Drive space is cheap, and so are current backup services. I can't imagine that this service would be significantly cheaper than the existing services, so what's the point? There's unlimited (yeah yeah, "Unlimited") backup services for $5/month, so it's not like there's even much money to be saved.

It's no different than doing the exact same thing over Firewire, but it's a lot easier to hide an exploit in plain sight. When you exploit over something like Firewire or Thunderbolt, it could be a simple "Hey, can I charge my iPhone?". I remember an old exploit that you could do using one of the ancient Firewire iPods. That's a lot different than "Hey, can I plug this random card into your computer?" when you want to do it over CardBus or ExpressCard.

On a desktop, I don't think it would be a problem. If you had a rather standard encryption scheme where you enter your passphrase on boot, it wouldn't be exploitable because someone would have to shut down the machine, stick a PCIe card in, and then boot again, thus losing the encryption key until it is entered again. It's just that laptops tend to have to have more exploitable interfaces that support hotplugging (like ExpressCard and Thunderbolt) whereas a desktop at most might have Firewire.

I'm surprised nobody has engineered a DMA exploit over SATA, considering it's hotpluggable and rather ubiquitous.

I don't know if the newer ones are any better, but my W510 definitely has overheating issues. They basically took the exact same cooling system used in the T510 and tried to use it to cool a quadcore and workstation video chip. The CPU could hit the point where it would start to throttle. Even after putting on better thermal paste, it still gets hot enough to cause the GPU to throttle. Basically any high performance laptop that doesn't either have a huge cooling system or a separate system for the CPU and GPU can run into these issues.

From what I understand, thunderbolt is essentially an external PCIe interface. That's inherently insecure. It was bad enough that Firewire gave devices DMA access, but with PCIe it will probably be 10x worse.

But that's just a broken glass fallacy. It's nothing but waste.

They're more expensive than most of these boards, but it sounds like Soekris boards are more or less what you're looking for.

I'd say that them claiming any sort of copyright is indeed weird, because it's not really a creative work. IANAL at all, but it seems to me like random emails simply fall well outside the domain of copyright. For the most part, they aren't creative or artistic in any way. The only way they could possibly be copyrightable is if you made the argument that they are "literary" works, but that's a stretch.

Poor intake is the cause for most poor laptop cooling. On my Thinkpad W510 (which is quite poorly designed thermally, it's the same cooling at the T510 but it has to handle a quad core and workstation graphics), lifting up the keyboard a little bit gives a 10-15C drop in temperatures simply due to the fact that the fan will actually have intake.

Something tells me elementary school students already run into attention span issues, and making days longer certainly isn't going to help with that.

What I don't get is why they aren't addressing the real problem.

Normally, it can be good to have students of varying skill levels*, because the better students can help the lesser students. However, it seems that we often see stories about "Cheating in CS classes" here, which effectively discourages people from collaborating at all because it gets seen as cheating. Ideally, helping others should be rewarded, so that people who know the content would get their easy credit, while those who want to learn it would be able to do so more easily.

*Some education programs take this way too far. I've heard horror stories about how a high school geometry class had actual geometry students lumped in with special education students. Obviously that doesn't work but some overpaid idiot thought it would be a good idea anyway.

Your business would never take off in the first place because people would see that you have no certifications.

I love how the claim they make is that they're bringing the desktop experience to mobile. They're not. They redefined their desktop experience into some horrid mobile UI, and now that they're actually putting that mobile UI where it belongs, they can claim that they're delivering the desktop UI on mobile.

But the problem is that over time, as more and more people do it, it becomes more and more of a necessity due to pushing the cost of labor down. If, overnight, everyone switched from 1 working adult households to 2 working adults, after the market had time to adjust, each family would be doing twice the work but not receiving twice the compensation.

But then you still run into the issue of each individual worker being paid less.

Really, what people fail to realize in this whole issue of employment/wages is that the issue is on the supply side, not the demand. More and more people are trying to work (e.g. more households with both parents working), which pushes down the price of labor.

Not that there's an easy solution to that (you can't pick people and ban them from working). Most liberal measures like minimum wage and forced overtime pay are in good faith, but don't actually work that well. They don't help the 99%, it just shuffles wealth around within it.

On one hand, I think a basic income would help because then less people at the bottom would be inclined to search for jobs in the first place. On the other hand, it's would just turn a chunk of society into absolute deadweight.