Because they roll up the money they make on re-selling the same code base year after year, insert the money in their nostrils, then finally, they separate out single lines of code and snort them.

That's why.

Need we truly agonize over monitor selection at the End of Days?

Gotcha. You said medical equipment was priority 0, so we've marked the TV/PC/Cable modem as -1.

This IS Slashdot, after all!

That was my favorite feature of Vista. ;)

I would, but then I can't post on the same story, even if it's in a different comment thread.

It sucks that the discussions I'd most like to spend my mod points on are also those in which I'm more likely to comment in, but that's just the way it is around here.

I wonder if there's a solution to the conflict of interests that presents though. Perhaps they could unlock moderation on a discussion if your comment itself gets moderated?

"Use em or lose em" they say. More often than not, I opt to lose them :P

We, the users of Slashdot, would like to collectively subscribe to your newsletter.

Precisely! The thing I'm hung up on is that UEFI secure boot maintains a chain of trust via signed code all the way up from the system firmware level. Even if you manage to use a signed bootloader that allows the loading of unsigned code (or that doesn't verify signatures, same difference I suppose), as soon as you break the signature chain from the system firmware, the next step in the process would be a chainloaded Windows Boot Manager. Because it doesn't have a valid signature chain, it will refuse to run any further. (..right?)

You could, from there, load a compromised bootmgr.efi, but then its signature wouldn't be valid, and the Windows kernel will refuse to load, and so on.

Naturally. But of course, Microsoft won't allow OEMs to ship systems that have secure boot disabled out of the box, so that's a bit of a moot point, no?

That strikes me as an odd proposition.... The Windows kernel has a lot of requirements out of its bootloader. It's not compatible with any of the plethora of [awesome] boot specifications that many Linux kernels support, like multiboot for example. BOOTMGR (or NTLDR for older OSes, but that of course will never support UEFI or secure boot) does a very significant amount of Windows-specific voodoo to get the system into a condition where the kernel can run, like loading boot start drivers and so on. Unless you patch the entire chain (which may include the MBR program... not as familiar with UEFI boot processes as I am with BIOS booting) to remove the signature requirement, from BOOTMGR, OSLoader, Winload, the kernel, and probably WinResume as well, you couldn't even start to get unsigned drivers working. Without invoking test mode, of course :)

It's absolutely possible, of course, but the sheer amount of hackery that is required to make it work is just mind boggling... at least to me. Can you link anything that explains your concept?

Why would you make up an acronym for a concept that doesn't exist for words that cannot be spoken?

I answer the same to that question.

I think it's a lot more reasonable to assume that Iran or any other country at war with the US would likely not be dropping nukes all over the place, even if they had them. Weaponized malware, on the other hand, has already proven to be VERY effective, and the most chilling aspect of those weapons is that they completed their missions without even being detected.

The thought of some clandestine scheme to wreak havoc with the precision that computer viruses can have but that nuclear weapons most certainly cannot is not only more plausible in my mind, but it's already been done. And no one is sitting back, looking at the horrible collateral damage they caused.

So as this type of warfare continues---and it most definitely will---and some day a SCADA system fails and it kills people, there won't be the "benefit" of a giant, impossible-to-miss mushroom cloud sitting on the horizon to tell us why it happened.

Scary because you can't see it. Much like ionizing radiation... but at least that is something relatively straightforward to detect, and doesn't reprogram your geiger counter to tell you everything is just fine while you suck up lethal doses of gamma rays.

To be fair, terrorism is rather broadly any act that incites fear, specifically for political purposes. I don't know about you, but Stuxnet and Flame scare the hell out of me.

And I don't even begin to represent their targets.

[TL;DR: below]

I can't see that being accurate on average. People who start smoking don't have a problem affording cigarettes. I can't think of anyone who went from zero to twenty (or more) cigarettes smoked per day in anything resembling a short amount of time, myself included. It's only when you're a regular smoker that the cost of cigarettes starts to go up into the hundreds of dollars per month, especially if the price of them is at or below, as you put it, $10 a pack. Progressing from that point, someone who is a regular smoker has had more than enough time to work the cost into his budget, and it's still affordable.

I don't really have any objection to the concept of taxes in general, nor as a smoker do I have an objection to taxing cigarettes. What really pisses me off (and that I naturally object to) is the fact that cigarette taxes (and just cigarettes, not other forms of tobacco, which is a different rant) are not appropriated exclusively to programs designed to aid people who want to quit, to cover the "social health"-related costs of having a society with lifelong smokers in it, and to more adequately prepare people so that they don't "fall into the trap" of being a "hopelessly addicted" smoker. Instead, and while a portion of money from said taxes does go to those efforts, taxes have been raised over the years against cigarettes through the one process that expressly enables oppression of the minority: Voting.

It's fairly well understood that poor people are both more likely to be smokers and less likely to vote. That way, when an issue is presented on the ballot that basically says: "A class of citizens that you're most likely not a member of [smokers] will effectively pay ${X Million} to fund something that doesn't benefit them and that they also won't appreciate [fine arts/a stadium] and/or a public institution [local schools/police force/whatever] in which they will receive, at most, a significantly underrepresented portion of that benefit due to their minority status." The odds of someone voting YES to a measure that they perceive will benefit them yet will allow them to incur none of the oppression it brings (financial or otherwise) by simply being outside of the class that is oppressed is, by my estimation, Pretty Fucking High. For examples of this that you might understand better (and hopefully find as upsetting as I do), see the recent bans on gay marriage in North Carolina and other states.

If cigarette taxes were truly fair and just, then they would be used to help mitigate ancillary problems that arise from smoking in the arena of human health, but first and foremost against the most fundamental problem that underlies smoking: addiction is not a choice. While I readily admit that there is no known method to circumvent that problem, there is a whole hell of a lot of stuff out there in the form of drugs, therapy, education, and likely significantly more things that I'm not even aware of that could be funded by cigarette taxes in such a way as to make that problem much less of a hurdle to overcome, allowing a smoker to make the choice to quit smoking and significantly aiding them in the process. Above all, and here's the kicker: those taxes could make "quitting today" less expensive than "smoking tomorrow." Sadly, you'll find that nicotine patches and gum, behavioral therapy, and something like Chantix are all more expensive over the period in which they're used or that they're designed to be effective than the cost of cigarettes would be to cover the same for the average smoker. At least in Ohio... the last time I checked, anyway.

For what it's worth, I firmly believe that people don't start smoking because they're morons. You start smoking because you want to smoke---though I won't argue that the reason you may want to smoke isn't moronic, as it very well may be---and you continue to smoke because you enjoy it and still want to smoke. It's a problem though when you want to not smoke, but can't. It's doubly a problem that someone in that situation may very well be "trapped" there through a combination of financial insecurity, social oppression, and the sheer power of addiction. Cigarette taxes could be used to turn the tides on this scenario in a truly meaningful way, but they're simply not. If they were, though, the best part is that it could be an entirely self-sustaining system. Whereas now, with cigarettes paying for all kinds of non-cigarette-related shit, if everyone quit tomorrow... county governments would have a serious funding problem.

Anyway, I'll stop ranting. I know, [Citation Needed]. My apologies. I'd really be more interested in something citing the opposite :P

[TL;DR]: Cigarette taxes don't benefit smokers or provide a means to pay the societal costs of smoking, and it's facilitated by majority oppression in a style that evokes class warfare.

Lest ye not be too quick to judge, that mayest thou consider: a physician engages in the art of "practice!"