...If you learn Slackware, you learn Linux. After playing around with Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE and a few derivations thereupon, slackware was the only one that really got me into thinking about why certain things are how they are. Most other distros treat you far too gently, and as a result you don't learn more beyond "This command says it failed because I need [y], so let's go get [y]."

this not only deprives foolish parents and their children of sound medical care, it pushes more patients towards less ethical or effective practices, promoting bad medicine. I completely agree with the doctors doing this, I just wish it hadn't come to this. As it was pointed out in other comments, parents refusing vaccines for their children is also threatening the 'herd immunity' that existing vaccines rely on, putting many more people than just their children at risk for diseases that today might not exist in america, but I don't know if that tomorrow someone with polio won't step off a plane here, and re-introduce the people who vaccinations don't protect to the sickness again. Hell, it could also mutate given enough time and start affecting people protected from it initially. Stupidity knows no bounds.

I'm less concerned about their reasons behind it, and more concerned with the fact that such a device would be like making all computers look exactly the same to hackers interested in grabbing your personal data. It would provide them with a single system to get control of to have access to millions of peoples personal information, because as soon as someone discovers how to reroute the log information to their network on a single of these boxes, the rest will be simple. I'm not a big fan of security through obscurity, but I don't see any reason to invite not only the government to take a gander at my S&M fetish, but anyone with enough brains to re-purpose these devices as well.

Exceptionally disturbing. A government monitoring all network traffic to/from devices? I haven't looked at the specifications for such a device, but I imagine it would still function in a business environment as well, thus exposing proprietary company secrets in addition to other personal information. Not to mention, I'm sure such devices would easily be capable of feeding data back into computers, providing hackers with a common interface and easy monitoring system in every internet enabled device. No need to go to a coffee shop or hop on somebody's wireless to setup a MitM capture, it's already in place everywhere and you just need to figure out a way to take control of 1 to have access to millions of peoples personal information.