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If you travel enough to need a laptop you should understand that if/when you cross to the US from any other country the US security/INS/customs people have recently been given pretty much carte blanche to seize/browse/copy the contents of your laptop (and your MP3 player and video/still camera, cell phone, etc. - in the same way they can look through your luggage) so you should not have things that are secret or "secure" or personal on it anyway.

"Normal" PCs can be bolted down with various devices to keep them from being removed - and in some places should be.

Laptops - even the ones that masquerade as "real" PCs should not be considered primary holders of data - so either you should not care (because they don't hold data) or you should not be accessing them remotely (access the data directly via VPN or... - not via your laptop sitting on your desktop where it should not be)

If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like it should be put together with nails - if all you have is a laptop the world looks like it should cater to your inadequacy. You're asking the wrong question.

The question should be "why is my employer forcing me to only use a laptop?"

"Very little is known about how these clouds form over the poles, why they are being seen more frequently and at lower latitudes than ever before, or why they have been growing brighter."

Should I provide refrences?
These clouds form as a result of water vapor deposited in the stratosphere, by the space shuttle and thunderhead clouds. They travel to the poles rather quickly, and form as clouds, due to the stability of the structure of the polar and antartic vortices. This fact is well known, to Dr. Drew Schindell, and Dr. Paul Newman, ( Dr Newman is still studying these clouds as to their structure ), both scientiests clearly know HOW they form, and Dr Schindell incorporates the stability of the antartic vortex into his ozone destruction models. Your Tax dollars at rest.

They are seen more frequently, due to the increased amount of shuttle launches, and the increased amount of thunder clouds. (DUH!). Due to the increase in the amount of water vapor, at those altitudes, the more clouds, the brighter they are, like water vapor on the ground. On a hot and humid day, with little temprature diffrential, you dont see clouds. On cold and humit days, with a lot of temprature diffrential, you see coulds, they are larger, and brighter. Wilbur and Orville Wright saw this and wrote about it 100 years ago.

"AIM will observe two complete cloud seasons over both poles, documenting an entire life cycle of the shiny clouds for the first time."
Where was this research during 9/11~9/14? When the US aircrafts were grounded? Wouldn't that have an impact on these clouds? Hundreds of scientsts recognised this opportunity, but Aparently Dr Rusell missed it. Best of luck on the experment...

"'It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means,' stated AIM principal investigator James Russell III of Hampton University, Hampton, Va. 'These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed.'"

Dr. Russell, it means this: "Anyone not wearing sunblock2000 is going to have a real bad day." -Sarah Connor. or...

http://www.coastalpost.com/98/8/10.htm

"There's the same old news about the springtime Antarctic Ozone Hole. It hasn't changed much since the early 1990s because there is almost no ozone left to destroy." -J Scanlon.

Need more refrences, You can use a search engine, or I can, if you want. It only takes a few seconds. Really. Even Dr Russell can do it.

Oh really?

Couple of points on your post:
1. How right you are about the no-bid, money-wasting thing--it's happening right now in Iraq, where millions have been wasted and in many cases, little reconstruction to show for it (sorry about the Coastal Post link--it was in major news publications a couple of weeks ago, but this is the most relevant recent hit in a Google News "Bechtel Iraq" search).
2. Isn't it sad that you have to say "probably," because in so many cases, it seems like these huge taxpayer decisions are made without anyone knowing about them?

Odd how quickly you come to defend an un-cited site when you didn't do much research on the matter. The fact is, I found that same list, verbatim, on multiple sites:

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channe lid=31&contentid=3945&page=2 (which attributes it to Rense)

http://whatreallyhappened.com/usa_vote_facts.html (which attributes to Nightweed)

http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2004/12/19/20_am azing_facts_about_voting_in_the_usa.php (which doesn't give a source, only that it has been seen "going around")

http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2006/07 /20_amazing_fact.html (which has an unsourced version without links and one with links sourced to Nightweed)

http://www.coastalpost.com/04/12/02a.htm (without links and attributed to Bob Rowe)

http://www.comicpress.com/ElectionFiasco.htm (verbatim post, unsourced)

http://www.guerrillafunk.com/thoughts/doc000023.ht ml (attributed to Angry Girl/Nightweed and Bob Rowe)

http://www.argusfest.org/ (unsourced, but verbatim)

And on and on and on....

Many do attribute to Nightweed and many do not. Since lists such as these are usually somewhat viral in nature and distribution, original authorship is often difficult if not impossible to determine. However, if the original author is indeed Angry Girl/Nightweed, then my thanks to her for compiling the list.

San Francisco Chronical, August 21, 1990
Group Says Space Shuttle Damages Earth's Ozone, by David Sylvester

Every time the space shuttle is launched, 250 tons of hydrochloric acid is released into the air. With each launch, .25 percent of the ozone is destroyed. So far, the space shuttle has destroyed 10 percent of the ozone.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, world renown physician and environmentalist stuns audiences when she makes that statement in her talks across the country. A brief article, in a small-circulation environmental publication, supports Dr. Caldicott's charges.

Two Soviet rocket scientists have warned that the solid fuel rocket boosters used on the space shuttle release 187 tons of ozone destroying chlorine molecules into the atmosphere with every launch. Valery Burdakov, co-designed of the Russian "Energiya" rocket engine, also noted that each shuttle launch produces seven tons of nitrogen (another ozone depleter), 387 tons of carbon dioxide (a major contributor to the "greenhouse effect") and 177 tons of aluminum oxide (linked to Alzheimer's Disease) before reaching an altitude of 31 miles.

Burdakov also notes that the history of ozone depletion correlates closely with the increase of chlorine discharged by solid fuel rockets since 1981. Soviet rockets employ a fuel combination that is 2000 times less damaging than the shuttle's but which still destroys 1500 tons of ozone per launch. According to Burdakov and his colleague, Vyacheslav Filin, a single shuttle launch can destroy as much as 10 million tons of ozone. This means that 300 total shuttle flights will completely destroy the Earth's protective ozone shield.

All other solid fuel rockets also contribute to ozone destruction. Near the top of the list are the U.S. Delta rocket (which destroys eight million tons per launch), the U.S. Titan, and the French Ariane V.In an article published originally in South, Burdakov warned that, at present rates of increase, rockets will soon be pouring 100,000 tons of chlorine and nitrogen into the atmosphere annually. Burdakov has called for international controls and a phase out of solid fuel rocket technology as well as a ban on supersonic aircraft flights into the stratosphere. The extraordinary charges by the Russian scientists were supported by research done by the Military Toxics Network, headquartered in San Francisco. Working with the Russian figures and data obtained from NASA, the Network concluded that significant damage was being done to the ozone layer by the space shuttle launches.

This was a lot funnier the first time!

*sigh*