Red Hat's approach, as the other Slashdot story states, is to have a first stage bootloader load and verify GRUB, and then GRUB loads and verifies Linux, and then Linux loads and verifies modules. This works if you run an official kernel with all official modules but not, as that story's featured article mentions, with "out of tree drivers". If you need to compile a kernel module from source to support hardware whose driver isn't yet in the mainline kernel, then as I understand it, you can't load such a module into a securely booted kernel without paying the $99 VeriNorton tax.

True, but this time it's "web scale", whatever that means. And a lot of the concerns in that video appear to have been addressed, with durability provided through a journal file.

What the iPod touch has to do with the comment depends on whether you think iPod touch is more like a phone or more like a tablet. I was replying to Belial6's comment, which discussed phones. Here in the United States, smartphones are typically sold bundled with a 24-month contract, and it is considered highly unusual to buy one and use it only on Wi-Fi.

By dropping the non-free textbooks entirely and switching to freely licensed textbooks developed using resources provided by Wikimedia Foundation.

When commerce among the states competes with commerce inside the states, the Congress has power to protect commerce among the states from commerce inside the states. Wickard v. Filburn.

But they can tax you and give you a tax credit if you do.

In that case, are you claiming that it is desirable that each operating system distributor must feed the Norton-Verisign racket?

If each end user has to do it, then yes, it is insurmountable in practice. It's especially hard for people who disagree with the principles of Norton software, which is sold by the same company that bought Verisign's certificate business.

But in order to do provide an appropriate education, wouldn't the state have to steal more of your money through its department of revenue?

Before UEFI Secure Boot, installing a new operating system was a matter of putting the CD in or plugging in the USB drive and rebooting. Recent versions of Ubuntu, for example, would give the option to shorten your Windows partition. But now, the problem will involve getting the new operating system's key into the UEFI environment.

In the real world, having a connector manufactured to fit the connector costs money.

As CronoCloud has repeatedly explained to me on this board, geeks alone do not a market make. Video game consoles are aimed at the mass market, not geeks who have probably already set up a PC as a monitor anyway.