can't I just dd an image to the USB stick and I am all set up?

[harridu]

It would be nice to have an image to dd to an USB stick. Something that requires root just when needed.

[steve6375]

dd would require different sized images for different sized drives.
e.g. If I had a 2TB image, which had 800GB of ISO files on it, I would still need to write 2TB of data which would take many hours.
Can you explain exactly what you mean?