"in a sensitive foreign country" - This should be Pakistan!!!!

Obama is spreading the wealth to everyone. he gave those computers to those who need them most. everyone should have a computer or a nuclear warhead. its in the socialist doctrine i think. hey, UK, this time we have Neville!!

Relating to "The Optimist" comment:

A lot of countries poor ones at that sees that Genie as a benevolent contributor to ones' economy. Sad indeed.

My comment: If those computers had nuke-info on them and if they were somehow distributed or exchanged for cash, would the perpetrator, REALIZE, him not thinking on where the future nukes could land? Does he live in Antarctica? I almost said the Arctic, but I realized that militarily that area is still valued.

I got one. My single most important rule of getting it out the house is that I must be prepared for loosing it, and everything that comes with it. People usually get what they deserve. One could also say that either people take precautions against something or beg for it to happen.

And to think we have to trust these people.

Physicists used to be pretty good with computers. For example, the World Wide Web was born at CERN, Europe. Physicists used to install their own computers and manage them, too. But those days are over, at least at the DOE labs. Today the computers are managed by lazy, incompetent IT workers whose only qualification is US citizenship. We used to have a fine network, called the Internet. We also used to have local area networks (LANs). That is all gone. At the labs we cannot even connect two computers in the same building or office. The desktop computers can only connect to central computers. Nobody can run their own web server or other services. Grid computing - dead. Physicists are no longer in charge of anything. The labs are run by politicians and administrators. These people have only one thing in mind, namely their own career. That is why they constantly produce new regulations. The labs conduct some research that is classified, however, most of the research is not. But, in order to give those in charge more responsibility (more jobs, more money), the whole lab is being treated the same way. There are places like BNL, JLab and Los Alamos where physicists can no longer choose and install the software they want to use for their research without being hassled by administrators and IT workers. At all labs, physicists are fed up with countless training programs, and the administrators come up every few months with new training. You should take a look at the training. We are seriously being taught that lightning is dangerous. Don't get me started on the "cybersecurity training". The atmosphere at the labs is truly depressive. Needless to point out that our students are being misused to do only time-consuming dumb tasks and learn very little. Let me also point out that the majority of physicists at the labs are foreigners, who are contributing their knowledge and expertise, work like crazy, get no more than 1- or 2-year contracts, and to make matters worse get constantly harassed by administrators with important tasks like providing visa documents to one administration of the government which they just got from another administration. Over many years they labs have operated without (!) a budget. To make matters worse, universities are facing serious budget cuts. Things will get only worse. At the end, many leave frustrated, knowing exactly what is going on at the labs. Even professors with tenure position leave these places because they cannot stand the madness anymore. And nobody dares to say something, because they are all concerned about their jobs. Now, back to your lost laptops - maybe they are just broken beyond repair and a bored administrator failed to remove them from the inventory.

Iran's Hitler will blow us all up anyhow.

Why would that happen now that Obama is in charge??? I thought the US was disarming anyway now that everyone loves them...

Is it sad that my first reaction to this news was, "What? Again?" From 2003 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/29/UCLABS.TMP and http://gcn.com/Articles/2003/05/01/Energy-IG-pans-notebook-lapses-at-Los-Alamos.aspx

LoJack makes a stealth-like product for computers that nearly guarantees recovery. You would think that anyone who works in a nuclear facility would be required to have a similar (higher end) tracking device installed on their computer as well as company PC's.