Once you lose physical control of a machine, you really can't say much about the security of it. You don't know where that laptop has been or who else might have tampered with it while it has been traveling the globe. The best you can really do is the standard antivirus scans. But that doesn't stop a 0-day or a custom written trojan.

You really ought to be treating all portable devices as potentially hostile devices and securing (and monitoring) your networks accordingly.

IMO if the user is competent enough to install Linux or their own custom Windows image on there, I don't think you are any worse off than it was previously. Seeing how out of date some IT departments are with patching and service packs, the machine may end up being more secure.

Got laid tonight ... check.

Cool story bro.

Your post is full of grammatical errors so don't get started.

What these students did was a jailable offense

Maybe in North Korea or China. In America something like this is at most a civil tort of libel.

Sodomy was made legal by the supreme court.

The law makes no distinction if the child porn you possess was obtained accidentally or intentionally.

Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.. The sniffing dogs smell some dope that got stashed underneath the seat and YOU are the one who gets put in prison.

I'm not a libertarian but even I can see how utterly broke and immoral the system has become to get to such a point.

Calling the cops is a complete gamble. The cops will likely say "you have child porn, I am required to arrest you and charge you with possession, you can explain it to the judge".

Best thing to do is a low-level multi-pass format, or a new HD. But that is if you *know* that you downloaded CP. If you don't know, cops may bust down your door some months later, seize your computer, then charge you once they find a thumbnail in some cache folder that was deleted 4 months ago.

Uh, no.

Scientific discoveries have, in fact, validated the concept of race.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/11/european-population-structure-with-300k.html

Differences?

How about "The Bell Curve"? How about things like athletic ability, lactose tolerance, and ability to survive in areas with little (or alot) of sunlight?

Yeah, no differences!!