You have already been proven wrong multiple times. The passengers of United 93 had just scraps of information about what was likely going to happen to them, yet they chose to try to take back the plane from the hijackers. In both the "shoe bomber" and "underwear bomber" cases, passengers were instrumental in taking out the threat. Most people know now that the most likely outcome of a terrorist taking control of a plane is that they are all going to die, so they will do whatever it takes to prevent that once the threat is identified.

Sure, there are going to be plenty of sheeple who are going to be paralyzed with fear and wet their pants instead of taking action. Those are probably the same ones who thought that having their genitals groped and scanned was going to keep them safe.

5) We spend much of our day reading Slashdot.

Maybe not since Verizon already allows up to four or five devices to share a 3G connection for free if you have one of the newer Palm phones.

As far as I can tell from my Kindle, there is no need to "save the screen". It is simply providing a visual indication that it has entered a mode where button presses will be ignored - which is nice since a few inadvertent clicks can cause you to lose your place in whatever you are reading. The power consumed to throw up an image when it goes into this state is pretty negligible, and I believe it offsets that by going into a lower power mode for the wireless connection while in this state. The only way to get out of this state is to activate a slider switch, so there's little to no risk of accidentally flipping pages due to it getting jostled around in a backpack.

That said, I really with it had the ability to increase the time-out or disable the screen saver entirely since I use my Kindle for displaying approach plates while flying and it is really aggravating when I'm in the middle of an approach and it decides to show me a picture of Jane Austen instead of the route that I'm flying.

And realistically, wouldn't a paper ballot and a pencil be the first federally certified voting system?

Not really. There was no federal certification program until the EAC and no uniform standards. The states are basically free to make up their own rules. Delaware might decide to require everybody to vote using red crayons and the feds don't have any say.