"It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures."

Yes, and the hope is that the US will have a very public conversation about whether that position is something we want to allow you to return to in the meantime.

I have a friend sitting next to me who's not the most computer-geeky of folks who likes hers; she's aware that one could wipe ChromeOS and put something more useful on it, but for now it does "everything she needs". She does have another laptop elsewhere (a larger thing).

That's actually a very good idea. And the false alarms could be dealt with by further readings from the accelerometer -- "in guy's pocket while he's seizing" and "dropped on ground" don't look the same.

North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and cheap rent.

Okay, I'm a computational physicist, not a CS guy, so my knowledge of programming is limited to what's needed to make the thing work. But isn't this ... extremely, painfully trivial? Like, when I taught Baby's First Computational Physics Course For Freshmen, we made them compute the first million prime numbers as part of the week 1 homework, right after Hello World and the Fahrenheit/Celsius converter.

Do people really graduate and not know how to do this?

... but people like Glenn Greenwald might want something like this: a machine that has at least some attempt made to make the software transparent. The target audience is the paranoid.

Sure, it may not be perfect (keyboard firmware, etc.).

Yes, but he still had to stop. If I'm in a hurry to go somewhere, the police don't have the right to confiscate my time without probable cause, just like they don't have the right to confiscate my property.

I once told a student "If instead of computing what you needed on the final to get an A to three significant figures, you put that time into learning physics, you'd be more likely to get an A."

There were options: 1) use discrete GPU all the time, 2) auto-switching.

I don't know if there was third-party software to do this; I rather feel like I shouldn't need third party software to stop the machine from quadrupling the power use and roasting me whenever I watch a Youtube video. My solution was to tell my work that I didn't need the loaner laptop any more, since I would be purchasing a standard one of my own, and installing Kubuntu on it.

A lot of modern ones seem to be more or less interchangeable. My last two laptops are both 19.5V and fit each other, and a friend recently left his charger at home. The voltages match, the plug fit, and he used mine with no problem.

I have a $950 laptop with:

--a nice metal chassis (around the keyboard -- some parts that don't get much wear are tough plastic to save weight)
--a touchpad that works just fine, thank you
--a keyboard that also works just fine, thank you
--an old-style charger but one that is fairly tough
--a screen that is admittedly not wonderful, but there are nice replacement screens available for $50
--a very nice laptop GPU (GTX660 M)
--6+ hours battery life (GPU off, obviously)

Northeastern Americans are immune from insults since they practice on each other all the time; it's like pissing in an ocean of piss, to quote 4chan.

I had a loaner 2010 Macbook for work. It did what lots of modern laptops do and had a dual-GPU system: a Radeon when you need acceleration, and integrated graphics when you don't. Thing was, you couldn't toggle the Radeon off, and it made beanheaded decisions about when acceleration was necessary... like anything with Flash. You'd be sitting there dicking around in a web browser, and all of a sudden toast yourself as the fans whirred up and the battery life plummeted because some dumbshit web ad wanted you to punch the monkey and ol' Stevie J's OS decided that you needed the GPU's help to do it.

(On my Linux/Windows system, the CPU or the Intel integrated GPU are more than capable of telling me about punching monkeys, or doing video decodes.)

Then raise taxes.

Taxes are a relatively efficient way of raising revenue. Traffic tickets are not.

The way I would prefer to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again is to publically ridicule the neo-Nazis, not send the police after them. The entire country pointing and saying "You people are crazy and dangerous" is a better safeguard than throwing some folks in jail. (Hitler got thrown in jail too, and look what happened to him...)

You cannot ban your way into removing things from society.