Uhh...I'm sorry, but if you're getting within $200 of your credit limit, you're doing it wrong.

Just picked three random motherboards off newegg, expensive, midrange, and cheap, and none of them had serial or parallel ports:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131803
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130582
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138339

Interestingly, the cheapest one does list serial and parallel headers on the board, so with the right adapter you could still get them.

You need them to take money out of an ATM. Also, if you make a purchase with a debit card using the PIN, you get less protection (coincidentally, the bank makes less money in fees from the purchase as well)

RMS, is that you? The world is never going to be your communist open source utopia where closed source and profiting off of software is illegal. People don't need the netlist for every IC they use. This board is more closed than most, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make as the price per performance is better by a mile than anything out there.

Putting it in a safe wont stop a determined criminal. Just like the common Slashdot aphorism that the most powerful encryption can often be defeated by a $5 wrench in a back alley.

There are already several places selling "fake" Arduinos. They are actually identical to the real ones, because the design to arduino is completely open source, and the official one has a rather high margin, so there's space for chinese manufacturers to come in and produce clones for cheaper.

So you're saying hacking child porn sites is like sleeping in tents outside banks?

Basically they do this because they want to be able to update the browser silently. The update process for firefox involves dialogs popping up, you have to OK them, then next time firefox restarts you have to approve a UAC prompt (on windows at least, I assume some kind of sudo popup on linux/mac). Chrome updates silently in the background, next time you open it you have the new version, but you don't get all sorts of popups and new tabs spamming you about it like with firefox. Also updating chrome doesn't disable half your extensions which is nice.

That cable is totally non standard, for crazy devices that output analog over their HDMI port. Most do not. HDMI is digital, VGA is analog, you can't convert from one to the other with a simple cable. It would not work for the raspberry pi (notice how the page says NOT FROM COMPUTER OR LAPTOP on it)

Hmm, you've got a good point. We should definitely discourage any sort of technical advances, since those advances might be used for DRM!