Every time I opt out, I am subject to TSA employees persuading me to go through the scanner instead. I always tell them: I am just doing what I can to save your job, as soon you will be replaced by the machine.
They usually do not know how to respond to that, so they shut up.

This unsuccessful attempt to throw mud at Assange may be good news for the Pirate Party. If I were Swedish, this incident alone would make me vote for them in the upcoming elections.

Americans are in love with their cars and hate not having them at their destination when they travel. Rental cars are an expensive workaround solution, given that cars cannot be carried in planes. However, cars could be carried in trains, even in high speed trains. The Eurochannel shuttles show that this is not only possible but relatively cheap and efficient. Marriage of high speed train and cars is the way of the future for America. Gone would be the increasingly more paranoid hassles of air travel and the inconvenience of not having your car with you. The rental car industry would suffer but the tourism industry would bloom, as people would be able to do more when they travel than they can now. I am surprised that so few people in the US see what a win-win situation this is for the US.

Yes and no. The UK is ahead in video surveillance (although it's not as exaggerated as many people on /. seem to believe); the US has been giving a surprising amount of power to the DHS; but only in one of the three countries you mentioned do people have to register their address with the local police. "Police state" is less a spectrum and more a set of attributes, and comparing different subsets objectively isn't easy.

Let me guess... This third country is the USA: I must register my address within 10 days of moving or face deportation. My fault, since I am just a lowly permanent resident and not a citizen. Fortunately, my son is a US citizen, and he did not have to register his address with the federal government, just with the state government. He has to carry his state-issued school ID at all times while in the school premises and show it to any school official who requests it for any reason. And in our state school attendance is mandatory. Americans sometimes forget that police in the USA comes under many different names: department of motor vehicles, board of education, citizen and immigration service, bureau of investigation, fire marshall, social services and ... police.

Let me rephrase it. I mean, get rid of schools as they are now. And in particular, get rid of so many incompetent teachers. The school buildings could be repurposed as educational libraries with classrooms for group study and for watching online lectures. A few teachers and proctors could be around to answer questions and to give and grade tests. Many teachers should consider a career change, and everyone will benefit. It would be financially sound and more efficient. The only reason this is not done is the teachers unions.

Online books are not a very good idea. Books are still better for reading and studying, and the technology for ebooks is still not good enough to mimic all features of real books. Video, on the other hand, is already good enough to have online lectures. I know, because my university does it, and I took some classes where I only went to the classroom to take the tests. I watched all lectures at my own pace in the comfort of my room, and I feel it made no difference whatsoever. Actually, I am sometimes bored in a classroom lecture and wished I could just press the pause button on the teacher, go for a coffe and come back without missing anything. So, I find online lectures just as effective as live lectures but much more convenient, and the interactive aspect can also be taken care of by using email and online forums. So, I think the Governor should re-examine the issue and maybe get rid of schools but keep the books. I am not kidding.

What the US really needs is to have a network of high speed trains that carry cars between cities. That system would be a real alternative to air travel. You could take your car with you and let the train do the boring and long driving for you in much less time. I wonder why people are not considering this system. A people-only system is not suitable for the US suburban metropolis.

A piece of hardware like this is badly needed, but the key is that any such device should be totally independent of the software installed. People then could choose to install anything they want on it. My ideal tablet would behave exactly like a notebook computer without the need to have custom software or modify existing desktop environments. One way to achieve that would be to have a touchscreen plus 3 additional hardware buttons that interact with the OS at the lowest level possible (maybe even below driver level). The 3 buttons should work like this:

• A button to show a virtual keyboard so that the OS receives key-press events
• A button to send drag events so that the OS receives button-pressed-while-mouse-moving events when pressed
• A button to cycle between left, middle and right clicks as the event sent to the OS when the user touches the screen

Any OS would think it was running in a regular notebook with a regular keyboard and a regular mouse, so the hardware would not be handicapped by the lack of available custom software. I see no reason why a tablet like this does not exist today, as there are lots of things one could do with it even if CPU power was low. The Nokia N8xx tablets were close to this goal, but their dependence on custom software (applications had to be hildonized) made them much less useful than they could have been otherwise.