If buying a car were like the Apple App Store, you'd hand over the check, take the keys, and drive one block before the engine fell out. Your only option would be to go back and buy another one. This time, when you get in and drive away, the shiny body stays behind and you find out you're really riding a Vespa with flat tires and a leaky gas tank pissing all over your shoes. Or you buy a "1 ton pickup," stop for some groceries on the way home, and the first bag you throw in the bed cracks the body in half.

Holy [citation needed] Bat-Man!

(I still say BD isn't gonna make it, they haven't been able to get the price per disc down low enough to make them suitable for small backups or handing out to friends)

They're down to $1 a disc for 25G BD-R, that's not cheap enough for you? Yeah it's almost twice the price of a DVD+R DL, but it's also nearly 3x the space. The drives are down to about $100 too.

Actually, it's exactly the opposite. I don't think it happens any more, but it used to be that (either by default or user setting, I don't know which) certain web servers would send files they didn't have a mime type for as text. Netscape, at the time, would display this text in the browser, which means not only were all the LFs changed to CRLF, but all the white space was compressed, so you couldn't just save it and uncook it unless you went back and used "right-click/Save As". IE on the other hand would go "*.doc? That's not text, that's a Word Document!" and present the "Save As" dialog.

The servers and/or the browsers have gotten smarter since then, so I don't recall running into this for at least the last ten years.

Take off the tinfoil hat already. The files just got cooked^2 by the web server and IE popped up a save dialog anyway. The PDF files were probably all from ascii postscript and had nothing to get cooked.

P.S. why the hell doesn't <sup> work?

That's because you bought it out of the road-use pump. I don't know if you can actually get non-road gasoline, but I'm sure that farmers use non-road diesel. It has a different color dye, red I think, and you get fined if you use it in your road vehicles.

In any event, if they do sell non-road gasoline, you probably can't buy less than 50 or 100 gallons at a time.

Trivial to do the first. You don't even have to forget the pass-phrase. Just create it with a random keyfile and then shred the keyfile. There, I did it. The password is "password", but the keyfile has been destroyed.

You know, you can do that with a cell phone too. They all have this little button on them that, when you hold it for about 3 seconds, the phone turns off. Some of them even have something called "airplane mode" where you can still use the camera and music player, but nobody can call you.

Um... Desktop virtualization Remote Desktop Services X Window System Virtual Network Computing. HTH, HAND.

Maybe I'm missing something, but who cares if the latency is due to sitting in the buffer for 1500 ms or retrying a dropped packet for 1500 ms?