Why not a remote kill switch for Rolexes?
Or money ..

be careful what you ask for.

True .. it's like the stupid car radios where you have to enter a code when the battery dies.
If it gets stolen, the thief realizes sometime later that it's useless, and it's still stolen.
Meanwhile, every time YOU have a dead battery or replace it, you have to dig around and find the stupid tag, or pay the dealer $100 to tell you.

You can already buy them .. police have been using them in the form of evidence bags for phones for a while now.
For example .. this : http://www.paraben.com/strongh...

Call your student employment office and post N/20 jobs .. where N is the number of hours/week the lab is open.
FWS students can work 20hrs/wk according to their visa, but it must be an on-campus job. As such, there are tons of students needing a job.

Have fun with the electrical inspector on that one .. but it's a good idea in theory.

There are tons of ways to do this .. problem is they will all cost more than what your'e trying to accomplish.
As I like to tell the bean counter types .. "what you seek is a technical solution to an administrative problem"
You have cameras, so that's your "abuse" answer .. you said you use logbooks but compliance is poor"
Solution: Random daily audits and punish any non-compliance.

Also, consider the cost for all the inter-departmental billing and your time in managing all this foolishness .. and ask "is this really worth it?".

Source? : I am security@ for a large .edu and I deal with a lot of this BS.

FIPS-140 (and 140-2) address exactly this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

At FIPS-140 Level 4, the crypto keys are stored on a unit that actively monitors for attack by environmental, electromagnetic, and physical methods.The physical is usually handled by a mesh of gridwires over the die.

The problem, of course, is Boeing is in bed with the government for Billions (Trillions) of dollars worth of military hardware, so don't think they'd sell you an Android phone before having a friendly chat with their friends at [A-Z]{3}.

Intel (and everybody else) does this for good reason .. high endurance components (Milspec, server, whatever) are usually designed for tolerances far beyond the actual spec, because manufacturing issues can cause the tolerances of the finished product to deviate somewhat.

If they design a [gizmo] to operate at 1.5ghz and sell it as a 1ghz chip knowing full well there is plenty of overhead but chances of failure running it at 65% of design are pretty much nil, yay for them for meeting the rejection rate.

Then along comes marketing and says "hey, we can sell the rest of them at 1.5ghz as consumer units" .. and the failure rate there doesn't really matter as much because you just print a disclaimer about "your data may go poof" and RMA the broken ones. As long as the defect rate is low enough to remain profitable, yay again.

You give me your real money and I give you this number. Annnnnd it's gone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

as recently demonstrated by Cyprus

100% of insured deposits were protected.

People bitching about the amounts over that which got the axe is like whining to State Farm that you had extra stuff in your house that you didn't insure AFTER the fire.

Not only that, but we saw them coming .. that newfangled RADAR thing just couldn't be trusted.

Never greet him at the airport.

If it's old, then it's out of warranty. Yeah, I get the whole e-waste thing, and I'm sure it pains people to see a pallet of otherwise good 1TB drives headed off to be shredded into chips .. but remember they are 3-4 years old and having one go bad while is a far bigger PITA in terms of lost productivity, lost data, etc. than it is to just buy a new one for $100 and pay $1 for the old one to get securely scrapped.

You forgot the while().
You have to pay by the hour for the while().

There is a reason for this sort of gear
Time is money.

As an example, we have a couple thousand PCs that are dumped each year due to lifecycle replacement. Yes, these are perfectly good PCs that could be wiped and loaded with (whatever) and donated .. but THAT COSTS MONEY. Loosing even ONE hard drive with data on it puts us in the newspaper, hence the policy is :

No data storage device leaves intact, ever.

We have the guys in facilities run them through a giant metal bandsaw, and that's BEFORE they go to be shredded/recycled (which, ironically, we pay THEM for, despite the fact that we're talking about tons of aluminum/steel/whatever .. but they won't burn off the insulation out back like JimBob either).

The reason you don't use .45ACP or sledgehammers is one of liability. Before the bandsaw method we used sledgehammers until some idiot hurt himself. When somebody looses a finger due to stupidity we'll probably buy one of these.