What did you expect when you donated money to John Banks ? Were you expecting help when the various US three letter agencies came gunning for you at the behest of the *IAA ?

They can have my coffee when they take if from my cold dead trembling hands ! Seriously, in my workplace if they stopped supplying coffee there would be an immediate staff reduction due to the inevitable murderous rampage. I'd suspect it as a self enforcing workforce reduction plan, but I seriously doubt the bean counters are smart enough for a plan that cunning

I work at a small I shop in NZ and roughly 4-5 times a month someone brings in a winME or win98 machine that's inevitably infested with ten trillion kinds of malware and has an expired OEM version of nortons. In these situations my usual response is to : 1. Kill it with Fire 2. KILL IT WITH FIRE 3. Kill customer *and* machine with fire. 4. All of the above. Just to be sure. On the plus side, I'm getting a large portion of these users migrated onto ubuntu as it's a *lot* cheaper than either replacing the machine with one that can deal with a modern OS or partial upgrade and installing XP/Vista. It's a bit heavier from a support point of view, but at least I don't have to deal with the "It's saying I've got $malware_of_the_week - fix it now!!!" calls.

Ah the classic model M, the only keyboard you could beat a user to death with, then sit down and use it delete their account.

Here in NZ we have been about to suffer one of the most draconian media industry walkovers that made the DMCA look like a wet bus ticket ... But then something entirely unexpected happened - the government actually after some shiny grassroot protests like the blackout thing that shut down many public sites here in NZ for the day. I might actually have some hope for democracy after all. http://creativefreedom.org.nz/

What worked for me (when hosting a bunch of 80+ machine lans) was using stickers and little wrist straps. On arriving each machine had a sticker attached to it, and a matching wrist strap was given to the owner. We had someone at the door checking every pc as it left that it matched the wrist strap. I've done this at 5 different lans now of various sizes and only had one person trying to leg it with someone's machine. When choosing a venue try to find a place with alarmed fire escapes - some video coverage is a good idea too.