I had an Ayn Rand quote in my sig until recently but got tired of it. It just didn't work (as in 'clever'). Who knows why...

You should heed your own words there. Talking about epic failure on slashdot is all kinds of epic failure, you pathetic keyboard warrior.

So in one of your possible ideal worlds, I would have to use ZFS on a 2GB SD card? Sounds interesting.

or more basic, wouldn't a non-programmer expect it to be just 'make widget visible' or 'show widget'? In the end it seems to come down to introducing shitloads of special purpose keywords.

you mean, stuff like waiting two years for a certified 64bit Vista driver (not everyone has time to spend hours trying to get vista64 to accept an uncertified driver)? Meanwhile the linux driver was there as soon as I installed the first 64bit kernel. And the sound card wasn't even some prehistoric piece of junk, but a quite reasonable and still-in-production M Audio delta 44.

Never quite unerstood why I should want to do that.

The easiest way to stop the EC from interfering is by not selling your products on the European market.
Use our market, obey our rules. Simply put. (It's a bit like the old American saying about 'eating cakes' ...)

On the other hand I don't think that carrying around data on a (normally unencrypted) harddisk naturally is a better solution either...

Irrelevant. Offtopic. Wrong.

Five freedoms. Learn them. Everyone, including the Prez, has them.

No, it's an invention. Inventions are engineering, discoveries and theories are science. Process technologies are definitely not scientific discoveries. The photovoltaic effect is a physics discovery, an efficient photovoltaic cell is an engineering invention. The former can get a Nobel Prize, the latter can not.

The real problem was that most large distributions (fedora in my case) dropped KDE 3.5 support entirely as soon as 4.0 came out. This forced me to completly skip the FC9 release, and eventually to move on to a distribution without the continuous half-year release terror.

Outlaw trust funds and the rich will move their money to a country which allows them.

yes

Ironically, people investing their own money to solve their problems (because there is no one else who offers a cheaper solution) would not sound too much out of place in an Ayn Rand novel ...

The BIOS (including the boot-selection page) is password protected. Even when a CD-ROM is physically attached, booting from CD-ROM/USB requires the system password. Oh, and the hard disk incorporates password protection, which is configured.

Easy enough for qualified personnel to defeat (along with the BIOS-level HDD password protection? Probably). That is, the nerd back at the police lab - not the PD's street soldiers.

Go ahead - give 'em a hacker tool on a stick. Let 'em feel like they're technically competent to conduct field investigations into an area which I'll wager most of them don't even remotely understand. Oh, and let me raise questions at trial into the safeguards in place to prevent officers from inadvertantly/intentionally corrupting the contents of the filesystems they intend to investigate in the field.

(I'm assuming their hacker's tool can automagically recognize and search ext3, ext4, jfs, ufs, xfs, reiserfs, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, etc. . . . and let us not forget software-based filesystem encryption for many of the aforementioned filesystems).