It's not about the ID itself, that is a 'game token' if you will. The danger lies in how tokens are linked and evaluated by all the other players in the game. Especially if those other player's interests do not consider your interests as worth consideration.

And I've good news for you, sunshine: That's precisely how the doctrine known as Search Incident to Lawful Arrest, aka SILA works. In searches not attached to a potential arrest restrictions still apply. Let's work with your example, cockfighting. A felony in most states. Along the way to the basement the Officer Intrepid spots a roach in an ashtray. Since this ain't Texas, that roach is a misdemeanor offense. Also not covered by the warrant looking for cockfighting evidence. Yes, it will be ignored - for now. They'll be getting busy obtaining another warrant for illicit drugs. Use that time wisely ;)

Yes. I've a pair of Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H dual band / high power. $90 US via Amazon. I use the 5GHz radios as N dual channel to get a solid 250+ Mbps between backend (where the audio / video servers live) to the "front" (WAN connection and media play 'puter) plus two 2.4 GHz WAPs in mixed mode. "High" power on this means 20 dbm. I had the radios turned down to 8 dbm, but that ended this past Christmas with the explosion in number of 802.11W ** devices around my neighborhood. The router features two choices for firmware built in: Yer basic easy-peasy setup tool or DD-WRT with all the fun stuff.

** 802.11 Whatever. I'm old and tired of alphabet soup.

I think what Penguinisto is trying to say is that the developer exodus begins with what the dev uses *for themselves* to get the biz owner's Windows servicing taken care of. You are not - in a larger context - correct in saying "you can't rdp without windows": throwing a X screen and keybd across the network is easily done. You are correct in saying that when we do rdp to a win box we're just using our *nix/droid platforms as thin clients.

Now the question is: Why would we want to?

Speaking for me, I just want the damn tool - the computer under my fingers - to just work, with a simple UI/UX that gets out my way and lets me work. Linux/Gnome/CLI and Android/AndFTP/ConnectBot works wonders for me and preserves what little sanity I still possess after nearly four decades worth of computing 'n tech-stuff work.

The odd thing is many of my clients want the same thing from their computing systems: it just works and gets out of the way of the worker so they can, you know, work ;)

Now imagine the conversation they and I will be having over the next few years ...

It's a bit more complicated than that. Reactive or resistive loading? Consider a typical portable room heater: A large percentage pure resistive (the heater) and a smaller percentage of reactive loading - the fan motor. Now examine the ratings for our relay - note the disparity in levels handled for resistive load vs "motor" (inductive loads). A typical relay can sport contacts that would handle 1.5KW - resistive. That's about 2 horsepower - but the relay's rating disallows operating motors greater than 1/3 to 1/2 HP (about 250 to 350 VA). And that's our problem - the presence of reactive loads requires a large derating wihich most folks are blithely unaware of. Also it's good practice to "bypass" either motor or relay contacts with a resistor-capacitor "snubber" or an MOV to take up the inductive kickback lest switching this load cause the relay's contacts to fail: %50 rate on fail to close (no *safety* problem) or fail to open - welded contacts, this is a safety problem, aka FIRE!

That's an overly broad statement. Capacitive reactive losses really matter a lot on submarine or buried cable. Not much of a factor in overhead HV transmission. Think of it like the classic parallel plate capacitor - since that's what we have, just our "plates" are curved away from each other (which reduces capacitance, but let us consider them as flat here). The area (over the length of the lines) is large, yes. But what kills that off so to speak, is a product of two things: a poor dielectric medium (air) and a large distance (many meters) between the "plates".

For "plates" 3cm wide with a length of 1km and a separation of 10m: about 27pF. In other words: 27pf/km.

Formula: (where's my dang MathML slashdot?) C = k * E * A / S where:
C is capacitance in Farads
k is relative permittivity of the dielectric. Equals 1 (for air)
E is permittivity of space, a constant 8.85E-12 F/m
A is area in meters squared
S is separation distance in meters

For that 1km model above the impedance at 60 Hz is 100Mohm. For a 220KV line that is a loss of about 480W/km. Such a line would be conveying power in the few hundreds megawatt range. Not much of a reactive loss there. Different on sub/buried: k is much larger, and S is much smaller (mm - cm distances).

What if the car's clock doesn't work? Or it's a rental and it's clearly wrong but you haven't a clue or the time to figure out how to set it? That's how the smart phone in the pocket "hampers you". Kinda obvious now that we think about it a bit, hmm?

How about you're a properly careful driver who keeps the road clearly in view at all times which on many vehicles you won't be doing if you are looking at the console clock and with all vehicles the cellphone laying on the seat / center console. With a wristwatch you can always keep the road view near center of your vision.

So to recap: Please, Please, Please .... DON'T FUCKING DRIVE.

Add to that: Rock climbing / Caving. Non-Sports: Engineering / Maint in heavy industry (like mining / steel / rubber). Cellphones are fragile critters: They won't survive drops of more than a couple of meters. I've a Casio G-Shock that I still use - after dropping it 35m on to rock. Show me a smartphone that will survive even a 10m drop consistently.

Also, some of us just like to know - or need to - the time accurate to 1-2 seconds with no drift to manage. No cellphone does. Certain radio-clock timepieces do well at this, the Casio MTG900 mentioned elsewhere does this (syncs to WWVB signal). Some wireless providers set their clocks evidently by guess or sundial (looking right at AT&T on this one). Mine (ATT, HTC Inspire) frequently is more than a minute off.

Ala BlueStrat's response above, with the same comment on verbosity, I'll leave this for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel#Politics

Note the mention of the presence of a Palestinian Arab sitting on the Supreme Court

REATILER would, if it existed be a person who was not a tiler, becoming a tiler, then relapsing to not being a tiler.

Tiler - noun. One who lays tile as in flooring or roofing. Or the doorkeeper of a Masonic lodge.

Simple? No it isn't. The first amendment does not supersede:
A single parents need (and right) to get home to the kid(s) before the sitter leaves / day care closes, or to the school / hospital if the child takes sick, etc.
The right not to die in an ambulance after the stroke, coronary, aneurysm, whatever because it's snarled in traffic.

There's two to get ya started on thinking on what could possibly go wrong with intentionally blocking traffic.

Alas, those old phreaking tricks won't work anymore in places that have moved away from the legacy in-band signaling and control hardware. Which is pretty much all of the civilized world since the early '90's for the PSTN. One could I suppose get lucky with a local PBX - but the attack still requires obtaining access to the PBX controller / software, not just access to modem's phone line.

I once pissed off a lot, onto the sidewalk.

Just for the lulz of it.

That's not entirely correct: The White House handles the overflow, the principal repository / recycling center is the Capital with two chambers dedicated to the task.

Yep they surely do. This sparked a thought .... so I checked mine: Sure enough there sits a MAC address. From whatever laptop I used to commission it with in 2002. That was a couple of laptops back.

Then there's this:
$ ifconfig eth1 down
$ ifconfig eth1 hw ether 01:23:45:54:32:01
$ ifconfig eth1 up

So did I copy (or did the router's firmware) that MAC or did I spoof it? I honestly don't remember.

It is possible to uniquely identify a computer on the internet, IP / MAC addressing is not one of them. Accurately would require looking at clock skew, traffic analysis and other time-consuming, trained-brain-required, non-1-click techniques.