Ever since I, somewhat reluctantly, started using Facebook, I have followed the simple policy of making everything I post as public as possible, while simply not posting anything I don't want any random web surfer to see. If this change will make more people snap out of their false sense of Facebook privacy, all the better, I say.

What you're saying is that it wouldn't be smart for the NSA to put a backdoor in Windows. But what we're discussing here is whether or not they may actually have done it. The way I see it, the two are completely different.

I don't think so, since the double slashes only apply to Internet schemes anyway. RFC1738 says:

Yeah, I could be wrong. Thanks for the reference; I used to read a lot of RFCs but haven't done much of that recently. And unfortunately, like I said, I don't remember what sources I used or where I heard that bit about the network protocol. RFC1738 is dated Dec. -94 and presumably wasn't even available for much of the time I spent working on that thesis.

Back when I wrote a thesis on dissemination of company-internal information via the world-wide web, in 1994 or so, I remember stating that originally, an indication of which network protocol to use was meant to go between the slashes. But since, in the real world, the network protocol was always TCP/IP, this was made the default and whatever was once put between the slashes was dropped.

Of course, I don't remember the source or anything.

In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.

Sounds a bit like DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System. Or at least like my wishful-thinking fantasies about DIBS, since I haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet.

Sure, why not? Or better yet, use an immutable drive image. E.g., in VirtualBox:

1. Set things up in the guest the way you want them. Shut the guest down.
2. Detach the drive image from the virtual machine.
3. VBoxManage modifyhd --type immutable TheDrive.vdi (this step, unfortunately, can't be done from the GUI).
4. Reattach the drive.
5. Profit! Your virtual machine always starts up to the state in step 1, no matter what you did in the previous session.

I'm sure other virtualization packages have similar features.

[citation needed]

No, really. I'm not flaming you, I'm just curious. What do you base this on?

A laptop generally isn't designed to be left running 24/7 and can supposedly catch fire if, say, the fan stops working and the CPU doesn't. Even if the fire doesn't spread, the toxic fumes from all that plastic can really ruin your day.

Still, it can be done, of course. But you may not want to put it near where somebody sleeps.

Um, no. IE was and is utter crap at least up to and including the 6.x versions. Netscape 4 was pretty good, actually, from a user's perspective (it was the first browser to have some sort of sane support for CSS, for one thing).

IE killed Netscape by being (a) free and (b) preinstalled with Windows (beginning with some version or other of Win95, IIRC). Netscape (AOL) tried to respond by open-sourcing the Gecko rendering engine, but for one thing, they did this too late. For another, it turned out that Gecko had devolved into a festering, unmaintainable mess that had to be more or less completely rewritten, compounding the "too late" problem.

Yet another case of a decent product taking a harsh beating from a crappy one due to strategical and political factors. C'est la vie.