And when I do go into the office, I can undock the laptop and take it with me.

Please note that I specified that I didn't think that it made much sense to use a laptop and a docking station if you're never going to undock it. You use your laptop both in your home office and when you're away, so your circumstances are different. BTW, do you happen to know how much electricity your docking station burns? I'm not saying that it's enough to make that much of a difference, but I am curious.

I use an old-style "dumb phone" that charges off of a 3mm jack. I wonder if there's an adapter I could use for that. And, before anybody asks, I use a dumb phone because all I want is a phone, not a pocket computer.

Not a big believer in docking stations, I see.

If, as the OP wrote, you're never going to unplug your laptop, why have one? If it's going to spend its entire service live sitting on your desk, you may as well have a desktop, especially when you consider that a desktop will cost less than a laptop and a docking station and probably give you more bang for your buck. And, if you factor in how much easier it is to upgrade a desktop or replace a failing component, the TCO of a desktop is far, far less than that of a laptop.

And now we know what BO means by "transparency in government:" we can't see that they're watching us.

How many pals did you lose to the VC?

None. First off, the VC was smashed in the Tet Offensive, before I joined up and second, I was in the Navy in Tonkin Gulf bombarding NVA positions in '72. AFAIK, nobody I knew in school was killed or even wounded in 'Nam.

and the draft dodgers were making a decision that in retrospect was a smart one

Oh, I don't know if it was smart or not. I served. I came back and used my GI Bill benefits to learn what I needed to have a better career. Now that I'm retired, I get all of my health care from the VA, and don't have to worry about whether or not Obamacare is good or not because it doesn't apply to me, unlike lots of the draft dodgers who are now worrying, very loudly in a few cases, about how they're going to pay their ever-increasing medical bills.

It will create another cottage industry of consultants trying to explain the thousands of pages of rules and regs to everyone else.

I don't know if Obamacare is good or bad, but I'm very, very concerned about the way it was written and passed: one, big, complex bill that was rammed through Congress before anybody except the authors had had a chance to read it, let alone understand it. Much better would have been a series of bills dealing with different aspects of the reform, with each one short enough to be read, understood and debated. I won't say that there are any nasty surprises lurking in the bill, but I can't say that there aren't, because it's so long, complex and unexplained. About all I can do is be glad that I get my health care from the VA, so I probably won't be affected by it one way or the other.

Nice try, AC, but you're wrong. They've changed the terminology to "witness summons," but it's still there. In fact, England is where the subpoena was created.

We've known for a long time that we're not in Known Space. In our universe, Mercury's day isn't the same length as its year as it is in Known Space.

Unfortunately, it's a rather one-sided protection, as the police would never show videos in which they'd appear to have abused their powers.

I don't know how things work in GB, but in the USA, the defense can subpoena the footage and, if they feel it would help, can submit it to the court themselves as evidence. And, I'd hope, any police claims that the video has been lost or not properly preserved would go a long way toward refuting their claims.

Pulseaudio always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. The only time I ever had trouble getting sound to work with Linux was when pulseaudio was new; now, It Just Works, for the most part.

Or you are a Linux fanboi. I installed linux on my media server just last year and it did not work with the optical audio, After a couple of hours I gave up.

Both my sister and I have been using Linux as our sole OS for over five years now. Neither of us has had the slightest problem getting sound to work over several different computers, using various releases of Fedora for me and Ubuntu for her. I follow several different support forums for Fedora, and questions about getting sound to work have gotten to be fairly uncommon during the past few years. I don't know why you couldn't get it to work, but I suspect, judging by your attitude, that you went out of your way to make things hard on yourself.

Doesn't change the fact that you, sir, are wrong.

That's easy to say, hard to prove, especially when coming from an AC.

It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound?

No, you're not. My guess is that the OP is a Windows fanboi regurgitating anti-Linux talking points from over fifteen years ago. I'm surprised that he's not also complaining about how hard it is to configure X and getting it running properly or to find a printer that works with it.

I was thinking that too. However, I can see it calling home every few minutes to let the control machine know it's still there and running. (No response needed.) If it misses a scheduled call, the control machine launches a new attack and re-infects it. Don't know how well it would work in practice, but it sounds reasonable.

Let me guess: a certain prominent politician who taught Constitutional Law for eight years?