If I had found out that some school official strip searched my kid, regardless of age or sex; the officials involved would never have made it to trial.

For those that didn't RTFA:
After she had stripped to her underwear, "they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side," she said. "They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear."

School is supposed to be a place where kids are safe. When the solution is worse then the crime you have a system out of control.

All I can think of when I read this article is this most excellent xkcd strip http://xkcd.com/137/

maybe not but google does let you download your email via imap, thereby exporting all of your data stored in gmail.

how is it Apple is able to include a pdf reader in os x without getting in trouble? Is that simply because they are not nearly the large target that microsoft is?

I guess this writer never heard of Occam's Razor

That is interesting as I recently purchase my first mac when the new macbook pros came out as well. I've owned good, ie not cheap, laptops before (thinkpads, dell xps, and an assortment of other less expensive machines). None of them come close to touching the new macbook pro. It is vastly more stable, goes into and out of sleep mode faster and more reliably then any other laptop I have owned, and in general feels more responsive then any windows machine I have used (including the brand new quad core dell xps I was given at work) I am not saying its perfect, I have had it completely lock up on me twice and had to force quit a few applications, but having 3rd party applications lock up is unavoidable. In the case where an application does lock up, force quit always worked immediately. As for your bitching about the laptop not having vga connectors, it is a standard apple practice not to include outdated ports/tech. Maybe you should have completely researched the machine before dropping that much money on it rather then blame someone else for your own mistake?