I get a similar effect by using a Dvorak keyboard layout at work (keycaps still in qwerty). Great fun when a coworker tries to enter a password on my keyboard.

Would adding a drop rule in iptables count as not honoring this 24h cleaning time that you speak of? Technically that would be a permanent record of someone that "opted out" of leaving any kind of record.

What would they be enforcing specifically?

First off, let me remind everyone that cookies left in your browser's cookie cache can only be read by the domain that gave them to you. So maps.google.com can read cookies issued by mail.google.com but www.amazon.com cannot read or in any way know about cookies issued from www.newegg.com. Cookies were designed that way for the exact reason of protecting privacy. Additionally, cookies that you receive on sites that you have not logged in to are not linked to your name, your street address, your email address or some secret serial number stamped on the back of your CPU; they are random numbers like you get at the DMV to know your place in line. Until you deliberately give a website some piece of identifying information by actually typing it in yourself, they know absolutely nothing about who you are.

Would "opting out" mean that anonymous users (ones that have not signed in to or otherwise given personal details to a website) can't receive session id cookies? That would mean that shopping at Newegg, Amazon, eBay and etc. would require a user to give actual personal details to the website before using any sort of shopping cart feature. Trying to work around that with any sort of ajax, HTTP/POST or HTTP/GET tricks would still be "tracking" per se and would be similarly banned.

Would "opting out" mean that the web server cannot log IP addresses? That would be a free pass for every damned script kiddie in every corner of the world to openly attack US web servers. If they have the "opt out" flag up then logging the IP to create firewall rules or report them to the authorities would be implicit admission of breaking the "opt out" rules. As a sysadmin it would also mean that I can't use Apache logs like this:
173.201.18.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:11:33:00 -0500] "GET /ne
173.201.18.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:11:33:02 -0500] "POST /w
209.220.104.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:12:04:09 -0500] "GET /n
209.220.104.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:12:04:10 -0500] "POST /
10.209.187.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:14:23:54 -0500] "POST /wp
184.154.62.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:14:23:54 -0500] "GET http
216.113.191.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:15:44:59 -0500] "POST /s
220.181.7.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:15:46:50 -0500] "GET /robo
184.154.62.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:16:01:49 -0500] "GET http
187.87.203.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:16:12:25 -0500] "GET /ne
187.87.203.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:16:12:42 -0500] "POST /w
119.63.198.xxx - - [01/Dec/2010:17:16:24 -0500] "HEAD /w
to figure out if things like 404 errors are coming from links on my site or some stale link on someone else's.

I could go on, but I'm not.

Getting our panties in a twist over "tracking" is idiotic. Most people like it when businesses remember them. I like it when a bartender knows that I like dark beers and recommends I try something based on that knowledge. I like it when I walk into a convenience store and the cashier has my brand of cigarettes on the counter before I'm even finished saying "hello". I like it when my bus driver knows to wait at the downtown station an extra 5 min because he knows that I'll be arriving there on another bus about the same time he's scheduled to depart.

How is tracking like this in real life, with your real face attached to your real body good while tracking your web browser is bad?

If anyone want's to legislate or ban anything, how about banning the sale of privileged information collected during signup? You could even leave off any language that would make it specific to the internet and have it protect your grocery store club card records from being sold off to the highest bidder the way that the Florida DMV just recently sold off the personal information of everyone with a FL driver's license.

Technically the Earth, Sun and all other massive bodies in this solar system all orbit each other simultaneously. But the sun is the most massive so it gets to be close to the center of the system.

Ditto for our solar system and every other solar system in the Milky Way.

It might also hold true for the whole of the universe but I'm not sure how many times we'll circle the drain before we meet the big bang's evil twin, the big squeeze.

Comparing Chrome 8.0.552.11 dev to Firefox 4.0b6 on Sun Spider.

Chrome: 335.6ms +/- 2.8%
Firefox: 543.6ms +/- 2.4%

System: AMD Phenom II 965 w/ 4GB RAM on Win7 Ultimate.

Recorded media (both analog and digital forms of photographs, audio and video) are as much a part of our cultural heritage as paintings and sculptures from previous eras.

Losing the last copy of a TV show or movie is not much different from losing the last copy of a book. It isn't just the great works that deserve archival, since future generations can learn about the state of society from both low budget movies and merchant ledgers.

And to more directly answer the question in your first sentence, I think it's unfortunate that several of the early episodes of Doctor Who were lost for the purpose of saving warehouse space.

Java isn't that tough. If he were to find a local college willing to let him audit or, if necessary, pay for just a Java class then it would probably be a worthwhile investment. If he has experience with procedural languages and programming then a good Java course would let him catch up with OOP design.

I think Java still makes a good poster child for OOP design and is more portable and accessible than C# or any other .NET language.

They're rolling out their bandwidth meter to more areas now. Last month I hit about 350GB without getting a call.

The e-brake is just a mechanical application of the rear brakes. The rear brakes are also controlled by the brake pedal so if you've faded your brakes by riding them, you're not going to magically get some new stopping power with the handbrake.

Skip the default password search and just get http://www.backtrack-linux.org/

Doesn't matter what the key is if it's using WEP. That's barely a couple minutes of number crunching for a cheap when it was new 3 years ago laptop. Seriously, it takes longer for a seasoned chain smoker to finish a Marb 72.

WPA-TKIP has been shown to have exploitable weaknesses so it will likely be cracked and then trivialized soon as well (if it hasn't been already). WAP-AES is reasonably secure at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if that falls within the next few years as well.

Encryption is, and always has been, an arms race.

Except that, from the poster's description, these maps are in no condition to survive any sort of feed mechanism.

My layman's recommendation would be to follow Wilschon's advice above and use a digital camera to digitize them. You'll probably want to rig a mount system that will allow you to move the camera on a parallel plane to whatever surface you have the map on.

Depending on how accurate you want the digitization to be, you'll probably want to use much better lenses that are built in to a typical snapshot camera. You should solicit the advice of a photography expert to find out what lens setup would work best for capturing images of a flat plane at .3 to .6 meters with no distortion and consistent focus.

With or without using a car analogy?