I can't imagine a single machine serving out over iSCSI to have performance acceptable to play any modern, intensive game. How's it all work?

Windows is sufficient for my needs. It's fast enough, secure enough, powerful enough and I have a something like 15 years of experience as a power user and administrator on a variety of versions. I don't code, so most of free software's "Doesn't work the way you want? Fix it yourself!" isn't an option (and I don't care to learn to code, either) and the ideological underpinnings aren't a factor I consider in my use of technology.

Why bother changing to anything else?

In most other countries, student debt wasn't institutionalized as a way of controlling the youth population like it was here after the 1960s.

This is another "accomplishment" in the style of most everything he's done for domestic policy: deliver some good speeches that change has happened, then order a fresh coat of paint applied to the status quo. A lot of big talk for a program with limited scope and impact...that was already passed into law, and is just being implemented earlier. It only applies to students who have not yet graduated, it only applies to Federally guaranteed loans (which, at most universities, do not cover the cost of attendance), and it offers a maximum of 5% of a payment reduction and a 0.3ish % interest rate reduction. And the unpaid balance of the loan expires five years earlier. In other words, this does nothing to help anyone who already has student loans, such as all of the people who graduated college into the depths of the recession or the non-recovery recovery, and are struggling to make payments or even find work.

It'd be a real shame if someone set off a truckload of marijuana in a crowded rest stop...think of the children!

A 1B3 (an early high-voltage rectifier) running a few thousand volts over spec cold-cathode will crank out enough X-rays for DIY x-ray photography and similar hobby experimentation, but they're not very high energy - I doubt they'd make it through the metal.

Is there a sensor that could detect if one of these technologies is in use? I'd love to outfit my vehicle with a TSA Detector so I can know when my rights are being violated on the go, so I could post a photo of the offending scannervan on the Internet.

Oh, and that's 7 ad-homs. Yours is one of the most direct, though. I was really hoping to have some debate about this topic, but it appears most everyone on here is either Machiavellian to an extreme or doesn't mind antisocial behavior.

Is that why I got a lot of negative replies? I don't actually play any online games, nor do I subscribe to pornography. Does that mean I can't have an opinion about those things?

Are gangs of punks something we're supposed to regard with admiration and esteem?

The pre-"malicious criminal gangs running rampant on the Internet without fear or shame" era, the one we were in until a few weeks ago, was the one where porn was between me and my hand. It didn't take the Government to take away that privacy, it was a group of hackers seeking thrill in epicaricacy. The choice has been made for me, but I didn't even get to write an ineffective letter to my representative for this one.

Just because I'm not actually impacted by any of these break-ins or disclosures or anything else they've done, doesn't mean I shouldn't be outraged by it.

Just replying to myself here with some statistics for anyone else who is interested:

11 replies
9 of them with no content to speak of
6 of those with ad-hom attacks
1 dissenting reasoned argument (to which I concur, nobody is saying IT security isn't important)
1 in support of my position (antisocial behavior is and should be unacceptable no matter where it happens)

This is about what I expected, but it's disheartening to see so many knee-jerk reactions in favor of malice, theft and schadenfreude. Surely we can think of a way to raise awareness of security, without the extra make-someone's-life-miserable that these Anonymous-affiliated hacker groups seem to favor?

This needs to stop. I can't wait for long prison sentences for all of the people involved in this. It's like Anonymous tried to figure out how they could be even more evil, by exposing unsuspecting randoms to identity theft risk "because they can." It's no longer making a statement, it's the online equivalent of a gang of punks going around smashing in car windows and robbing old ladies of their social security when they leave the ATM.

Only one thing will come of all this, and honestly I'm damn near the point of embracing it instead of fighting it: severe restrictions on Internet freedom and intense monitoring and logging by ISPs and the Government. I want my game servers to be up, I want my credit card information not to be stolen, and if I look at pornography I want that fact to be between me and my hand and not posted to a web site. The Internet should be a place of freedom, but this isn't freedom, it's anarchy and if the choices are between a regulated Internet relatively free of this kind of malicious disruption of innocent bystanders or the "Wild West" over a fiber optic link, I'm just going to have to take the former.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus comes to mind.