Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Karl Malden, Bob Newhart, in a 1968 (!) computer crime comedy, with a brillant twist ending.

Don't denigrate people because of associations. I've seen no evidence that Dan Geer is in a position to know about what the NSA and CIA have been lying to us about; indeed it would be gross operational incompetence for him to be in that position. His responsibility is to make near-future dual use security technology available to intelligence agencies. Although I'd prefer to see the CIA abolished and the NSA completely redirected and reorganized, that doesn't mean everyone associated those organizations are liberty destroying liars. For that, you need to be directly responsible for violating fourth amendment rights and lying about it to congress, e.g., James Clapper.

Senator Stevens has left this vale of tears; someone else will need to confound this with the internet.

The Z80 processor had no memory management unit, so there was no virtualizing the 16 address lines to anything more than 65536 bytes. The bottom 8k or so were reserved to the operating system and basic interpreter in ROM. I don't know where that 512 K number came from. Was that the max storage on the 5 1/4 " floppy?

We don't know if the software was unauthorized, unless we see the terms and conditions under which the child/parent received the laptop. Anything with a barely modern web browser is constantly running javascript programs, and the vast majority of folks have no idea it's running on their machines, much less knowingly authorizing it.

The Northern Mariana Islands are a top ten candidate for the farthest habitable point from everywhere else in the world. I'm surprised there was more than one FBI agent on the island, and it's a good bet any one of the top quartile of slashdot's readership would instantly be the most computer literate person on the island were they to move there. Hanlon's razor is particularly applicable here.

Mark Geston,criticizing technology worship. The cover blurb:

"The ship was to be seven miles long, a third of a mile in diameter and have a wing-spread of three and a half miles. It would take two and a half centuries to construct. Its announced purpose: to carry humanity away from its ruined world, from the world that had become a perpetual purgatory.

To build this vast ship would require the undivided activity of an entire nation and would mean carrying out a ruthless program of war and conquest, of annihilation and reconstruction, and of education and rediscovery.

But was this starship really what it was claimed to be? Or was there a greater secret behind its incredible cost -- a secret so strange that no man dared reveal it?"

Trolling will just be mistaken for another enemy sect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Suppose I want a quarter size replica of Hiram Power's bust of George Washington (completed 1844, so no copyright issues). I'd like to walk into the museum, innocuously wave around a small device, then go home and print. How close are we?

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with swatting a kid on the behind if he/she refuses to behave." That statement has been falsified by the epidemiologic evidence (it obviously being unethical to have an un-spanked control group and a spanked test group). Children subject to physical discipline are more likely to be charged with crimes once they mature. Unfortunately, I can't find an un-paywalled citation.