That's because they *would* be incompetent in this case. If a student brought the network down by simply using the connection then something is wrong with the network. My university does not censor anything and there have been no major outages that I know of. They don't block outgoing traffic and on the wireless you even get a public IP address with both incoming and outgoing traffic allowed and yet the network manages to stay up somehow. Of course the network is set up competently, i.e. students' connections are isolated as much as possible, so even if a student's machine is compromised (which happens a lot I imagine) it is no worse for the others than any of the millions of compromised machines on the Internet. Also, there are some (negotiable) caps to prevent bandwidth wasting.

And even if the network is not properly set up, how is censoring open-source communities' websites such as hackaday going to help it anyway?

I believe "Intel Insider" does something like this, but I'm not sure and I wasn't really referring to anybody actually doing DRM that way currently. I just meant that in a typical hardware-assisted playback (of compressed video) the application feeds the original video to the hardware an does not usually need to touch it after that. The current hardware does still provide a channel through which the decompressed video can be read (for saving it or processing it in a way that the hardware does not support), however there is nothing stopping future versions from disabling that channel for videos that have a "protected" flag set on and I think this may be what "Intel Insider" does, although I couldn't find much information about it.

Pause/play/seek/etc. are still done by the application but they are not really relevant here since they operate on the original stream and the application still feeds the video to the hardware and so, it can still start/stop feeding it or move to another position in the original stream.

This isn't how hardware decoding (typically) works. You pass the encoded (and in this case encrypted) video to the hardware and tell it where on the display it should be rendered. It will decode it (and in this case decrypt it as well) and show it. Firefox does not get involved after passing the encoded video.

Classified data is required to be always encrypted and any drive that has ever contained classified data is required to be physically destroyed. If you found real classified data on your hard drive you got from newegg something went very wrong and whoever was responsible should be punished accordingly. Though, I think if you found a document that says "classified" it is far more likely that somebody is just playing a silly joke on whoever gets the drive.

And what do you do if the data is on a USB drive that requires the password to be provided before letting you copy anything and is designed to erase the data (or more likely in practice the secondary random key) if you attempt to physically open it?

The bootloader being open source does not in any way mean that it cannot implement secure booting. If it refuses to boot an unsigned OS and if it refuses to replace itself with an unsigned image (that's typical for secure bootloaders) then you are stuck looking for vulnerabilities or replacing the chip just like with a closed bootloader.

Not only that, barring some exceptional circumstances, you cannot become an Engineer in Canada without a university degree.

Flipping a fair coin is always independent (50%) regardless of whether you flip one or a million of them. Same reason, why martingale in roulette doesn't work.

There is no such "feature" in Android. HTC Hero works fine over wifi and without a data plan. Even without a SIM card everything works over wifi.

Well, current Macs are Intel architecture computers and they are capable of running Windows.

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