Not necessarily. However the standard security apparatus from the 1970's, known as the "Walk-Through Metal Detector", would have easily detected these devices.

When even many non-nerds saw that the Surface was not going to catch on when it was announced last year. (To be fair, many people snickered at the "iPad" before it hit the market.) But throw in a whole new interface, copy that interface to the new version of Windows, yet make apps/programs incompatible across platforms. And the average Joe could see this was a recipe for disaster. The nerds among us already have hands-on experience with the also-rans--especially those of us who scored in the HP TouchPad fire sale. Ballmer saw himself becoming the next Steve Jobs thinking that his solitary passion for the MS tablet/Windows overhaul would completely override his detractors.The tablet is the next big thing and we must make our mark-common sense be damned! But out of this, I think Microsoft is in far more mortal danger than the eternal doom of its flagship O/S. They bet the farm on Win8, forcing it onto all consumer grade PCs, without leaving a reasonable bridge between the prior and subsequent versions which kept the company from its current situation when WinME came out, as one could hold onto Win98, wait for XP, or pay a bit more for Win2K as alternatives. Ballmer isn't offering any alternative to hanging onto Win7 for the masses this time around.

Therefore, for the typical person looking to buy a PC or laptop off the shelf at their local big box store, the options really boil down to: 1) Unwitting or knowingly choose to suffer with Win8; 2) Buy a MacBook; 3) Choose an iPad or Android tablet; or 4) rely on their iOS or Android smartphone. And again to all the nerds: the suburban soccer mom buying a laptop to send their kid off to college with is NOT going to: 1) search for a Linux distro to install, or 2) search eBay and/or TPB for a WinXP/7 setup disk.

Therefore, I don't believe this is merely the end of Windows, it could very well be the end of Microsoft entirely. Yes, they still have Office, and a few mice and keyboards. This is not enough to maintain the company at it's present size. Expect plenty more rounds of layoffs this year, a stock selloff, bankruptcy, and Google and Apple in a bidding war for the few remaining profitable assets such as Office.

The folks who enforce the policy are far removed from the folks who make the policy. So the TSA agent's job is miserable enough already, between passengers who are asshats in general, especially to the "peons who serve and/or inconvenience them" They get the constant DHS brainwash: "You are the last line of defense against the terrorists, blah, blah, blah...", have to work crappy split shifts without a consistent schedule, and know they'll be reprimanded or fired if they let one of those fake guns or explosives go past.So deliberately giving them additional grief in hopes of changing the policies, is not only piling on to what's probably one of the most stressful, and unsatisfying jobs in the country, but will have absolutely no effect on those policies is probably one of the most despicable ideas I've heard in a while.

I'm no fan of the TSA in general, and defunding it would be a good first step in solving the sequestered fiscal ceiling or whatever the current self-inflicted economic crisis is being called today. But please direct your loathing of the Security Theater boondoggle to those who can actually do something about it. John Pistole, Ray LaHood, Barack Obama, and your own congress critters. Write them, call them, encourage your family, friends, fellow forum members, etc. to do likewise--and do it often. Don't make threats or resort to name calling, rather provide a concise argument why you think the policy(ies) need to be changed or eliminated.

Hassling the TSA screener is most definitely not a productive conduit for change, and will only increase the turnover--Maybe the TSA will start hiring people straight out of prison when they exhaust the current labor pool.

Then please tell us.. Why on Earth did you squander funds on something at Amazon for your personal use in the first place? You should give that money back to your employer or the clients it serves! Also, why are you posting on /.? You must cease squandering time on your personal pursuits and return to work or community service immediately!
/sarcasm
/AC troll food

I'd rather members of the 1% sought to eradicate world hunger, disease, and poverty... Oh wait, Bill & Melinda Gates, along with Warren Buffet are quite involved in that pursuit. Sure there should be more CEOs, hedge-fund managers, etc doing likewise.. but this is a free country right?

So beyond that, I'm pleased that Jeff Bezos is recovering and preserving important artifacts from history, rather than some other uber-wealthy individuals in recent memory.

As a postscript.. You do remember another country's populace that rose up with the Arab Spring, don't you? It's a small island known as Bahrain. The crackdown by its government is still very oppressive. But for some reason it never got quite the level of coverage and events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Syria have attracted.. Surely, it couldn't be due to its location in the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran could it? We can't seriously chide a despotic regime that happens to provide a hugely strategic base near several large oil distribution hubs now can we?

Perhaps you might remember this quote though, "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." --George W.Bush, 09/20/2001 Often considered the core of the Bush Doctrine. Another famous quote: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." -- Condoleezza Rice, 09/08/2002
I'm sure I could find some other choice quotes "Axis of Evil", "uranium from Niger", etc. to add to these.

Sure, the Bush administration may not have explicitly implicated Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks, but these statements so soon after the 9/11 attacks were still playing havoc with the emotions of Americans in particular, and the world at large; would make it easy for any average joe, or journalist, to conflate the regime of Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda. Preying on our fears that another attack on our shores via Saddam's "WMD program" was imminent. Thereby systematically branding anyone who thought this march to war was a mistake as unpatriotic. Or don't you remember, "Freedom Fries?"

Back to the point of what Twitter could have done or not had it existed then, I agree with the "No." Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites may have played a huge role in fanning the flames of the "Arab Spring", But this was in nations accustomed to far, far less freedom of speech than one has in the USA, Canada, much of Europe, etc. thus had far greater effect on organizing protests. Ee can easily access any meetup site, and view videos anytime on YouTube showing police crackdowns against (war, OWS, G8 summits, etc.) protesters within the developed world. So as others have said, Twitter would have been used just like we could (and did) via email, message boards, IRC, etc. But when the critical mass of war supporters is larger than that of the opponents, Twitter remains irrelevant.

And a hacker would never, ever be able to bribe an undocumented janitor with a C-Note, 6-pack, and/or weed to take pictures of any monitor with a post it note stuck to it. It'd be positively unthinkable for a worker to take note of co-workers passwords in hopes of wreaking havoc should they be terminated...

Yes, but many corporate networks *still* require a user to enter a password containing alpha, numeral, and special characters, and have the passwords expire after 2-3 months. Eventually, the users get the beat down by the boss or IT about writing it on a post-it stuck on their monitor. IT therefore has successfully trained most users to write down passwords in a notebook or a desk calendar. Indeed! The users have grokked the corporate mantra toward information security: Security through Obscurity.

Not to mention for a couple bucks, one can download one of several Android or iOS pinball apps with multiple layouts, excellent sound and graphics, and spot-on physics. A couple seconds to load a different table vs. loading a new ROM & replacing the upper play field for this system.

If you gotta have an actual full sized pinball in your game room, you can probably find the machine you dumped countless quarters into during your misspent youth for sale online, probably for around $2K in decent condition.

Chrome OS seems geared to those same folks who'd otherwise install trojans, spyware, etc. for the sake of getting an animated cat to chase their cursor. So these users are protected from themselves in not directly hosing their OS from sheer ignorance, and the geeks who purchased these systems might now be lulled into complacency in knowing that they aren't likely to need to LLF the drive and then explain to their relatives where all their funny pictures went...

The problem I foresee is that a user of Chrome OS will therefore have a large target painted on them they they'll be much more likely to fall prey to a phishing campaign. Have you trained Aunt Mabel well enough to know that when she receives that "Important message regarding your mortgage account" informing her that her payment wasn't properly credited, she won't immediately be clicking through to log into her account or calling the "customer service hotline" for assistance?

Neither "hard-core conservative" nor "hard-core liberal" refer to any political party. Ideologies perhaps. You could equate Tea-Partiers to the former and Occupiers to the latter, but neither group appears to have much faith in their "designated party" from the 2-party system we've got. Liberals complain that Obama is perpetuating and strengthening heavily criticized policies from GWB. Meanwhile, the conservatives have been throwing their stalwarts (Arlen Spector, John McCain, and now Chuck Hagel, et al) under the bus for not being suitably uncompromising about their core ideologies. And the GOP is torn apart as their try to pander to this group while distancing themselves from nutjobs such as Todd Akin.

Bingo!

This is precisely why the "holy grail" of mainstream consumer acceptance/implementation of Linux hasn't succeeded. This is despite a handful of well-intentioned pushes over the past decade or so.. (Lindows, Ubuntu, etc.) Which is sad, since Microsoft essentially just gave FOSS the opportunity to become the primary desktop operating system in use by the masses. This (pardon the term) window of opportunity is still open but will close soon.

Linux is a system written by nerds, for nerds. You can create a fairly automated install process and load to a KDE with pretty graphics, and you can try to make WINE as transparent as possible to allow people to use the programs to which they've become accustom. But for the average consumer who installed McAfee and Norton on their same PC, and complains that their system is "messed up" and wants it fixed; the nerd community with its superior attitude of RTFA/PEBKAC isn't going to to have the patience to hold their hands long enough to get them up to speed. Moreover, handing out distros burned onto CD-Rs and labeled with Sharpies isn't going to entice John Q. Public to want to install it onto their system, no matter how much he hates Windows 8.

True, nothing I've mentioned so far directly relates to a specific database project. But if one's goal is to actually make Linux a viable and trusted alternative for the masses to Windows or MacOS, then a lot of work needs to be done in developing a system that can work reasonably well as a walled garden, but allow and encourage the user to explore and learn without being given a half dozen cryptic commands to type into the command line to make something work. This will involve advertising, graphic design, user interface design, programming, documentation, etc.. At many points in this process databases will be needed to allow the FOSS community to collaborate on such an undertaking.

That's right folks! The nature of creationism, intelligent design, er "Biological Intelligent Design" continues to evolve!

and before you get all pedantic on me.. I intended to write, "disabling Noscript" or "enabling javascript" above. but just that one mistake could link just a couple of your hundreds of identities, and it could all snowball from there.