...anyone calling themself a 'hactivist' deserves to be locked up as far as I'm concerned.

I mean...fucking hell. Hacktivist.

My bad, it might be the WA govt. Requires it to be fitted if you sell the car too IIRC.

It would be more like the government requiring car manufacturers to do something about car theft, since an 'infected computer' is essentially out of the user's control. And yes, the Australian government DOES require all cars to have an immobiliser.

Any correlation between first post and sex life?

I suspect they feel it's most definitely 'gone viral'. You might not have heard of it, but Lamebook is definitely a popular website with a lot of fans.

They are not after Slashdot's traffic, they are trying to protect themselves from Facebook's hefty law department.

This is not the point. The point is not to fill your mind with memoties of trig identities. It's to prepare you for memorisation and to teach you to remember.That would be like saying "Miss! I wrote this short story and I don't get why I did it! I'll never need to write THIS SHORT STORY ever again! What a waste of my schooling!". Sometimes you gotta do useless stuff to learn skills. A footballer doesn't need to dribble the ball around traffic cones anytime in his life except for at training.

You even say 'we need to know how to think mathematically'. A part of that is using your memory to good effect, both in having a large bank of memorised knowledge and in knowing what you need to memorise and what you can do without.

Understanding medical literature requires a fairly good grasp of statistics.

Writing medical literature apparently does not :')

I'll start worrying about the slippery slope once someone is actually being persecuted who isn't guilty.

The fact is, nobody gets fined who doesn't break the law, and while the Police may get money from the red light cameras and the speed cameras, nobody loses who doesn't break the rules. There are no losers here except criminals.

This isn't like (to go down a slashdot rabbit hole, perhaps) Sony removing Other OS from the PS3 to prevent piracy while stepping on your freedoms. The only freedom being taken by a red light camera is your freedom to run red lights. If you have a problem with this then Id ask you to explain to me who the loser is.

Or you could stop running red lights.

Sony may like its systems closed, but Nintendo has as long a history of locked-down, anti-piracy measures and closed systems. The Wii does not play DVDs. Homebrew (slash piracy...) cartridges for DS are banned. Online is a joke. As far back as the NES and as recently as the DSi (no transferring downloadable games between systems), Nintendo is all about proprietary.

A lot of the people who buy from them do so out of a feeling they are protesting against DRM and big corporations, that they are helping out a `little guy'.

A very corporation-esque stunt like this MIGHT serve to turn off some of their fanbase.

Do graduate students use the system? At my university, roughly 20-30 percent of 'staff' are actually postgrads and a hig percentage of those use Apple stuff and smartphones. The dusty old crones in the permanent staff do not.