For loose definitions of "identify" they could find sets of credit card transactions that would meet the given "pieces" of information. If Detective Paul Drake is looking for someone who went to a particular restaurant one night and then bought cake from some bakery next day, and Della Street knows the same person paid for toll the same evening, the super duper algorithm will tell Perry Mason all the sets of transactions that would match the given "pieces". But the data sets will not have any name or address attached to it. But still Ham Burger will make a mistake and his star witness will confess on the stand.

Not for $700+ for an obsolete laptop, there aren't.

It would be a decent one for a CA, to keep in the safe.

To the military I say: buy the best on the market, with a proven track record, with a slight bias for buying local.

Not here - the DoD is spending $2B to design a new rifle, rather than just adopt the AK74M, which has all the features it wants and many allies already use.

"'Cause commies, son."

I know there's SMART and other tools, but oddly enough, with offshore admins supposedly monitoring our equipment 24/7, I can still walk through our (fairly large) machine room and identify three or five warning lights that they did not know about. (I'm a "legacy" IT employee who still has access to the room.) Software alerts are important, but they're only as good as the people watching them. Even with an alert automatically spawning a trouble ticket, things can go bad if the ticket is dropped into a week-long queue, or even if it happens during local daylight hours and the offshore crew aren't coming online until 8:00 PM local time. Later, when the smoke clears, the offshore admins will insist they were just following process, and we'll just set things up to be knocked down again at a future date.

Secondly, you're right about IT making recommendations that are ignored by the pencil pushers. But in my opinion that's the CIO not doing his or her job.

Ouch. Good point.

Ooooooooooh..... That's evil. :)

But does it run Windows?

Are privacy and security issues the leverage that finally puts Linux in people's hands in significant numbers?"

(Are there enough people who *care* about these issues?)

The issue as I'm sure you know isn't "opened", but rather "opened within a certain length of time." Obviously given unlimited time you can get into anything, and you probably can get into an ATM a lot faster than a decent safe. But once you have the explosion routine down pat, you can probably be away with the ATM money in *seconds*. In terms of practicality and low risk, that's hard to beat.

Well, we have a ways to go before we lead the world in government corruption, but we're world class when it comes to petty political venality.

Specifically.....

publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband

In the US we gave our telcos massive tax cuts in the 90s in exchange for fiber rollout. The telcos took the money and ran.

Faraday cages are nice until you need to stick a wire through them to plug into the wall. Enjoy your battery life (and/or jiggawatt laser outside pointed through the mesh at a solar panel inside)

Broadband is a description of the technology, not of bandwidth. The FCC is a technical organization, so why can't they use the correct name?