Way back when I was in University and long before using a laptop in class became popular I was doing it on an Apple Duo 230.

It worked well for me then but it had only a single purpose during the lecture and that was for note taking. There was no wireless Internet, no peer to peer networking, and very few distractions loaded on that machine.

I would advocate that professors and students start the year off with a few minutes discussion this. Perhaps the best advice would be to institute a rule of airplane mode on, silent mode on and only accepted activity is note taking during lecture time. If the are doing a study session or discussion where Internet access actually becomes a benefit (lookup information that adds to the discussion) then perhaps the instructor would then explicitly announce to students they can go an lookup the information and turn on the wireless at those time. But the default behavior should be wireless off, class notes and materials loaded only in class.

I have to post a big Me too on this one. Never an argument, or a crazy request to reinstall software or try pointless remedies.

Nowhere near as many systems as you but exactly the same response. They fixed units that failed, took me about 1-2 minutes on the phone to go over the details and the rest of the time was just waiting for them to fill out the dispatch forms.

I predict they won't even wait for this to be perfected.

Someone in a third world country is likely brewing up a batch of stem cells in their "lab" as we speak.

Maybe they will have it ready in time for London. Weight lifting, you were a sport once. Now it's just magic show where everyone wonders how they make the trick work.

The SD Card can be locked to a specific device using a password.

example:
http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-linux-sdcard-security.php

An SD card can be locked using a password, or it can be set to permanent write protected mode.

Also the manufacturer of an SD card may not include the secure features in their cards (which would probably mean it wouldn't work on these phones)

From the linked article:
Technologic Systems has developed a Linux application named "sdlock" which can be used to manipulate SD card hardware-enforced password locks and set the card's permanent write-protect feature. Using a password protected SD card is a great way to ensure software security and/or to make sure your TS-7000 SBC based product cannot be used in an unintended matter once deployed. This utility is only available for the TS-7300 and TS-7400 products, which are configured with the TS-SDBOOT firmware.
Some of the possibilities include:
                Password protecting SD Cards
                Set the SBC to boot only locked SD Cards
                Set the SD Card readable only on a specific SBC
                Checksum verification of bootable SD Cards
                Make an SD Card permanently write-protected
How To Use It
Usage and command line help for this command:
$ sdlock –help
Usage: sdlock [OPTION] ...
Controls SD card lock and permanent write-protect features.
General options:
-p, --password=PASS Use PASS as password
-c, --clear Remove password lock
-s, --set Set password lock
-u, --unlock Unlock temporarily
-e, --erase Erase entire device (clears password)
-w, --wprot Enable permanent write protect
-h, --help This help

What Google sticks into their server racks and data centres is not a good comparison to this case. That's a completely different use case.

What does Google put on their employees desks?
Last I heard they have a mixture of vendors, Apple, Dell or Lenovo machines are common with Google.

Any pictures you see posted of a Google office are usually not the desks but their crazy reception area, break room, lunch room, etc. But the few pictures I scanned through usually you see a Dell or Lenovo box peeking out with a a few obvious Apple laptop appearances.

The earlier comments about integration testing is really the key point why you would never want to roll out white box self made machines as a fleet of office computers. So lets say you pick your specs, your motherboard, video card, etc etc. Only to find out after you buy all of them that the machines randomly freeze up and you don't know why. Maybe you find out that the particular brand of video card you chose is causing the problem with the particular motherboard you choose. The same board with a different video card is fine, the same video card with a different board is fine but together every last PC you assembled will freeze up at least once a day. Not saying a Dell, HP, or Lenovo machine would never have that kind of problem but it's much less likely especially with the business oriented boxes and the extra level of integration testing those machines get even over the same companies consumer oriented units.

So looking at some of the linked info it appears that this is targeting a Siemens SIMATIC WinCC Database. It appears that the database uses a hardcoded username and password combination that end users are told not to change. I found some forum postings from people who made the mistake of changing the password only to have the software fail.

Server=.\WinCC;uid=WinCCConnect;pwd=2WSXcder (+1 for what appears to be a reasonably random looking password, -1 for being short, -1 for not including symbols, -100 for hardcoding it into the app and forcing all users to have the same exploitable entry point into their embedded database that this worm can use to read and inject code into the database)
https://www.automation.siemens.com/forum/guests/PostShow.aspx?PostID=16127&Language=en&PageIndex=2

Product being targeted:
http://www.automation.siemens.com/w2/automation-technology-distributed-control-system-simatic-pcs-7-1075.htm

Seems pretty clear that this was a targeted attack. (Launched by Competitor, former employee, etc)

I wonder what Google uses for an accounting package?

Very hard to find accounting programs that do not require Windows OS.

So there are 13,257 medallions in new york.

Lets estimate each cab makes an average of 30 trips per day. So every day there are about 397710 cab trips made or 145 million trips a year.

They are saying that 1.8 million trips were overcharged over a period of 2 years. So over 2 years there were about 290 million trips of which 1.8 million were overcharged.

So approximately 0.6% of the trips made were overcharged by about $5.

Doesn't sound like it's so bad to me. Half a percent is a legitimate rate of errors for any human endeavour. So the previous trip was out of the city area and the rate wasn't switched back for the next rider would be a good example of how that would happen.

The story seems a little sensational to me. I'm sure there are a few legitimate abusers but the numbers don't seem to imply a widespread problem to me.

Mod this one up.

This is 100% the answer the original post was looking for.

It's open source
It encrypts only the users profile folder
Doesn't require the business, or Vista Ultimate edition of Windows.

And It's not really an ugly hack. the GINA api's are stable and allow Windows to decrypt the data prior to reading the profile.

It depends on the provider you are with and the area you are located.

There is no general statement I can make that covers every situation but in general the CDMA based providers have started to allow their customers free roaming within the zone near the border for voice calls. A few years back when they were renegotiating their roaming agreements they came to the sensible conclusion that by treating those calls as regular domestic calls instead of international roaming they would make about the same amount of money since it worked both ways and they would make their customers happier when they didn't get surprise roaming bills.

Unfortunately that agreement was only for Voice calls with those specific providers and they only do it in specific areas where there is a population of people near the border. So you cannot rely on it.

The worst case scenario for this is when your CDMA phone is still locked on to a domestic tower for the voice calls but is using a foreign tower for the EVDO data connection. Most phones will not turn on the roaming indicator for when the EVDO channels in the phone are connected to another providers tower. They only show you the roaming indicator and the home option only takes effect when the primary voice 1x channels in the phone have switched. So you can set your phone to home only and if you are in that particular sweet spot where the phone will happily stay on the local providers tower for 1x voice coverage but wants to grab the foreign providers signal for data packets on the EVDO channel then you will still get a bill.

So the technical challenges with roaming can be pretty substantial. Even when the customer does everything right there are conditions where the network will provide undesired results. So hopefully the customer service at your chosen provider is helpful with resolving the billing issue these technical problems generate. Hopefully the network departments are able to figure out roaming lists which allow the phone to work as the customer intended. And hopefully the executives negotiate partner deals with an eye toward benefiting both the customer and the company interests. Unhappy customers are not likely their intention but too often the complexity of the issues at all levels serve to frustrate the end user when dealing with these large companies.

Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?

Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.

Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.

Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?

From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html

1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html

Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime

Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.

You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.