My father taught me photography with a camera that had no electronics whatever, above the quantum-mechanical layer of photons interacting with crystals or silver oxide. Still have one around somewhere. Let me know how anyone would propose disabling this device without subjecting the entire bus to dangerous effect such as harmful levels of X-rays.

What I proposed was software. The implementation would be entirely in the driver SOFTWARE, not the speaker HARDWARE drivers.

Sorry about the ambiguity.

Protecting against thermal burnout doesn't require expensive DSP algorithms. The audio drivers could come close by simply maintaining a time-decayed value of the recent audio sample delta. Easy to compute. The time constant would be something a little faster than the rate a which the speaker can dump heat to the environment. That computation would track fairly closely the power dissipation (heat) in the speaker, and when unsafely high, the driver should stop and flag some sort of error popup.

My answer would have been:

"Not caring what my biggest weaknesses are."

Your idea of cryptographically signing books is an extremely worthy one. The details may be tricky to work out (a recent /. item suggests that the NSA is planning to break all cryptography for all time with quantum computing) but we should all keep the idea in mind against the time it becomes necessary to protect our history and knowledge from Big Brother. And it will become necessary...

BTW, my family dog has been running a small paperless library in the back yard for about a decade. No E-readers -- all the items are scratch-and-sniff.

They haven't proven intent. (And I hope they cannot.) The driver has only been arrested and charged, not convicted.

Let's see. The Tesla S battery outputs 375 volts. So if I mount about 50 of these devices on the roof in series can I remove that heavy performance-sapping battery pack?

Oh, wait, I can do a lot better if I just rub a balloon with my cat. Of course, I have to feed the cat, so operation isn't free. And I had to bear the cost of neutering the cat long ago so he wouldn't accelerate unpredictably.

I would like to question a related but opposite question:

Should people want even a dumb watch? One that just tells the time, and maybe has an alarm and calendar.

Years ago I worked at a place where there were a number of radio astronomers. One carried a flip-open clamshell watch that was entirely plastic (no electronics) and contained only a 3D replica of Stonehenge. Worked for him... (You can still buy these. Google Stonehenge Watch.)

It isn't obvious to me that constant preoccupation with the exact time is a boon to humanity. It may be necessary in our culture, given the scheduling of media to quantized fraction-of-an-hour time, and the need to coordinate for appointments, and not have railroad trains run into one another. But other human societies have worked differently, and perhaps they work better in some ways. Or at least differently.

A wonderful and breezy introduction to cultural perceptions of time (and space, and lotsa other things) can be found in Edward T Hall's 1959 _The SiIent Language_. While this isn't even Hall's final word on the subject (see Wikipedia or Amazon) I bought a copy for $0.10 at a used book store back in the late 1970s, and reading it has helped me tremendously dealing with foreign-culture customers, travel. and even my foreign-citizen wife.

You haven't been completely clear, but if the mother has primary custody and wants to limit your misogynist contact, she can obviously control the amount of contact you have. The specific device won't matter if she won't let him use it, or simply takes it away.

If she has called you a misogynist pig in any way that was recorded and which can be proven, you need a lawyer to deal with this I'm presuming you are not actually a misogynist pig, so your wife's unstable slander would be useful if you want to gain more control.

As for specific devices, at 4 your son knows what you look like. Why is video chat better than simple audio phone? There is still this thing in the universe called copper-wired POTS. You can phone at times you both are available (if the mother doesn't interfere) and at 4, you might be able to teach him how to phone you.

Yes, but this prohibits use of Google's many server-side tools for editing documents, spreadsheets, calendar, etc. If confidentiality of your data is to be preserved, that data can never be transferred unencrypted out of machines you control. That prevents the server-side application from checking your spelling, evaluating your spreadsheet calculations, or anything else. The cloud becomes nothing but a distributed filesystem.

But Google wants to read your data in order to advertise to you. That's why they provide the free service and have implemented all of it server side. They are not dishonest about this, but their denial that they share your data with government authorities seems to ignore the fact that a government can force them secretly to disclose anything.

Ummm, if you want to store your data in Google's cloud, or anyone else's, then all you need do is encrypt it before uploading. Then the responsibility for keeping the key secret is yours. If Google reencrypts your data, there is usually no significant gain or loss of security. You can even share documents with anyone else who has the key, perhaps delivered by carrier pigeon. (Surprisingly, multiple different encryptions can sometimes be weaker than any of the individual encryptions - read that somewhere on Usenet long ago -- but I don't think this matters much in practice, otherwise a standard cracking technique would be to try reencrypting the encrypted data.)

Of course, this strategy won't work with Google's application suite (Google Docs, etc.) because your thin client talks unencrypted data with the application running in Google's cloud, even if the connection is ssh -- the data is unencrypted in the server until saved under encryption. Someone should explain to me again why accessing cloud-based apps from a thin client is such a win...

There may be conflicting law against the employer.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

It could be argued that agreeing to the terms of Facebook establishes a contract with Facebook. That contract prohibits disclosing one's password to anyone else. Anyone trying to force a violation of that contract could be committing tortious interference, which could be actionable in civil court.

It might be that Facebook would have no losses in such a violation, but one's friends would have information intended only for friends to have acess disclosed to this employers. That loss of privacy could give thoe friends grounds for civil action.

I'm not a lawyer, and glad of it...

You might convince a team to write good code simply by trying to convince them to write bad code, provided you can obfuscate you efforts sufficiently so what you encourage is plausible.

Herding cats...