How would a manufacturer force people to upgrade the unlock mechanism in the cars?

In other news - batteries have firmware.

You can exchange bitcoins for legal tender at any one of the exchanges.

You can use bitcoins to buy amazon products (there is a bitcoin trader who will make the order for you).

The grocery thing is not common yet, but there are food stores for bitcoin and one of the most famous early transactions in Bitcoin was someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. If the pizza guy kept those coins, he would now be worth $300,000.

Where is the "When Mark Shuttleworth force-fed Unity down my throat" option?

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of people willing to help with CentOS 6, but the team has just ignored them. There was a 'list of outstanding bugs' that was linked to in the 'When will CentOS 6 be released' thread, and a couple of days after that was posted, every bug had a patch against it.

They ignored that for another couple of months, wrote their own patches, and then went off and did other things.

Whilst Scientific Linux 5.6 is easily installable. Install 5.5 and then run 'yum update'. There's an alpha ISO around, and I think there was a beta due out shortly.

Actually, apt is (deliberately) missing a vital system verification tool - a way to verify the consistency of packages. rpm -qv will tell you what files have been changed since a package was installed. The debian way to do it is 'reinstall the package and see what breaks'.

I am not making this up.

Except in this case, they aren't giving you a CD-R to replace the one they damaged. They're giving you an unwritable CD, that only costs $0.12

The issue is that the replacement system is of *lesser* spec than some of the models that were replaced. We're not even talking equivalent models that have since been upgraded. In my case, I lose 2GB RAM, 1 entire core, and the quality/(comparative real-world) speed of the CPU is lower.

This is obviously not true. Car companies have no vested interest in reducing fuel economy. In 1984 GM was struggling to meet consumer demand for the big, comfortable cars Americans want, while also meeting ever-stricter emissions and fuel economy rules. Since GM really didn't know how to make cars that were both small and good, they were stuck with a stable of large, underpowered cars and small, unpopular ones, and losing market share every year. A technology like you describe would have allowed them to leapfrog the problem altogether; instead of sweeping the technology under the rug, they would have bought the exclusive rights and dominated the market.

Now, maybe if you claimed your grandfather had tried to sell it to Exxon, it might be more credible.

My kids are heading towards this age and I feel this area is very complex.

I don't want my kids to be afraid to surf anywhere, but by the same token, I want to know where they are going, but then again I can imagine that there are things they might want to research that they don't want me to know about. So my regime at the moment is... everything will be logged through the access proxy installed at our home. Except for periods of time where they can go and look at anything they want, but during these times, they must be supervised by an adult that we trust, of which we know enough that are sufficiently broad minded that I know there is nothing they couldn't go surfing for if they wanted to.

In particular I am thinking sites about sexuality, drugs, medical issues or other controversial topics that theor parents could never understand.... :-)

If this goes well, they will be allowed to surf unsupervised and unlogged as they get older.

Some problems do not require technical solutions, or rather do not require gatekeepers but perhaps better chaperones.

is that the person who thought they were being clever by labeling this a "leak" didn't notice it was an unclassified memo sent to the heads of public agencies.