While slightly OT, I took a moment to seek out possible alternatives but it seems DD-WRT is still the only 3rd-party firmware to solidly support the WRT54G(S) v5 and above. Is any fellow /.'er aware of firmware that would work well with v.5 and above considering that friends and family happen to have purchased the newer/stripped down versions.

Why would you have to rely on a manufacturer's promise?

I'm sure that there a some great coders on /. and elsewhere that could contribute to the Coreboot Project (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) and add a simple function at the BIOS level to run some form of a RAM scrambling function before processing the poweroff command from the O/S.

Just my $0.02...

Also, which is more economically efficient - to pay people a marginal amount to sit around (unemployment - which comes out of taxes, remember)

In an effort to correct that bit of misinformation, see: U.S. Unemployment Program

For those that don't have a moment to waste, below is a clip of the wiki entry:

----- Snippet -----

"Unemployment insurance is a federal-state program jointly financed through federal and state employer payroll taxes (federal and state UI taxes)"

Well said...

Bill also owes all of us an apology for Microsoft Bob!! Rememeber that piece of crap?? An utter useless "add-on"! What a monumental waste of coding time.

As the saying goes:

"People only hear what they see"...

I second that!

"Only issue I have is lack of 16 bit support for really old DOS stuff which doesn't bother me."

Obviously you haven't tried getting a handful of printers, all major brands might I add, working under 64-bit Vista! A simple google search will reveal how many users have run into such issues with no solution in sight from the vendors. Of course, sales people won't bother letting buyers know about this issue because their concern is to close the sale. Granted, it's a generalization, but it happens to be the case more often than not. Fast forward to that user going through the initial screens, happy with their new powerful PC, only to find out that their printer which worked just fine with the previous PC is not supported on the shiny, latest and greatest OS.

Complete disappointment...

Perhaps you care to rephrase that statement?