Off-Topic much.

takes 5 minutes to boot...

My Win 7-64 with 16GB RAM takes about 20 seconds excluding BIOS, you could try updating drivers / using something like bootvis ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/default.aspx )

Look up the history of money, the first notes where in fact IOUs for various things including gold, those IOUs then got traded and became money.

Some of those IOUs could have actually been for pigs.

Read from here onwards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money#Trade_bills_of_exchange

Money IS IOUs, it has no other value.

Money is IOUs, write an IOU for a pig, use the IOU as the medium of exchange.

Of course you can send pigs by wire, what do you think stocks and futures are. How many thousands of pigs do you want?

Nice for those getting pardoned but a bad idea in general.

How can you pardon someone who hasn't been convicted?

you know, I'm really upset and concerned about spying on me because I feel it violates my 4th amendment rights

You only just noticed?

Slippery slope, this is not on a slippery slope, this has hit the bottom.

but I'm relatively indifferent to spying on foreigners

YOU are a foreigner to the rest of the world, fool.

Well hey, how about the British spy of you and the Americans spy on the British and then we're only spying on foreigners.

See how that works. Look up echelon. In fact, here: ECHELON

Ban advertising, it's far worse, and ban all those magazines that sell a false unobtainable lifestyle. Porn is the wrong target, its so fake. Teenagers will soon work out how to get round any block anyway.

Perhaps the mandate should be that this feature is clearly labelled on the product as a product warning.

Why should anyone pay for this if they don't want it, a clear example of a feature all TVs have that doesn't benefit the consumer is HDCP, they pay for the chips to decode encrypted signals, they pay for the relevant patents and research, but this is a technology which reduces the functionality of TVs and audio-visual equipment in general.

1) Cameras in TVs could become ubiquitous - can you find a new laptop without a camera?

2) The camera might not be advertised, the feature might not be mentioned.

This wouldn't necessarily be possible to stop if a network like BT openzone is nearby and BT did a deal with the TV makers to carry the data via WiFi.

And what if you can't see it, do you rip your TV open to find it. Or it could be so close to the IR-sensor that if you block it then your remote also stops working?

Why do you think there are so many people with Facebook privacy settings wide open?

Mostly because they are too lazy / don't know how to go through a bunch of settings which Facebook made very complicated.

What if some customers want to be watched?

Why should the 95% that don't want to be watched have invasive technology added to their TVs just to appease the 5% that do want to be watched.

Now that's a rather inane answer, do you really read slashdot at -1 all the time so that you can see all the spam and trolling? Spam could be a mod option that doesn't cost points.

Or an anti-spam option like Youtube's could be implemented, but with improvements to stop it being abused.

And the irony is you can't post code on a site where most can program because it is automatically blocked (unless you add a ton of superfluous writing).

A good way to implement a spam filter would be to have longer term members that obviously aren't trolls (based on their profile stats) get a [this is spam] button, and the post gets hidden and marked as spam like on youtube with the option to say it isn't spam because some fools will of course abuse the spam button. Then anyone who abuses the spam button gets warned and then the button gets permanently removed for them.

'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'

Who is a worse threat to our freedoms, the copyright cartels or Kim Dotcom? I hope he helps to destroy them, although the cartels are so stuck in their ways that they might just destroy themselves.

And Kim D. has charisma, the cartels don't, they look and stink like s***

corrupt politicians wrecking the economy? Not so much.

Clearly you haven't paying attention for the last 5 years.

Dodgy mortgages in America packaged up in fancy financial instruments and then sold as low risk, ended up causing near collapse of the banking system, resulting in massive borrowing and pushing Europe into recession. Corrupt American politicians refusing to regulate the financial industry properly are the cause.

And google Greece Cyprus Debt.