You sir are an idiot - of course there was harm done. An innocent, intent, driven student was arrested for no good reason other than sheer lunacy by faculty with delusions of grandeur.

I agree he was arrested without good cause, but how do you know he is innocent? There simply isn't enough information given in the article for anyone to make that call.. What were these chemicals, and what were the quantities? i.e. 50 kilos of ammonium nitrate or a large vat of nitric acid is a little different then finding a 12oz jar of saltpetre and a bag of charcoal.

Don't immediately assume fauit with the authorities (except maybe for the initial arrest, which was unjustified based solely on a drawing and odd behavior), when it may just as well be bad writing.

If you spend most of your computer time loading and closing applications, booting or rebooting, or sifting through large directories of files - then an SSD is probably a good buy.

Personally, I don't spend much of my time doing any of those things. In the morning my computer resumes from sleep in 3 seconds. My web browser is still open, and I can continue from my last session. There is hardly any disk access. My work involves a lot of writing, a lot of programming, and a lot of MATLAB. None of these things involve disk accesses, because I already started these applications a month ago when I last booted.

Occasionally I play a game. Except between levels, there are no disk accesses.

For me, given that my hard drive is hardly accessed as it is, I don't really see the point. The only time I've ever wished for an SSD is when I run out of RAM. Make sure you have enough RAM, and - at least in my experience - disk speed is rarely an issue. I have 1.5 TB in my laptop, and couldn't imagine sacrificing that space just to speed up my once-a-month boot.

Agree with most of this - but I would also add variable width fonts to the list.

I agree with your concerns, but the cats been out of the bag for years. Video cameras are ubiquitous, as are telescopes and binoculars.

I wish there was a way to block these technologies or legislate them, but practically it's not going to happen. Younger people are going to grow up in a world with much less expectation of privacy, and with fewer taboos. In some ways, maybe that's a good thing, but it's not the way I want to live.

Really? Are you sure you're a linux user? apt-get install game

Steam is a glorified, locked down package manager. It's a system of locks that allows you to donate money to developers, except that you must first pay a cut to Valve. I guess that's not all bad - it's no worse than paypal I'm sure.

That's because the actual contents don't matter - they're completely bypassed by the "small part" of the bill.

I don't care to read the rest of the bill, because it doesn't matter. If all one needs to do is slap a digital lock on a work to completely bypass fair use, then why should I read the rest of the bill?

The digital lock provision isn't a "small part" of the bill.

Then you'd win the contest, but all your winnings would be needed for your legal defense.

Ubuntu is hardly representative of all linux distros. It is just one distribution, and there are many other better tested distributions. I use Ubuntu currently, and it is among the slowest and buggiest of all the distros I've tried.

Umm, root?

and it comes with a free black turtleneck!

Why would you want hardware RAID? All you get is vendor lock-in and a small decrease in cpu usage.

Why is there a race? Why aren't they working together to find it?

I don't get it.

My T60 laptop is called t60. My Antec computer is called antec. My media server is called mythtv.

Names should have meaning.