I find myself wondering if there's any chance the drone actually saved the life of one or more of the men. I hear so many stories about police shooting unarmed civilians, that I wonder if the drone footage (confirming the men to be unarmed) prevented the situation from escalating to the point where the police would shoot first and ask questions later.

(Note: I'm not condoning nor justifying the use of drones against American civilians. I'm only pondering if one questionably unethical act played part in preventing something a lot more horrific.)

No, I wouldn't call this news for nerds. Because it's not news. But I do think it's relevant to nerds, especially those that take interest math and music.

It's creative. It's mathematical. It's something that a non-nerd would struggle to appreciate. It's even under idle. So what's the problem?

There is a trick in dd to creating sparse files which should let the virtual disk dynamically grow, while not actually using up all of its pre-allocated space. This would be accomplished by changing your dd command to:

dd if=/dev/zero of=disk1 bs=1 count=1 seek=1024M

But I personally have not tried this, and my understanding is that it's not well supported by a lot of common utilities. So I believe it can be done, but in most cases it's not well recommended.

In Linux, you're not limited to mounting ISO's. You can use the program dd to read in from /dev/zero and create a file of any arbitrary size. You can then run makefs to install whatever file system you want on that file (getting features like encryption, journaling, data deduplication, etc.) Partition it with fdisk, and from there you can mount it as a loop device as though it was any disk. It's more work to create, and requires a bit more understanding of disks/filesystems. But all of the tools are there for it on pretty much any distro you could come across.

First thing that comes to my mind is nepotism.