There is a choice, but our so-called leaders stand in the way. They have forgotten that the economy exists to serve the people (all of them), not the other way around. They treat the economy as if it was some sort of god.

I would be less worried about Secureboot if it was absolutely mandated to allow a user key and allow disabling. Alas, it hasn't been all that long and the one mandate out there (from MS) is now gone. It's interesting that it is supposed to be for the owner's benefit but typically doesn't offer a simple way for the user to bless a bootloader or OS nor does it offer a boot anyway option. Almost as if the benefit is meant for someone else.

Perhaps the best approach would have been for the firmware to be just a simple bootstrap with a well-defined handoff to stage two which would reside in a seperately re-writable segment of the flash rom.

That, in turn could do the rest of EFI or could be a more conventional bios or be replaced with SeaBIOS, bits of Coreboot, or whatever the user wants. I would expect the factory installed default to be a simple boot menu that can read MBR and GPT in order to load the disk based boot loader.

That would both improve reliability where needed and make sure that you could always replace the offending EFI if it wanted to insist on SecureBoot or other potentially harmful scheme.

Failing that, just go with the simplest possible bootstrap and let the OS or bootloader deal with the rest.

Put up secret spying along the route first and then place the official spying and then see what moves? ;D

It's an odd blend of no chores and yet no actual free time. Even when unsupervised, they're locked up in the house (but no running!). Then people wonder why they don't exercise more.

I once read an essay about how 'the novel' would be the downfall of civilization.

Well, technically they didn't even have time to intensify the forward batteries fire before Arvel Crynyd came in for a visit.

It completely misses the aspect of positive freedoms. The conditions that maximise the negative freedoms (that is, rights to have others NOT do something) are often dismal for the positive freedoms. For example, Crusoe had it made as far as people not telling him he could not shout obscenities at 3 A.M. But reading whatever he wants? A bit hard when nobody is writing anything he can get to.

That argument only works when replying to an extremist. For example someone who never met a regulation he liked. Someone who wants to move the 'slider' a bit one way or the other, not so much.

In cases like this where the 'safety' is far from established but the cost to freedom is shown (even if a few steps out), it's even less appropriate.

Schmidt also indicated that Google glass feels happy and feels like dancing.

Probably not. We'd have a few stories about how 40 years ago the flying car was banned to unanimous approval after a few notable incidents of 'motorists' crashing into schools and such.

There's little point. Specific answers to specific questions still implies that those answers could not have been used as educational material, only for cheating.

Knowing that the correct answer to question 52b is 28 (even with the steps to copy down) really isn't that helpful for general knowledge. It's still just an answer key, it's just not a complete answer key.

Solar thermal with molten salts works fine, and those mid latitude locations all receive ~10-14 hours per day of sunshine, though obviously peak output would be during the noon to 4PM period.

fellow-travelers

The 1950s called and wants its insult back.

Your hgh school English teacher called, he wants your passing grade in 'Vocabulary' back.

Strat

I was already wondering what's going to replace those dreaded "killer games" as the boogeyman.

And it's not like it's new. Somehow I can even imagine some Mesolithic father looking with worry at his Neolithic son who keeps polishing his tools long after they have reached a "good enough" state. But not quite as far back, can you imagine that what we now consider "classic literature" was once thought to ruin, twist and wreck young minds? Tom Sawyer was such a mind wrecker. But people who read it grew up and they didn't turn out to be lazy idiots, so a new boogeyman was needed. And as time went by, various things got the blame. Radio, swing music, TV, beat music, rock music (interestingly it really used to be music a lot in the not too distant past), D&D, horror movies, computer games ... did I forget something important?

Now, what do they all have in common? One, and only one, thing: They were at the time when they were demonized new technologies, discoveries or developments that were gladly embraced by the young generation but poorly understood by their parents. As these young people grew up, this boogeyman could no longer be kept alive simply because those that do the demonizing now knew that what used to be demonized was not a problem at all. But no worries, new technologies, new trends, come and young people will pick them up so you can be scared of something your kids like and you don't understand, too!

It's never been the technology. It's always been the kids. It's not the phones that turn our little angels into antisocial monsters. They ARE antisocial monsters. Think back to your time at school. And if you can't think of any antisocial assholes, well... maybe a mirror would help.