We need jumpers or physical switches that prevent firmware stored in flash (whether it be GPU firmware, BIOS, HDD firmware, network card firmware or whatever) from being overwritten unless you specifically flip that switch.

The answer to fixing this problem is to require scrap metal dealers to be licensed (with strong penalties for anyone who isn't) and to require all transactions to be recorded along with the ID of the seller. Its already done in many jurisdictions for pawn shops (where you need a license to operate one and where sellers have to provide ID when they sell it, why should scrap merchants be any different.

Whats the bet that the "Security Software" they refer to includes those crappy limited trial versions of software from McAfee and Norton, the stuff that is impossible to uninstall and gives you endless nag screens pushing you to give them money? (nag screens that used to be good at getting idiots to part with their money but now thanks to scams and fake anti-virus products and stuff that all their geek friends keep telling them about are more likely to get those same idiots to assume they are bogus and ignore them)

Those things are some of the worst offenders when it comes to bloatware.

I want Bagpipe Hero. Or Saxophone Hero.

GSM (and GSM cryptography) was developed way back when the smartest thing a cellphone could do was to store a few phone numbers and the hardware grunt the system had was minimal.

Also, when GSM was developed, the various intelligence agencies in the NATO countries deliberately wanted the cryptography to be weak in order to make it easier to hack.

Why is the federal government (and its agencies) so scared to allow state and local law enforcement agencies to reveal the use of these devices?

They will find a way to twist the law so that it only applies to the big corps and not the little guy.

No, time to go to open source verified-by-security-audit strongly-encrypted VoIP (the kind that at the very least will require the spooks to put a lot of effort into cracking it so they cant just vacuum it all up like they do now) and secure anonymous distributed crypto-currencies that the feds cant easily track (and cant seize as part of a "random" roadside stop on the interstate)

You dont need to make one, just buy one of the many varieties of metal credit card wallets already on the market that do the job of blocking the cards just fine.

I have a fairly large C++ project with a bunch of classes and it makes good use of operator overloading including overloading + and += on string classes, [] on containers and a whole bunch of operators on various kinds of matrices and vectors and stuff.

Our codebase would be much less readable and easy to work with if it wasn't for operator overloading.

The difference is that Samba and Bitkeeper don't use the online servers as part of their anti-piracy solution in the way most of the games do. Its not the reverse engineering of the server protocols as such that's illegal, its the fact that these server clones let you play with pirated copies.

Generally they dont hard-code IP addresses, just domain names.
And when it comes to the server clones I have seen before (e.g. the GameSpy clones made after the shutdown of that service) people either hacked the clients to point to the new domain names or used hosts files or proxies to intercept requests and point them at the new locations.

If you post and set it to "show only to certain people" (or whatever the settings are on your social media outlet of choice) then yes there IS an expectation that people outside the group can't see it.

If a cop is posing as as a teenager or college kid online so they can hang out in chat-rooms and hook pedophiles that's one thing (pedophiles are scum who deserve to be locked away in one of those nasty jails they show on various TV documentaries) but if they are doing it to bust up a few kids having some beers (and presumably harming no-one except themselves) then that's different and shouldn't be allowed.

Better yet, why not make a dongle that can pull content directly from the NAS via SAMBA, supports every codec known to man (including the obscure ones) by using something like FFMPEG (with hardware accelerated decoding for the codecs where the hardware can do it) and can be controlled via a normal remote or via an app (one that exists on all the necessary platforms).

As for DRM (which is necessary if you want Netflix etc) just get Adobe to port the same DRM blob being used for Firefox on Windows to the new device and let the blob handle the DRM.

If I was Sony I would be splitting the company into 3 pieces, one for the movie and music operations, one for the consumer electronics division (Bravia TVs, CyberShot & Alpha cameras etc etc) and one for the PlayStation division and their video games empire.

A 3-way split means the consumer electronics division will no longer be restricted by the need to not do anything that would piss off the guys over in the content creation division. Also people who hate Sony and refuse to buy their products due to the crap their content creation division does (come on, they made & sold a whole pile of audio CDs that installed malware on basically any Windows PC you put the disk into) would be able to buy from the (presumably no longer super-evil) stand-alone consumer electronics company knowing they aren't supporting the super-evil content creation part of the company.