It could work the opposite way. Remember the '90's Assault weapons ban? Columbine happened while the weapons were banned.... when it was time to renew it, the message was "this didn't prevent Columbine, it's worthless".
Maybe when the warrantless snooping laws are up for review, someone will point out that it didn't prevent the Boston Bombing (or whatever it gets called) and it will expire with just as little fanfare.
However none of this is going to happen until we stop reelecting company politicians who appoint company bureaucrats
Can you list the company politicians currently in office? Who is the worst? What district? What kind of election opposition do they have?
We're not going to stop re-electing "company politicians" until it begins to be widespread public knowledge which politicians are the worst offenders, and then the time to get them out of office is the primary. (Amost) nobody votes in congressional primaries, and by so doing we are abdicating our responsibility to get these people out of office.
A simple high-profile campaign to defeat a "bought and paid for" politician (say, Lamar Smith, author of SOPA?) in the primary--with funding, planning, and Net-wide effort (similar to the level of effort used to defeat SOPA) would signal a tidal change in the forces of politics. It would be like Scott Brown's primary victory was for the Tea Party... lawmakers pay attention to people who can put them out of jobs by way of the primaries.
Before the advent of cheap quality weighted electronic musical keyboards, pianists would use piano keyboards that made no sound for practicing. I think you'd have to be pretty advanced before this became something of value though.
Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?
You mean that of a "good search engine?"
Google used to be the good search engine. They've already abandoned it. Do a search for a monetize-able term like "insurance." You'll get 7 ads before you get a single search result. Google is an ad engine, not a search engine.
I switched my Chrome bar to duckduckgo a few months ago... I don't have anything against Google. They make a great browser, awesome web mail, and cars that drive themselves. But their search engine is no longer of quality... this isn't even a "final nail", just yet another symptom.
Some curricula do exactly that. My kids have been using Miquon Math for years, and I was surprised to see the worksheets have exactly that type of 1 + _ = 2 problems, even in early grades.
I develop on a Dell laptop now and I run windows on it. I run Ubuntu 12 LTS in a virtualbox rather than as the main OS because I really like hot-dock capability, and it has never worked right in Linux. With Windows (7) I can hit that button and go to a meeting, snap it back in and have my dual-big-screen developer workstation. Devs aren't going to work on a single screen, so why bother with a high-res one?
The screen is so you can take notes, and check a server or DB from a meeting when you're away from your desk. The dock and the 2 roomy monitors that accompany it are for the real task of development.
If they can't support smooth docking and undocking (hopefully better than Win7--I would love for it to put my window positions back where they were last time I was docked) then this product will be a flop with me. Am I the only dev who thinks in terms of docking?
Why are we signing petitions? It's primary election season. Let's make an example of one of the congressmen-for-hire.
the Tea Party came to power when Scott Brown defeated an incumbent in a primary contest. Let's get an incumbent SOPA supporter out of office because he supported SOPA.
Primary congressional elections are where the real electoral power is... and we have a tendency to ignore them. I believe that nothing less than a primary loss from a SOPA or PIPA supporter would get their attention.
The problem is they get $50,000 for their campaign fund for supporting it. The solution, obviously, is to make it cost them more than $50,000 worth of publicity for supporting it.
Lamar Smith, who introduced SOPA, is currently running uncontested for the Republican Primary in his district.
Lamar Smith still needs to lose his job over this.
on
House Kills SOPA
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is good. The next step is to keep Lamar Smith from getting re-elected. Right now he's running unopposed for the republican nomination in a district that includes parts of Austin, a very techie town. With the right amount of national support for "Anybody but Lamar Smith" he can and should lose his seat over this.
Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.
Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.
That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...
Firefox - dev browser. Loads my in-progress web apps, plugged into all the debugging tools I use.
Chrome - documentation browser. I load docs related to dev in chrome, and also gmail if I'm on a network where google apps aren't hanging
Opera - casual / non-work-related browser. Opera is kind of a sucky browser compared to other options. By using it for non-work-related activity, I can ensure that I don't enjoy screwing around all day.
There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.
And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.
That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.
The name of the company is Microsoft. Microcomputer Software. The old way of looking at computing is desktop computers. It worked very well for them when desktop computers worked, because that was the company. The new (and most likely, long-term future) way of looking at computing is the Internet. Microsoft never really got the Internet. IE only became significant years late, and only because of the desktop OS monopoly. Bing probably won't.
I'm guessing what GP intended to say is 400,000 is the population Foxconn employs in Shenzen... that is, 10 out of 400k Foxconn employees have committed suicide in the past year, vs 45 out of 400,000 Americans.
There are other factors, like age, that come into play here, but if the facts are fairly even, this is a non-story. I've worked at an American company with 3,000 employees, and one of them committed suicide in 4 years I worked there... If I'm doing the math right, that is the equivalent of 33 suicides per 400,000 employees per year. Napkin-math says it's a non-story.
However political parties leader will not waver too far off their ideology core as the group in the hole still follows that ideology.
Occams razor says "divide and conqueror" makes more sense to explain why we have two political parties.
I disagree... you're assigning malicious intent to some unnamed entity and judging its motives. I think a much simpler explanation is the two-party system is simply emergent behavior from the U.S.'s winner-take-all system of electing representativess. In governments where the leaders are selected differently, you have different results.
There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.
Which is why it won't happen. The one thing democrats and republicans will work together on is to stop anything that would enable the rise of a third (or more) party. They will use every legal trick, and probably more than few illegal ones, to stop this.
The only way this is going to change is for the american voters to wake up and start voting in mass for third party and independent candidates, especially the ones with little campaign funding. That campaign funding comes with some serious strings attached...
I hate to say it, but this is why it's never going to change. As the advertising industry has known for years, and as Coca-Cola bases its business model on, changing the minds of the masses is simply a matter of spending enough money.
As long as people consume entertainment that they don't pay for (such as television, radio, and most websites for that matter) people are going to consume advertising, opening a portion of their minds to the highest bidder. As long as people freely offer their minds to the highest bidder in exchange for a sitcom, phony partisan "news" report or video of a cat falling off a TV, the ones with the most money (read: the establishment) is going to have the most influence the masses.
The only thing that might change that is if people start starving or otherwise feeling primal physical discomfort as a result of the establishment / status quo keeping on doing what they're doing. That's a possibility, but not one that I hope for.
Have you looked at politics any time in the past half-century? In established democracies, freedom is considered dangerous, and most regulations are established with a clear goal of limiting freedom in the name of safety, conformity, or reduced liability.
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
I don't know... I do believe that good books have exceedingly clean plots, but there are some writers (think Philip K Dick) whose masterworks are engineered to lead to hanging questions. Was Deckard a replicant? Or in Total Recall, was he a big hero or just stuck in a cascading delusion?
I enjoyed GP's explanation. It makes as much sense as anything I've seen so far, though it could be the result of mental gymnastics.
You know, this isn't really a response to you, but while reading your post it occurred to me that any company *can* make a network that sits on top of the internet, to which all those rules apply. If Microsoft wants to create a Microsoft network of some kind, they can implement any restriction they want... maybe the licensed, approved-user-only model will be compelling. With the XBox, MS already controls a platform pretty well, and... well, to tell the truth, XBoxLive or whatever the network is that you play games on is a MS only network that MS controls the hardware and the access to. So if MS really believes in it, why not require a license to access the MS Xbox internet?
Man, a license for the internet... the stupidity, it burns.
Religious freedom allows you to worship, but it does not in my mind give one free license to program children with it. Children are not property. Religious conflict with a secular school is not a valid reason for home-schooling.
Children are not property, but they are a responsibility, and there's a law so old and deep that it isn't explicitly written in law books (that I know of... IANAL): If you are responsible to provide for something, you control it.
This is why, in the office, some people are greedy to take on more responsibility -- more responsibility means more power.
It's why a case can be made for even late-term abortion of otherwise viable fetuses -- if it's inside your body and totally dependent on you, you have a right to make even the most extreme choices about it.
It's why "taxation without representation" is a big enough deal to revolt over -- if you're responsible for paying for something, you have a right to have a say in what is done with that.
It's why the old-fashioned single-income family where the husband is the provider and the wife "doesn't have to work" while it appears to be the woman "winning" and making the man her servant, is not something feminists aspire to -- because if the husband is financally responsible for the wife, he has a lot more power in the relationship than she.
And it's why people are wary of government healthcare, or schooling, or... heck, there are some people wary of anything the government is responsible for -- it's because if the government is responsible for it, the government controls it.
And when you're raising a kid, you are responsible for that child. If it doesn't get fed, you're legally liable. If the child doesn't get disciplined, you could face penalties yourself because you're responsible. If your child doesn't get a quality education, you may not have any judicial penalty, but the blame does fall to you, because if you're responsible for a kid, you control it.
As the kid grows up, he'll take on more responsibilities for himself -- if he reaches the point that he's fully responsible for himself (working to earn his own keep, paying his own bills) then guess what? You may still be his parent, but you are de facto not in control of your child. If he's responsible for himself, he's in control and can make his own choices. He may choose to follow your rules and respect you, but unless he depends on you for something, he can also choose not to.
This is the main reason I am strongly peeved when I hear a government official claiming responsibility for something, saying we, the government, need to fix education, or need to fix healthcare, or to create jobs. If the government is responsible for whether or not I have a job, then the government gains a lot more control over my life -- what type of job is available to me, what type of salary I can expect... if it's unrealistic to think the government can control that, then it's equally unrealistic to think the government can or should be responsible for it. (Maybe if I was unemployed I would feel differently.)
I know a lot of people use the term "evolutionary" as a synonym for "gradual" or "slow" but when I think of evolution, I think of the specific process of mutations and reproduction by which a population changes over time. Unless there's something new about galaxies I've never heard of, I don't understand why the term "evolutionary" is the best word to describe the development of the early universe. (Or anything at astronomical scales that I can think of.)
Competing? This is where I find a problem with the simple "greed" answer... there are a lot of companies that make laptops and laptop batteries. If they could all sell batteries cheaper, then greed should incite one to do that, making his product more competitive and gaining him more sales. If they "can" get away with every company over charging, then the only reason is that laptop purchasers, as a market, really don't care about that much of a price difference.
And if that is the case, then who cares? Why is the seller guilty of greed for charging a price we are willing to pay, but we're not guilty of the same greed for wanting to keep that price difference to ourselves when it's worth more than that to us?
It's just because our brains are first and foremost pattern-matching machines. I mean... what's the current best way to quickly tell a human from a computer? Show them a distorted pattern, and the human can recognize it insantly.
So, as pattern-matching machines, we literally think in patterns. We have "software" on top of that to run logic and analysis, but even those are influenced by the pattern-matching hardware, such that analysis is optimized by matching patterns first.
So when someone has a stupid prejudice, it may be stupid, but it's human and it's easy enough to see... this pattern exists, and this part of the pattern is true, therefore the whole pattern match.
The media latches onto this... and I want to give them some credit, too. Rather than crassly cashing-in, I think it's more likely that viewers find it easier to process simplistic, stereotyped patterns than the more complex layers of patterns that better map to the real world. (Same thing happens in message boards, especially community-moderated ones. Think about it.) Media organizations recognize this pattern -- of simplistic patterns being more mass-consumable and therefore more popular, and bam! You have the media perpetuating simplistic patterns. Which of course creates a feedback loop.
How to beat this? Start by not playing the simple-pattern game. Recognize and internalize the layers, and bring attention to the anti-patterns that break the simplistic views. Do the hard thinking -- someone has to -- and teach it to others. Even if -- especially if -- it pushes outside of your comfort zone. Complex understanding of the world is uncomfortable, but it is important.
If the computer is shut down, and you've a BIOS password enabled - you wouldn't be able to do this, right?
You'd first have to enter the BIOS password to boot the system, then press a key to boot from external media and do your mischief. But, if you had physical access to the machine, I suppose you could take it apart and reset the BIOS password anyway.
Really, if you have physical access to the machine, it's got no chance.
The difference is, if someone took it apart and reset the BIOS password, it would take a lot more time than just the 1-minute boot from USB stick, and more importantly, the next time you boot the machine, you'd see the password was reset, know it had been tampered, and not enter your decryption key. Unless there's a more sophisticated BIOS password attack that I'm unaware of, this would keep your data private.
A bigger issue, though, is if you have information sensitive enough to require a BIOS password and full disk encryption, it's probably also sensitive enough to physically secure the machine and/or keep it on your person at all time.
Slashdot Mirror
It could work the opposite way. Remember the '90's Assault weapons ban? Columbine happened while the weapons were banned.... when it was time to renew it, the message was "this didn't prevent Columbine, it's worthless".
Maybe when the warrantless snooping laws are up for review, someone will point out that it didn't prevent the Boston Bombing (or whatever it gets called) and it will expire with just as little fanfare.
However none of this is going to happen until we stop reelecting company politicians who appoint company bureaucrats
Can you list the company politicians currently in office? Who is the worst? What district? What kind of election opposition do they have?
We're not going to stop re-electing "company politicians" until it begins to be widespread public knowledge which politicians are the worst offenders, and then the time to get them out of office is the primary. (Amost) nobody votes in congressional primaries, and by so doing we are abdicating our responsibility to get these people out of office.
A simple high-profile campaign to defeat a "bought and paid for" politician (say, Lamar Smith, author of SOPA?) in the primary--with funding, planning, and Net-wide effort (similar to the level of effort used to defeat SOPA) would signal a tidal change in the forces of politics. It would be like Scott Brown's primary victory was for the Tea Party... lawmakers pay attention to people who can put them out of jobs by way of the primaries.
Before the advent of cheap quality weighted electronic musical keyboards, pianists would use piano keyboards that made no sound for practicing. I think you'd have to be pretty advanced before this became something of value though.
And the beginning of the next search giant.
Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?
You mean that of a "good search engine?"
Google used to be the good search engine. They've already abandoned it. Do a search for a monetize-able term like "insurance." You'll get 7 ads before you get a single search result. Google is an ad engine, not a search engine.
I switched my Chrome bar to duckduckgo a few months ago... I don't have anything against Google. They make a great browser, awesome web mail, and cars that drive themselves. But their search engine is no longer of quality... this isn't even a "final nail", just yet another symptom.
Some curricula do exactly that. My kids have been using Miquon Math for years, and I was surprised to see the worksheets have exactly that type of 1 + _ = 2 problems, even in early grades.
I develop on a Dell laptop now and I run windows on it. I run Ubuntu 12 LTS in a virtualbox rather than as the main OS because I really like hot-dock capability, and it has never worked right in Linux. With Windows (7) I can hit that button and go to a meeting, snap it back in and have my dual-big-screen developer workstation. Devs aren't going to work on a single screen, so why bother with a high-res one?
The screen is so you can take notes, and check a server or DB from a meeting when you're away from your desk. The dock and the 2 roomy monitors that accompany it are for the real task of development.
If they can't support smooth docking and undocking (hopefully better than Win7--I would love for it to put my window positions back where they were last time I was docked) then this product will be a flop with me. Am I the only dev who thinks in terms of docking?
Why are we signing petitions? It's primary election season. Let's make an example of one of the congressmen-for-hire.
the Tea Party came to power when Scott Brown defeated an incumbent in a primary contest. Let's get an incumbent SOPA supporter out of office because he supported SOPA.
Primary congressional elections are where the real electoral power is... and we have a tendency to ignore them. I believe that nothing less than a primary loss from a SOPA or PIPA supporter would get their attention.
The problem is they get $50,000 for their campaign fund for supporting it. The solution, obviously, is to make it cost them more than $50,000 worth of publicity for supporting it.
Lamar Smith, who introduced SOPA, is currently running uncontested for the Republican Primary in his district.
This is good. The next step is to keep Lamar Smith from getting re-elected. Right now he's running unopposed for the republican nomination in a district that includes parts of Austin, a very techie town. With the right amount of national support for "Anybody but Lamar Smith" he can and should lose his seat over this.
Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.
Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.
That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...
There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.
And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.
That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.
The name of the company is Microsoft. Microcomputer Software. The old way of looking at computing is desktop computers. It worked very well for them when desktop computers worked, because that was the company. The new (and most likely, long-term future) way of looking at computing is the Internet. Microsoft never really got the Internet. IE only became significant years late, and only because of the desktop OS monopoly. Bing probably won't.
I'm guessing what GP intended to say is 400,000 is the population Foxconn employs in Shenzen... that is, 10 out of 400k Foxconn employees have committed suicide in the past year, vs 45 out of 400,000 Americans.
There are other factors, like age, that come into play here, but if the facts are fairly even, this is a non-story. I've worked at an American company with 3,000 employees, and one of them committed suicide in 4 years I worked there... If I'm doing the math right, that is the equivalent of 33 suicides per 400,000 employees per year. Napkin-math says it's a non-story.
However political parties leader will not waver too far off their ideology core as the group in the hole still follows that ideology.
Occams razor says "divide and conqueror" makes more sense to explain why we have two political parties.
I disagree... you're assigning malicious intent to some unnamed entity and judging its motives. I think a much simpler explanation is the two-party system is simply emergent behavior from the U.S.'s winner-take-all system of electing representativess. In governments where the leaders are selected differently, you have different results.
If you're using WEP, they don't have to knock on your door and ask, they can just crack it.
There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.
Which is why it won't happen. The one thing democrats and republicans will work together on is to stop anything that would enable the rise of a third (or more) party. They will use every legal trick, and probably more than few illegal ones, to stop this.
The only way this is going to change is for the american voters to wake up and start voting in mass for third party and independent candidates, especially the ones with little campaign funding. That campaign funding comes with some serious strings attached...
I hate to say it, but this is why it's never going to change. As the advertising industry has known for years, and as Coca-Cola bases its business model on, changing the minds of the masses is simply a matter of spending enough money.
As long as people consume entertainment that they don't pay for (such as television, radio, and most websites for that matter) people are going to consume advertising, opening a portion of their minds to the highest bidder. As long as people freely offer their minds to the highest bidder in exchange for a sitcom, phony partisan "news" report or video of a cat falling off a TV, the ones with the most money (read: the establishment) is going to have the most influence the masses.
The only thing that might change that is if people start starving or otherwise feeling primal physical discomfort as a result of the establishment / status quo keeping on doing what they're doing. That's a possibility, but not one that I hope for.
Have you looked at politics any time in the past half-century? In established democracies, freedom is considered dangerous, and most regulations are established with a clear goal of limiting freedom in the name of safety, conformity, or reduced liability.
You said back in the day like Mac users are still not waiting for ports on good games, lol
Now they just have an XBox.
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities ... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)
I don't know ... I do believe that good books have exceedingly clean plots, but there are some writers (think Philip K Dick) whose masterworks are engineered to lead to hanging questions. Was Deckard a replicant? Or in Total Recall, was he a big hero or just stuck in a cascading delusion?
I enjoyed GP's explanation. It makes as much sense as anything I've seen so far, though it could be the result of mental gymnastics.
Shell shortcuts work, and the sandwich joke is in there, too...
guest@xkcd:/$ make me a sandwich
What? Make it yourself.
guest@xkcd:/$ sudo !!
sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
You know, this isn't really a response to you, but while reading your post it occurred to me that any company *can* make a network that sits on top of the internet, to which all those rules apply. If Microsoft wants to create a Microsoft network of some kind, they can implement any restriction they want ... maybe the licensed, approved-user-only model will be compelling. With the XBox, MS already controls a platform pretty well, and ... well, to tell the truth, XBoxLive or whatever the network is that you play games on is a MS only network that MS controls the hardware and the access to. So if MS really believes in it, why not require a license to access the MS Xbox internet?
Man, a license for the internet ... the stupidity, it burns.
Religious freedom allows you to worship, but it does not in my mind give one free license to program children with it. Children are not property. Religious conflict with a secular school is not a valid reason for home-schooling.
Children are not property, but they are a responsibility, and there's a law so old and deep that it isn't explicitly written in law books (that I know of ... IANAL): If you are responsible to provide for something, you control it.
And when you're raising a kid, you are responsible for that child. If it doesn't get fed, you're legally liable. If the child doesn't get disciplined, you could face penalties yourself because you're responsible. If your child doesn't get a quality education, you may not have any judicial penalty, but the blame does fall to you, because if you're responsible for a kid, you control it.
As the kid grows up, he'll take on more responsibilities for himself -- if he reaches the point that he's fully responsible for himself (working to earn his own keep, paying his own bills) then guess what? You may still be his parent, but you are de facto not in control of your child. If he's responsible for himself, he's in control and can make his own choices. He may choose to follow your rules and respect you, but unless he depends on you for something, he can also choose not to.
This is the main reason I am strongly peeved when I hear a government official claiming responsibility for something, saying we, the government, need to fix education, or need to fix healthcare, or to create jobs. If the government is responsible for whether or not I have a job, then the government gains a lot more control over my life -- what type of job is available to me, what type of salary I can expect... if it's unrealistic to think the government can control that, then it's equally unrealistic to think the government can or should be responsible for it. (Maybe if I was unemployed I would feel differently.)
I know a lot of people use the term "evolutionary" as a synonym for "gradual" or "slow" but when I think of evolution, I think of the specific process of mutations and reproduction by which a population changes over time. Unless there's something new about galaxies I've never heard of, I don't understand why the term "evolutionary" is the best word to describe the development of the early universe. (Or anything at astronomical scales that I can think of.)
Competing? This is where I find a problem with the simple "greed" answer ... there are a lot of companies that make laptops and laptop batteries. If they could all sell batteries cheaper, then greed should incite one to do that, making his product more competitive and gaining him more sales. If they "can" get away with every company over charging, then the only reason is that laptop purchasers, as a market, really don't care about that much of a price difference.
And if that is the case, then who cares? Why is the seller guilty of greed for charging a price we are willing to pay, but we're not guilty of the same greed for wanting to keep that price difference to ourselves when it's worth more than that to us?
It's just because our brains are first and foremost pattern-matching machines. I mean ... what's the current best way to quickly tell a human from a computer? Show them a distorted pattern, and the human can recognize it insantly.
So, as pattern-matching machines, we literally think in patterns. We have "software" on top of that to run logic and analysis, but even those are influenced by the pattern-matching hardware, such that analysis is optimized by matching patterns first.
So when someone has a stupid prejudice, it may be stupid, but it's human and it's easy enough to see ... this pattern exists, and this part of the pattern is true, therefore the whole pattern match.
The media latches onto this ... and I want to give them some credit, too. Rather than crassly cashing-in, I think it's more likely that viewers find it easier to process simplistic, stereotyped patterns than the more complex layers of patterns that better map to the real world. (Same thing happens in message boards, especially community-moderated ones. Think about it.) Media organizations recognize this pattern -- of simplistic patterns being more mass-consumable and therefore more popular, and bam! You have the media perpetuating simplistic patterns. Which of course creates a feedback loop.
How to beat this? Start by not playing the simple-pattern game. Recognize and internalize the layers, and bring attention to the anti-patterns that break the simplistic views. Do the hard thinking -- someone has to -- and teach it to others. Even if -- especially if -- it pushes outside of your comfort zone. Complex understanding of the world is uncomfortable, but it is important.
If the computer is shut down, and you've a BIOS password enabled - you wouldn't be able to do this, right?
You'd first have to enter the BIOS password to boot the system, then press a key to boot from external media and do your mischief. But, if you had physical access to the machine, I suppose you could take it apart and reset the BIOS password anyway.
Really, if you have physical access to the machine, it's got no chance.
The difference is, if someone took it apart and reset the BIOS password, it would take a lot more time than just the 1-minute boot from USB stick, and more importantly, the next time you boot the machine, you'd see the password was reset, know it had been tampered, and not enter your decryption key. Unless there's a more sophisticated BIOS password attack that I'm unaware of, this would keep your data private.
A bigger issue, though, is if you have information sensitive enough to require a BIOS password and full disk encryption, it's probably also sensitive enough to physically secure the machine and/or keep it on your person at all time.