BIOS passwords are in no way secure. Resetting bios passwords is as easy as taking the backup battery off the motherboard, and unplugging it long enough to reset to its factory state. To prevent this you have to lock the hardware up from physical access.

Completely invalid reasoning on so many levels. Curtailing supply NEVER diminshes demand.

Diminished supply does 2 things: it raises the cost of the item/service in question and it pushes buyers to other outlets to fuffill the demand.

Look at the meteoric rise in the sale and use of prescription drugs. The war on cocaine, which used to be a prominent upper class drug has now been largely supplanted by the use of prescription Ritalin, which is chemically very similar. Constricting the supply of cocaine did no reduce demand or the use of drugs but pushed people onto a cheaper and easier to get product.

Basically, you're wrong wrong wrong

I haven't used a palm in a while but all my notes in college were taken on a palm tungsten M with an infrared folding keyboard. I calibrated the touch screen on the device 1 time and never had calibration problems. Maybe the difference is using quality parts vs cheapest since voting machines sole market is to government, who always go for the lowest bidder even though it always bites them in the ass.

Unfortunately this is not a story that main stream media will carry. As long as there are issues that average joe cares more about like the economy or the how our troops are being utilized, the continued trampling of our Constitution will not get complained about. Politicians are smart enough to know the only thing people care about "it's the economy stupid".

For the news to cover it would be to hurt their ratings with the general public and in the end only public news will cover things that would hurt their advertisers.

The weird thing about it is it's not just the US that is falling into this black whole of constant surveillance. Other western nations (see England and cctv system or Australia and the recent attempt at internet filtering) both are sliding in that direction as well. It seems like another case of our technology racing ahead of our morality (or common sense).

Just get the command line flex compiler from adobe, which is completely free and get FlashDevelop 3, which is also free. In other words, Google it.

I love that you think blocking adds on biggest and most successful attempt to bring content directly and legally to the internet is something people should be proud of. Don't be retarded, ad revenue is the only way Hulu will stay alive.

yea seriously, anyone who has studied the criminal justice system for more then 5 minutes knows how huge a role police discretion plays in the enforcement of laws. It is one of the huge variables in the system that people not familiar with the topic tend to ignore.

I would love to see some evidence of this ridiculous assertion. Moore's law does not apply to every field in life and there is a huge difference between doubling the number of transistors and creating a new treatment, then going through rigorous test to ensure the new treatment doesn't kill people.

Just because this is /. doesn't mean Moore is god.

Yes you are right, we already are footing the bill when poor people wait till the they are sick enough that it is against the law for the ER to deny them care.

It has been empirically proven that preventative treatment is phenomenally cheaper then curative treatment. Having a system where the poor could get health care before their health degrades into a medical nightmare will save us money in the long run. Sometimes doing the right thing is also the fiscally responsible choice.

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