When did Thailand become the world's largest country by population?

Problem is that the teachers & bosses might have other friends on your friends list, in which case a simple slip up on a mutual friend's posting can defeat your privacy settings. Then it asks the question, what's going on and why haven't we seen more postings from you?

No, but they *can* communicate with the drive manufacturer to have them put into place a policy & procedure to ensure that the drives *are* wiped clean before being shipped out.
Actually, since there is data on the drive, I would wonder exactly how well tested the drive was before being sent to Newegg for sale.

Certainly at the worker bee level we all can agree that most certs are not worth the paper that they're printed on, however when you start looking at what the company needs and requires then, yes, the certs do provide some value.
Imagine signing a multi-million dollar contract with a data center. Part of the contract are clauses for things like QOS, DR, and a whole host of other very tiny details which are so, so important in the contract. Now, lets say that the data center goes down (fire for example), along with it your business. Now you're out major bucks, you will be turning to your lawyers and asking if you can sue for breach of contract. The lawyers are going to review the contract, see what the certs mean, review the certs and the data center's answers, and then tell you if you do or do not have a case.
And that's why the certs are important. Because they spell out exactly what the data center will do in case of [fill in the blank], and gives the data center coverage which is then enforced by your contract.

Why not have a GNU key which Windows will never trust as part of the firmware?

Actually, having grown up there in West by god Virginia, I can tell you that the Greenbank radio observatory area is very lovely and populated with very smart people doing very good work.

The Hillbillies that you are talking about are more from Bluefield.

The two big problems being with this lovely idea are:
* Companies might not want to compete with prior version of their products
* Rights to the product might not be in the free and clear (legal)

Otherwise I too would love the to have PCG.

The Corn Field in Second Life perhaps?

Sure- Automated process that stores the results in a database or is otherwise used in a system where the results are aggregated and retrievable for 4th party consumption with a method to tie back to a person.

That wasn't difficult at all. Just because I write something for consumption to the members of a particular web site (assuming that it's NOT out in the public like Slashdot's or any other comment system), I would not expect it to be slurped up and sold by 3rd parties. On a member's only web site, such as talked about in the story, the inclusion of my EULA statement would be a strong deterrent against these scrapers.

Two minutes of your time to insert the HTML?
A day for your lawyer to write up the text, who is either on a retainer or works directly for your company?
That was hard.

Add a line in your acceptable use / EULA section stating that you expect the user of the account to be human and that any attempt to scrape the data off of the server is fined at $100,000 per message, plus $10,000 to each message author.

Hell yes. Don't you?

Just report the blog as a violation of TOS.

Bullshit. Apple is "saying" that they're doing it for personal data reasons, but the real reason is that they want to OWN the relationship between the consumer (you) and them (the company).

No, the real reason is liability.
If you sell the machine and believe it to be secure and sell it as such with out the review & audit, and then it's proven to be insecure, fine, unknown bug.
If you audit the machine with white hat hackers, they tell you of issues, you sell the machine anyways, it's hacked, you're on a very big hook.