Yes! I HATE the fact they have replaced the really effective Shinfield Rd mini-roundabout with that set of lights. I tend to only drive in Reading for a week, once a year, but know it quite well because I used to live there. Also I question myself every time I have to navigate Winnersh Triangle roundabout and have ended up in Lower Earley more than once instead of Wokingham Rd.

It doesn't have to be gratuitous, and I like a good score arranged multi-channel - it feels more immersive. A good 5.1 system combined with a good centre speaker will allow the dialog to be more intelligible.

Haha absolutely (and that is just from someone who tries to edit HD 1080i). From the viewer's perspective though I think most TVs today don't flicker at 50 or 60Hz

540p would be less lines than SD in PAL regions where SD is 576i. Actually 576i is called out as SD at the beginning of TFA. Would progressive scan really make up for this?

OK gotcha - I failed to adjust my context correctly when reading your comment.

I believe that most of the hassle of identity theft is cleaning up your credit report after the fact and letting the creditors know they've been duped.

I do know that in the UK you can get credit without ID, and you can apply online but they mail a credit agreement for signing which you send back before you get a card.

In the US I wonder how much of the talk of identity theft is the credit agencies selling credit report monitoring services. :)

Actually I was thinking more about doing something like applying for a credit card where I don't think its necessary to supply any ID (not covered by the PATRIOT act). A few years back it was possible (don't know if it is still possible) to apply for a credit card online with not much more than your address and social security number. You could get instant approval and they'd supply the credit card number on the approval screen so you could start spending online immediately! I suspect that if someone applies for credit in your name with your social security number online this would be classed as 'identity theft'. Also if identity theft is generally only large scale operations why is talk of it so prevalent? While not a supporter of national ID cards I definitely see the benefit of a crypto card with a private key stored on it where authentication can be done via RSA or some other asymetrical algorithm. Using insecure methods to 'authenticate' (SSN, name etc) people is absolutely an issue of identity and identification! :)

Does that mean that if a criminal has both those numbers he can sign up online for a credit card in your name? I think that is where a lot of identity theft issues come from: being identified by a number with no form of authentication. I've never experienced identity theft myself but I know from moving house that online credit applications never seem to complain when I give an address that isn't already on my credit file. Anyone have any statistics or info on the most common forms of identity theft are in the US?

Both of these suggestions are cool. You could also use AppLocker on Windows to do application whitelisting.

But you've ignored my main point which is that no alternative OS protects from this scenario (without using some unmanageable SELinux configuration that you will switch off): User gets program as attachment, authorises the running of said program and program accesses everything user normally accesses. Therefore no privilege escalation. It is not 'more secure' in this scenario.

What privileged operation is required to access resources that are readily available to the user context? None that I can think of. You can read files and connect to the network without root/administrator. This can only be solved with a combination of policy and user education. AV and attachment filtering would be a start. As this was a targeted attack I don't think that security by obscurity would necessarily work (i.e. running a different OS)