The solution to this would be to add a new command to the ATA spec, call it FREEZE or something. If a drive receives this command, it won't do any writing/erasing, neither on its own or in response to ATA commands. Then you just create write blockers that also send this command.

Of course, this both requires new drives and new write blocker hardware, so it probably won't be implemented.

Maybe it was actually caused by the phones being muted? Since the you're so used to hearing something when a phone is placed against your ear, and you often spend a moderate effort trying to separate the sound from the phone from background noise, maybe the lack of any sound at all made their brains try extra hard to listen for the expected sound.

A nice control would be some non-cellphone device that looked and acted like a phone, could be either muted or not, but only played a pre-recorded message and didn't produce any EM radiation.

I just looked into this a bit more, and if what I understand is correct:

These games do NOT require you to be always-on anymore
Splinter Cell: Conviction
Silent Hunter 5
Assassin's Creed 2

These games STILL requires you to be always-on
The Settlers 7
Prince of Persia 2010
Hawx 2
Probably a few others

As an aside, the the way they "fixed" the always-on issue is a bit interesting - instead of issuing new patches for the various games, they now download a separate program for each game that does what Ubisoft's servers used to do.

You don't need to seed a single byte to get the IPs of everyone on a torrent. Just ask the tracker/DHT network, and it willingly gives away all info about seeders/peers. This is by design, as torrents were never intended to be used for illegal means.

As an example of thorough work done by a real design agency, here is a 90-page PDF style guide from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. (Not in English, but the images should speak for themselves.)

You won't get anything comparable for $250 on 99designs.

Have timing measurements ever been exploited online in practice? I would assume that over the internet, any difference in timing would get drowned out in the timing noise of a dozen routers, switches, heck, even possibly cable quality - making any reliable measurement impossible.

Server=.\WinCC;uid=WinCCConnect;pwd=2WSXcder (+1 for what appears to be a reasonably random looking password

Only random looking. Glance down at your keyboard as you type in that password.

If you're talking about VAC-banning then you're just factually incorrect. If not then I'd be interested to know of an example, because I've never heard of somebody's entire Steam account being banned. Phished, perhaps, but not banned.

Google "disabled Steam account". They ban people for various things, mostly related to billing issues. If you want to experience it yourself, try purchasing something with a credit card, then dispute the charge. Poof, no more account.

They might have a slight point if the stuck accelerator problem actually was caused a software problem.

But since the problem has been shown to be a floor mat, or, in some other cases, a faulty mechanical design, what does this article have to do with anything?

Just turn off the pagefile.

Windows can't page when it doesn't have a pagefile. Problem solved. At least it works for me.

I haven't tested Windows 7 yet, but I was always annoyed that XP seemed quite fond of prioritizing disk cache over background applications. Every time after I had been playing a game, my web browser/email client would be slow as molasses because it was completely swapped out and it would take minutes before it went back to normal speed. So I did the one thing that a lot of people think is some kind of blasphemy.

I turned off swap.

And never looked back. I don't have to worry about disk trashing when changing between programs anymore, the whole system feels faster and I've never run out of memory, despite only having 3GB. Something was definitely flawed in the XP memory management.

There are nearly as many computers in the real world using SDRAM and DDR SDRAM as there are using computers using DDR2 or DDR3.

They are also owned by people/companies that would rather buy a new system instead of adding more RAM.

Yes, it's Google's problem that you don't know how to use robots.txt.

Bull. Shit.

My Xbox hasn't been online in months and I have both installed and played games from the drive while it was offline. Try again.

Why would you want the double-precision version? Crypto is all about integer math.