Can it wake up from sleeping and hibernating in a second?

If you have a full-disc encrypted computer you want to turn if off when you are not sitting in front of it.

And why would Oracle want to prevent if from being forked?

But maybe they could release it also under GPL.

Depends what you mean by affected.

I think that the data retention laws is a violation of my privacy, and therefore effect me.
But the courts do not see it that way.

I also think all the internetfilters is a violation of freedom of speech.
That also will not be easy to take to court.

There could actually be people voting for a pirate party even if they are not pro-piracy.

Just as some people will wote for e.g. Christian democrats without having an interest in Christianity.

One reason could be region codes.

Last time I used VLC on Windows was when I brought some region 2 (Europe) DVD's to Canada. The Sony DVD player, the Playstation or the windows XP computer would not play it.
Until I installed VLC, then it worked perfectly.

I prefer Mplayer, but VLC is great and easy to install on MS windows.

Forget the harddrives. They are a source of good magnets, but apart from that cheap USB sticks are a better alternative.

Small usb sticks?

* I like to keep one with a debian net-install Image. E.g. many netbooks do not have CD-drives so you need a USB-stick, but it can be small.

* Store important information. Eg. put you PGP keys on it and keep it in your safe.
    It you store it on both a CD-rom and USB-stick you will find out what last the longest.

* Keep servers quiet. If you have a server in you living room that you want to keep quite, you could put in a USB-stick and mount /var/log on in so the machanical disks does not spin up.

* OpenWrt Accesspoint typically have 16 to 32 MByte flash internally. Even a small USB stick can make a big difference.

==
Obviously, it remains to be seen if any video/audio watermark system is robust enough to survive the basic trans-coding algorithm that are usually applied by the pirates, and also if they are robust enough to be admissible in courts.
==

If they really wanted, they could e.g. select a number of short scenes and shoot them 10 times each and distribute movies with different combinations of these shots to each theater.

There would be no way of recognizing the critical shots from a single recording. Diffing many recordings from different theaters could reveal some of the shots, but probably not all.

If you read the EULA and ask a kid to press the Enter button, you are probably not off the hook (if you were on the hook in the first place, i.e., if the EULA was valid at all).

But if you just ask a kid to e.g. a piece of software and that kid just accepts everything without reading it, how can _you_ be bound by it.

Regarding the cat, you should build a device with two buttons, so that the cat can decide to accept or deny the EULA. That way you have not coerced it into pressing "yes".

No, but at least the people make "wipe" are paranoid too:

From the wipe man page
==
NOTE ABOUT JOURNALING FILESYSTEMS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS (JUNE 2004)
              Journaling filesystems (such as Ext3 or ReiserFS) are now being used by default by most Linux distributions. No secure deletion program that
              does filesystem-level calls can sanitize files on such filesystems, because sensitive data and metadata can be written to the journal, which can-
              not be readily accessed. Per-file secure deletion is better implemented in the operating system.

              Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partition.

              Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your
              disk). Wiping size issues have been hopefully fixed (I apologize for the long delay).

              Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those days. They transparently remap defective blocks. This means that the disk can keep
              an albeit corrupted (maybe slightly) but inaccessible and unerasable copy of some of your data. Modern disks are said to have about 100% trans-
              parent remapping capacity. You can have a look at recent discussions on Slashdot.

              I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this
              almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Bet-
              ter, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

              Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers
              and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

              Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

              Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact, in every
              sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation and "con-
              trol of public dissent".

              People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS.
==

Except for mayby some TV games, there is no need for higher quality.
TV is one-way so just buffer more.
Preferably download it all before you start to watch it (that's what mimms is for).

Would you rather pay 10pount/year or watch the stream delayed an extra second?