In fact you'll find that CT/CAT scans expose you to a comparable amount of radiation as flying: http://www2.ans.org/pi/raddosechart/pdfs/raddosechart.pdf 1 full body CAT scan is about the same as 220 hours of flying (10 long haul flights) 1 Thyroid scan about the same as 28 hours of flying (just over 1 long haul flight) There's lots of sources of radiation, not only that but studies have started to show that constant low level exposure to radiation may in fact reduce you susceptibility to cancer.

Oh and forgot to mention, it's FOSS too!

For what it's worth, Niceplayer is a fairly decent alternative to Quicktime and VLC http://code.google.com/p/niceplayer/

Moreover, most of the EDA industry doesn't port their software to MacOS. Even linux get's more attention from the EDA industry than MacOS (although this isn't surprising, considering the strong Unix roots of much of the software). Even Mathwork's Matlab for MacOS is a poor hack job of an X port of the linux version of their software.

My Sony Bravia X-Series I bought a few years ago is 100Hz/120Hz (depending on source) and the latest does 200Hz/240Hz depending on source. Admittedly it doesn't accept sources over 60Hz and uses frame interpolation (they call it "Motionflow") to increase the frame rate from the source, but the most expensive part is ensuring the panel can do the refresh rate. Other manufacturers have equivalent frame interpolation technology too.

I think you've all missed my point. My point is, by using any old encryption, no matter how strong/weak the encryption is, it makes it illegal to decipher what the content of it is without a warrant. The idea is to make any evidence collected inadmissible in court. Furthermore, if a warrant to raid your premises was obtained using evidence that was tainted (due to being collected illegally), the warrant may be deemed invalid and any further evidence collected maybe also inadmissible.

Correct. However, evidence collected illegally generally isn't admissible in court.

Try doing a PhD concerned with the hardware implementation of pretty hardcore mathematics for wireless communications and have someone refer what you do to be "IT". Without trying to sound like some form of zealot, the best thing I did was switch to a Mac. Not because it is a superior environment or anything, but because when someone has a Windows problem I feign ignorance and say "sorry, not sure, I don't use Windows these days".

The way I see it, the problem with encryption is that it's generally computationally expensive and there are bandwidth overheads in performing strong worthwhile encryption. BUT, with the DMCA and other localised laws forbidding cracking of encryption, is strong encryption needed? Is it worth just encrypting things using a trivial dictionary or some such computationally trivial and zero bandwidth overhead system? That way if someone wants to look at the data, they'll need a warrant or else they'd be breaking the law. Is my thinking here valid?

As long as the program never runs with privileges different than the user installing it then it's not really a concern. In fact, it's not really any different to the user running whatever software they want in their home directory. However, as pointed out by many before, if the program runs with elevated privileges or under a different username or even worse, as root, than it becomes far too dangerous to allow. Hopefully a sane compromise can be achieved like only requiring root privileges to install programs that run elevated.