny anymore.

As you say, we will watch and see.

The RICO act shouldn't apply unless there is an actual conspiracy. For a certain class of hacker, the RICO act would definitely be relevant, there's no doubt in my mind that the ID theft rings and the botnet rings fall into this category. But if he starts going after the script kiddies who joined Anonymous because they thought it was cool, or even more legitimately because it resonated with their sense of social justice, life will get interesting for both the administration and the parents of said script kiddies. If this law follows the path blazed by the drug seizure laws, folks will have their entire home stripped of computers and smart phones because they were vaguely linked with some kind of hacking crime.

I'll second the recommendation to start small with a library or utility. Preferably a utility so it's easier to see how the pieces are supposed to fit together. With a library you frequently just get a group of classes without a good way to understand the underlying design.

I have to say that I think this is probably one of the best "Ask Slashdot" questions I've ever seen in my years here. It's directed to the right audience (the answers will actually be useful, as opposed to say, answers to a question about copyright law), it will have interest for a lot of of others who also want to learn and contribute, and it isn't a simple question that has only one good answer, so it will generate some useful discussion in addition to the usual /, noise.

I was going to mention that Consumerist has had stories like this for years. Then I noticed that the link in the story is to a Consumerist story...from 2009. Slashdot -- always up on the latest trends in commerce and the internet.

This isn't just a marketing thing, it's an upsale. BB charges you for this system prep "service" and frequently tries to make it look like it's a required bundle with any laptop purchase, which it isn't.