To further refine that, it's a lack of mental healthcare PLUS the easy availability of guns that is the problem. One without the other would not really be a problem.

The difference compared to the US is that in Switzerland, all those guns are kept at home by people who have been trained and serve(d) in the military. As in, they have been through a selection process to weed out the unstable idiots who should not have guns, because you do not want unstable idiots to have firearms period, whether in the military or not.

In the US, any Billy Joe Bob Gun-nut can go out and buy an assault rifle with little more than a basic background check. There is no training requirement and there is no psychological check in place to prevent guns from ending up in the wrong person's hands.

I find it very interesting to read so many people here defending XP in light of its security weaknesses. We're talking about an OS that has a horrible security model out of the box and encourages applications to be designed to run with full admin privileges. If you are a developer stuck on XP and you haven't updated your software to work properly with the newer security model introduced in Vista, well shame on you. You've had way more than enough time... 7 years to be exact.

XP is the "odd one out" now, with regards to how you design a good, secure Windows application. There are 3 newer versions of Windows and the 4th is coming next week, all with a similar, much more robust security model. XP is now the bastard child, different from the rest. Sickly.

And don't forget the 64-bit question. While 32-bit XP was very widely used and adopted, the 64-bit "edition" was an instant bastard child, born out of the unholy union of XP and Server 2003 64-bit. Very few applications support 64-bit XP and with good reason. While it was the first 64-bit Windows on the desktop, its compatibility with existing and even new applications was never a strong point. It was a niche product and never gained widespread support. If you need 64-bit support, XP doesn't cut it. We work with very large datasets, and 64-bit is basically a requirement for much of what we do.

We are about to release the last versions of our software that support XP and I can't wait for the day we drop support completely. It's an additional testing burden when we already need to test all newer versions. Plus, it behaves differently than the rest. Continuing to support XP today drives up costs and limits adoption of newer and better technologies. It had a good run, but now it's time to let it die. There are newer and better Windows versions.

Hmm... maybe the TSA needs to be talking to ICE (immigration and customs enforcement). Because recent articles point to ICE having used traveler information to specifically target "dissidents" returning from outside the US in order to perform an illegal search and seizure. In the most recent high profile case, a journalist (iirc) returning from a vacation in Mexico had all his electronics confiscated at the border because he had an association with a support organization working on behalf of Bradley Manning. This was before Manning's conviction. ICE kept his stuff for 7 MONTHS, while they sifted through all his documents and files. It's even rumored they shared the data with other three letter government organizations. Nothing was found to justify such an illegal search.

Isn't that basically the same argument the US military uses to justify rape and not go go after the perpetrator?

Really now? Show me a netbook with an IPS screen and 4 cores that sells for less than $349. What? Can't find one? Whoops...!

I don't know what the inert grenades look like today, but the one I had when I was a kid had a huge hole bored out of the bottom of the grenade and you could fully see inside that it was empty. There is no way anyone handling one of these would think it was live... oh wait, we're talking TSA agents here, most of which are about as smart as a brick. And that's an insult to bricks.

Yeah, I'm no fan of the TSA, but I've got close to 2 million miles under my belt over the past 23 years and I've seen them repeatedly do very stupid things for very stupid reasons. If anything, a typical TSA agent is ignorant and under-trained.

Shuttling a couple hard disks back and forth every day of the week using overnight shipping would be a fairly expensive option. You would have to have at minimum 2 sets of disks, sending them both ways every day, the shipping costs alone would be high if you do this on a daily basis. We are talking 2x the daily overnight shipping costs for a 2 pound package, multiplied by an average 21 working days/month. I don't know what the typical costs for overnight shipping in the US these days, but let's say $25 per shipment and $50/day. The monthly shipping costs work out to be $1050. And that does not include all the "manual" labor of copying data to/from the disks, packing, shipping paperwork, etc. The cost of the disks would be fairly trivial in comparison to the shipping costs.

Also, you would likely want a larger pool of disks to spread the failure rate, as all the bumps and shocks they receive every day being shipped back and forth is very likely to result in damage and short lifespan.

I totally agree on this method for one-time or infrequent large transfers, but I think you are creating more problems by trying to use this method for daily transfer of data.

The problem with that is, EU data protection/privacy laws won't let Google just hand over user data stored in the EU to the US. As a US citizen living in the EU, with a Google datacenter in my current home country, I find this ironic.

Please do your research and read up on the tech behind the 41mp PureView. It's not hype. The camera essentially oversamples the scene to improve image quality.

Exactly. Has anyone actually thought about what might happen if you are actually able to shoot one from the sky? A drone is a small aircraft. Do you really want that falling in your neighborhood? If people start actually shooting them from the skies, it won't be long before some innocent people on the ground are killed by falling parts or the whole aircraft itself. Shooting them is about the most stupid thing you can do, ever. How about voting the idiots out of office who are supporting them in the first place? That would be a good start.

I hate to counter a possible AC troll, but Linus has always followed the "do one thing and do it well" mantra. In a sense, we are likely better off that he didn't "look at the big picture" and lose focus on the core.

I believe the issue the AC brings up lies more with Linux desktop environments, rather than with Linus himself. If Linux had more or less standardized on a single desktop* for corporate use, we would likely see more Linux on the desktop today. But it didn't and the rest is history.

* I am not trying to imply there should be one and only one desktop for Linux. I am simply saying that to address the corporate desktop market, a standardized desktop** is more or less essential. Of course there are also special needs outside the corporate desktop, and this is where different desktop environments can exist and fill a particular niche.

** Win8 is a good example where MS changed the standard desktop environment and is being shunned by the corporate crowd as a result. It's just too different from what had become the "standard" since Win95.

Not to mention, that if the SDP and Communist parties had agreed to cooperate and stand together as one against the Nazi party, it's highly likely the Nazis would have never made it to power in the first place. Unfortunately, it was politics as usual and the threat was not neutralized before it was too late.

And yet, the Dell still has a mobile GPU.

This. This is overblown BS written by someone who doesn't understand TPM and what it can and can't do.

The story also fails to mention that the TPM module is usually an option and typically only available on corporate PC's. Not to mention the fact that it can be disabled in BIOS/EFI if you are admin over that system.

TPM is not even required by Windows 8. RT... well that's another issue but this article is mainly about PC's, not RT tablets.