I don't know, I looked at buying a motorcycle for commuting everyday and decided against it due to safety factors. This looks like it would get better MPG and be almost as safe as a regular car.

The letter was sent to him, and specifically told him he couldn't share it's contents with anyone. So unless he could prove the letter was stolen or his lawyer posted it he'd be screwed. And if the lawyer posted it he'd probably be disbarred unless he said the client approved the posting in which case where back to him sharing the contents. No matter which way you cut it if it got out he's more than likely going to jail.

Unfortunately they do enhance security a little, although I strongly believe the enhanced security doesn't actually make anyone safer. I look at this way I could hire a virtual army of body guards to patrol outside my house and I'll be pretty safe from a break in. But that level of protection against something that's extremely unlikely to happen is just retarded. Terrorist some day will probably succeed in killing more Americans in our home country... however spending billions of dollars and completely destroying our privacy isn't justified by the possible death of even a couple of thousand people.

Oh and what these devices are really meant to detect are deadly things that a metal detector or sniffer can't detect. Such as broken glass, a true ceramic knife (most of them have metal in them purely to be detectable by metal detectors), or even a sharp stick (or pencil... wonder when they'll be banned). Keep in mind that any of these items could have been used by the 911 terrorist and would have been almost effective (if not as effective) as the box cutters they used.

The feds and specifically TSA are really just trying to see how much they can get away with before the public complains. I fully expect, (if these things are allowed to stay) that in five years you won't be allowed to have any liquids (acid can be really dangerous), batteries, pencils, pens or, shoelaces (can be very effective to strangle someone with). What we'll be left with eventually will be a plane full of people in their underware reading books... oh wait... I've had some nasty paper cuts before :-)

Ever hear of Manuel Noriega and Panama?

I'm not sure if this is what your referring to but I use a SSH socks proxy and tsocks under linux quite a bit to allow proxy unaware apps to be use it (like RDP). The only issue I have with this setup is DNS. Since it primarily uses UDP not TCP for lookups they are all performed against the locally configured name servers not the remote. I haven't found an elegant solution for this yet but your network.proxy.socks_remote_dns config may help a lot (I've never heard of that before).

For the original submitter, I understand your reluctance to being restricted and object to the idea of the great firewall as much as the next guy, however is completely open access really worth breaking the law there and potentially being imprisoned in China. Also keep in mind that while you may object to the concept of the firewall but you are a guest in the country and breaking any countries laws while as such is really disrespectful. If you really don't like the law don't travel there, if your trying to make some sort of political statement (which I doubt) then best of luck to you... China isn't well know for being good sports about that sort of thing.

The problem with torrents is that anyone can see the IPs getting the files, and in some cases it may be as important to protect the source as it is to protect those wanting information. If you can imagine an oppressive regime trying to stop the spread of some information would likely try to find the individuals in possession of the information... which would be anyone that connected to the torrent.

Wish I had mod points, nailed my view of what happened exactly. The only thing I'd disagree with (which you left out) was the shooting of the van. I'm having a hard time coming up with a good reason for that, but I do think you'd have to be a complete idiot to drive into a battle with your kids, good samaritan or not. And no, the shooting hadn't been stopped for remotely long enough to think it was safe.

That wasn't NewEgg, one of their suppliers (not the culprit) threatened to sue.

Speaking of booting from an ISO on a flash drive... does anyone know a way to store multiple ISOs files on a flash drive so that you can choose which to boot from? Would make installing the various OSs I use a lot easier than searching for the correct CD/DVD each time I install.

I'm wondering if or when Google will start to develop software to get around the great firewall of china. If you think about it they can pull out and will still have a large portion of the worlds search business. If they then release something to make getting around firewalls easy, they can get the search business in china without having a corporate presence there simply by being "the" search engine.

I don't take vacations like that, but I do travel a lot and a 15 to 20 hour trip (where power isn't available) each way will kill most devices. I'm personally waiting for the battery life on a netbook to reach 15 to 20 hours before I buy. I'm hoping some of the up coming arm based ones will fit the bill.

Hypothetical situation, say I want another admins password. What's to stop me from picking his pocket getting his wallet, photocoping the password list, then putting the wallet back. Then I just have to try each password in the list one a day until I get the right one? Granted I have to be good at picking pockets but that would give me access to everything.

You hit upon my greatest aggravation with passwords. It annoys the hell out of me when a website or application tells me that my 12 character mixed upper and lower character with symbols password isn't valid because there isn't a number in it.

As someone who spends a lot of time around Mexico City (my wife's family lives there) I'd love to buy one of these for each of my kids. There are far too Americans getting kidnapped in that area for someone to argue that it's not worth the price. Of course it probably wouldn't take long for a kidnapper to find it and get rid of it, but if it takes 30 minutes that may be enough time.

And additional FYI, they aren't just kidnapping the rich anymore. Now they've resorted to kidnapping for several thousand dollars which makes anyone in that area very vulnerable.

They can release windows for arm but one big problem will remain, none of the apps users want will run under arm. Linux however doesn't have this issue, there are already huge package repositories for arm, and what isn't there can easily be compiled and added. I'm not an apple guy so I have no clue how they got around the problem.