@byomtov - re "A friend who taught law relates that he was in class one day and asked a student to look at a certain section of the textbook. When the student couldn't find the material my friend told him to: "Look at the bottom of page xx, where the Arabic numerals are." Came the response: "Arabic? I don't know any Arabic." Well, your friend is only slightly less-dumb than the student, for verily I say unto you that xx is a ROMAN numeral, not an Arabic one. I take it this was an American 'school', yeah? That would not surprise me in the least. As to the gist of the article: it is silly that people act surprised when 'law' enforcement attempts to do an end-around on a section of the Bill of Rights, and then goes and gets a rubber stamp from some robed charlatan whose entire career has been underwritten by the government. Codified Bills of Rights, when overseen by the political-parasite class, morph from "non-exhaustive sets of constraints on government" to "the last set of things you have left". And THEN, the parsing starts by the aforementioned robed charlatans. 4th amendment says "persons, houses, papers, and effects"? Well, a car is not an "effect" because some tax-feeder says so. And besides (continues the 'judge'), if a badged goon says he smells pot, the 4th can go fuck itself. 8th amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment? Well (sayeth the robed charlatan), locking someone up for 14 years for civil contempt doesn't violate the 8th because it wasn't PUNISHMENT, it was COERCION. See how words work? John Yoo - another charlatan in tax-funded sinecure - claimed that anything that didn't cause death or organ failure was not torture (and therefore not a violation on Geneva and common law prohibitions on same). To which I responded: give me John Yoo and a range of power tools and I will "non-torture" him until he changes his mind.

Although I confess a quiver of delight at the 'hella hellban' (where hellbanned users live in a world composed entirely of hellbanned users), it just seems too Prohibition-y for me; apart from exploit/hack attempts, the only time I ban anyone is for spamming iff the spam is obvious. If you were running a 'walled garden' forum - for Apple users, religious nutjobs, .mil/law enforcement or some other 'correct line' ideological straitjacket - maybe in those retarded cases the barely-adequate psychic defences of the readership need to be protected from the cognitive dissonance that can be generated by the idea-marketplace. But apart from that, I favour 'open slather' - where good ideas win and bad ideas get ignored and go die in a corner after writing a final batshit-insane 1500-word single-para allcaps post. Otherwise you're saying it's OK to put Jews in the ghetto. And much as I deplore anybody who thinks that they're superior to me on the basis of a foreskin-swap first organised by an Iron Age goatherd... well, ghettoes are bad. As Chomsky wrote - if we don't believe in freedom of expression for those whose ideas we despise, we don't really believe in it at all. Ideas, /b/rothers... it's all about the ideas. The ban paradigm stems from the same idea-sump as the worst aspects of political correctness: it implicitly asserts that the poor frail reader is a delicate flower who is incapable of overlooking the horror of a few words on a webpage. That's TEH ghey, frankly.

@BloomCB - "That drive could nuke before I'm done with this post and I would be just fi" I lol'd hard. Srsly, I wish I could think up stuff of that level of clever (maybe it was derivative from the 4chan 'sniper' threads, but yours was still gold because it was totally unexpected). Lulz aside, it seems it's all about the little frequent writes. And @Daniel Olsen - if you're doing whole disk encryption, you're asking for trouble with SSD. But how can you & sysadmins not find a decent encryption protocol that doesn't use whole-disk? Even TrueCrypt (as one entry-level example) would suffice for 99% of things I can think of: it doesn't 'bleed' unencrypted data at all.