Tweets are public as they can be read by any member of the public regardless of whether that someone is party to the conversation or not. A member of the public cannot read an email that was not sent to them at least not in the general case. So tweets are public, emails are mostly not. Emails can become public if they are sent to an email list with a publicly readable archive etc.

Warrants are costly and time consuming. Why use one if it is not needed? Do you like wasting time and throwing money away?

As to the specifics of this case, well get the tweets from a currently public source or get a warrant, seems reasonable to me.

Graphite is the form of carbon used in pencils. Anyway, my pencil is a lot more than a single atom thick ;-)

How about the OS is hosed and you want to force a PXE boot in order to re-image the disk?

Bzzt, wrong! When you buy a DVD you are paying to have a licensed copy of that DVD. You can watch it as many times as you like, you can watch it with other people, as many times as you like, you can watch it with different groups of people as many times as you like, you can lend it to other people as many times as you like. It is just like a book. I do not believe that the second hand book market stopped new books being published and neither will a second hand games market stop new games being created.

An experience is not a saleable commodity. You sell a licensed copy of the game. You do not sell the experience of playing that game.

Err, no. First of all it is an optional update through Microsoft Update not Windows Update. So the user has to have chosen to switch to the Microsoft Updates which will update other MS software installed on the PC eg Office. Secondly it is only offered to users who are not already running A/V software.

The software on the expansion ROM is just a low level driver. So the attack described is about compromised firmware, not hardware. No need for special chip fabs at NSA secret facilities or physical access to the machine. Any one using flashrom or similar can install such code in a flash expansion ROM.

I follow the coreboot development and I am impressed by how far they have got however:-
1) coreboot does not support any motherboards that are still for sale, its all old technology, see my comment about being obsolete before being reversed.
2) coreboot is not a BIOS, nor does it claim to be
3) coreboot does not support any laptops as they cannot get the documentation on the embedded controllers, again the laptop will likely be obsolete before it can be reversed.
4) coreboot, when it does work, tends to only work for limited configurations of the hardware

Yes coreboot is improving and adding support for new features etc however it will always be playing catchup unless it can have all the specs for the hardware (ie an open platform) and that will always take time. Also most people are not interested in making a truly flexible and generic solution, they just want it to work well enough for them.

As for OpenBIOS, that is truly a misnomer, it is not a BIOS at all. It is an implementation of IEEE 1275-1994 known as Open Firmware. It depends on a lower level first loader such as coreboot, so inherits all coreboot issues. Apple stopped using Open Firmware when they switched to Intel CPUs. Sun are moving away from Sparc CPUs. So it is of little practical use, however the biggest problem is this quote on the OpenBIOS website "Do not try to put OpenBIOS in a real boot ROM, it will not work and may damage your hardware!"

Sorry but the BIOS has not been small and simple for about 20 years. It does far more than simply launch a bootloader. New technologies have constantly been added to the BIOS and each one has added to the complexity. APM, PnP, PCI, ACPI, EPP/ECP, BBS, UEFI, PCIe etc etc. The 4MB ROM is not yet full of BIOS code, that's still only about 1.5MB give or take. However Intel boards also have code in there for their manageability engine etc. With a reasonable amount of headroom in the ROM manufacturers are looking to add value by using that available space to include new features hence this Lojack fiasco.
OSS doesn't stand much of a chance of producing a BIOS until it has a suitably open hardware platform to go with it. So much of a BIOS is intimately connected to the hardware that without access to the full specs the hardware would be obsolete before it could be reverse engineered.

No. They are good enough to boot some older motherboards in limited configurations but there is almost no laptop support at all.

Damn, I've just wasted 15 years of my life porting BIOSes to different platforms. Thanks for telling me that it was all unnecessary. Hardware manufacturers will also be pleased to know that they can just use a smaller ROM of a few KB instead of the 4MB ROMs that are coming into use now. That will save a few pennies.

I bow before your in depth and vastly superior knowledge of the subject.

Because booting a PC is not simple. DRAM init is complicated. PCI init is complicated. Supporting suspend to RAM is complicated. etc etc.

Hardware is nothing more than petrified software. You're also assuming that the hardware is in fact bug free, never malfunctions and has no production flaws. Not to mention needing to design the hardware in such a way as to cope with all possible scenarios.