Isn't this like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas?

So the TSA aren't spreading fear, degrading people, and impinging on civil liberties? All we have to do is not travel by air. Got it. I'm glad we've managed to protect our freedoms os effectively - silly me.

Why is the pilot's union telling them to avoid the machines? (Honest question)

This woman should be applauded, her sticking up for the health of her children (those backscatter machine REALLY safe?) and their dignity (because "pat downs" are degrading). She was willing to get herself arrested to stand up for her children. We need more people like her.

Connect it to the Internet and use your Apple ID to download a fresh copy (it really is that simple).

Yeah, Apple have removed the floppy disk again... we'll adapt.

Yeah because every PC OEM includes reinstall media don't they? Oh, but they don't, they include a "reinstall partition" (which is no help if the drive is borked). I even saw a laptop (Acer I think) where you could only make one set of the reinstall media from the recovery partition! (Think about that for a while... yeah)

Apple are one of the few vendors who include a recovery DVD (currently), I think it highly likely they will continue to provide recovery media of some kind (I think it'll be a MacBook Air style USB thumb drive - no inside information here).

You can't copy a file across your network?! Seriously, think about it - you downloaded it, you're going to run it from the hard disk. Now how can you do that from another computer? Copy the file across the network perhaps?

I bet there will only USB thumb drive reinstall media - but personally I think that's better.

Or they boot from their existing media and use their Apple ID to re-download it (yes a huge hassle... but doable). Or probably more likely they take it to an Apple Store where a "genius" fixes it, and as part of that process they reload the OS... Just saying.

Err, for consumers it's better - installing from USB thumb drive is FAR faster... Sure, it costs a little more for Apple to supply it.

But here's an idea, when they do Mac OS X 10.8 it would be really easy to write that image over your install USB to keep it current.