Regardless of a developers motivation, the only practical effect is accurately characterized.
In that case, it's the same effect of the GPL as well.
companies, given the choice, will always retain their IP
Many companies contribute code to BSD-licensed projects, and even more fund them to continue their work. In short, you're utterly wrong about the practical effect.
BSD's aren't unified because the license sets up incentives for forking and keeping changes proprietary.
The various BSDs are all BSD licensed, yet they remain non-unified. Repeating your blanket assertion won't make it any more true the second time around.
If you're not going to attempt to reconcile reality with your assertions, everyone should ignore all assertions you make.
As for the effect of LSB, for example it specified the standard packaging format to be.rpm... ever used debian, ubuntu, arch, or gentoo?
Yes, though it's no their preferred format, they ALL include utilities for handling RPMs.
He gives you exactly the same freedoms he has.
Nonsense. He can go back and re-license all of his stuff at any time. The GPL is not binding to him. He binds everyone else with it. Sure, with the GPL, you're giving up your freedom in exchange for someone else's code. It may be a reasonable trade, but it's NOT freedom.
GPL removes the incentive to keep private code.
The incentive is still there. Look at all the GPL violators out there. Ask Tivo why they aren't playing along.
Have a look at any article analyzing contributions to the linux kernel. Many, many companies are now contributing. More code is being created. More people are getting access to more code because the GPL incentivizes reciprocity from individuals and companies.
Linux is more popular than the BSDs. This is likely due to an unfortunately timed lawsuit early on, and then self-propagated, as Linux continues to gets more developers and market share thanks to network effects. This will likely continue.
Your assertion that Linux is more popular BECAUSE IT IS GPL'ed is utterly laughable. Any number of very liberally-licensed software projects (like X11, OpenSSH, Apache, etc.) are every bit as popular as Linux. Your assertion requires extraordinary evidence, and you've provided absolutely none, thus far.
A waitress has every right to be mad when someone orders $300 worth of food and doesn't even leave her a single cent.
"right" has nothing to do with it. She has every right to provide terrible service and expect a tip as well... She has every right to expect anything she wants, but that doesn't mean it's moral or amoral to not give it to her.
Legal != Moral. Just because something doesn't/have/ to be done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
No, but using a license that says free for commercial use, then EXPECTING to get a GIFT in return, and COMPLAINING when you don't, just makes you an idiot.
How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip? Just because your courtesy expectations don't meet-up with someone else's, doesn't give either any right to yell at them about it.
The purpose of BSD is to get code out there and perhaps make a reputation for the developer.
I expect a lot of BSD developers will step in here and call you an idiot for assuming you know what their motives are...
BSD gives others freedom to make code closed and provide no freedom to downstream users. with BSD license, the freedom extends to only a depth of 1.
Except EVERYONE can go back to the original (free) code, and do with it whatever they want. You're right that it doesn't push the developer's personal agenda on everyone who wants to redistribute it, but that's not freedom, it's a different type of proprietary.
GPL tries very hard to ensure that downstream users enjoy the same freedom as those who obtain the code directly
Proprietary software does the same thing...
An important effect of this is that anyone who works on GPL code tends to make it available,
Right. You are REQUIRED to contribute your changes to the public. Using your own metric: the freedom extends to only a depth of 0.
and it has the potential to make it back into the mainstream. The mainsteam can therefore integrate and grow stronger, and accumulate improvements, where in BSD the tendency is to fragment forever. There is no incentive to contribute back to the main stream. Hence the diaspora of bsd's in contrast with the relative unity of GPL licensed software.
Now this is just stupid. The BSDs are all open source, under a single license. The fact that they aren't all unified isn't because somebody close-up the source code. It's the LSB that keeps one distro of Linux to another, largely compatible, NOT the GPL.
GPL only limits freedom to the extent necessary to prevent others from removing freedoms for yet other licensees.
No, if it wanted to do that, it would simply require the original source code be provided. The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.
More code is made available with more freedoms to more people for more purposes with the GPL.
Are you suggesting it's somehow easier to get the source code for (eg.) GNU tar than it is for BSD tar? I fail to see how that's even possible.
just use 5 cents worth of epoxy to put the broken piece back in place?
That was my thought exactly... BUT THEN I RTFA, took a look at the first picture of the old busted plastic case, and understood. Good thing, too. I'd hate to have posted a "why didn't he just..." comment on/. that makes me look like an idiot. Close call there...
I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've had a Flash related browser issue over the last couple of years.
I used to have people tell me that their Windows 98 systems were rock solid, kept running for months at a time between reboots, and simply never, ever had the slightest hint of any problems... I still don't know how to respond to something like that. Your statement is similar.
Meanwhile, with a stock Fedora 13 system (on older hardware), I have to kill Flash on an almost daily basis, because it pretty often gets into a CPU-eating mode, and locks up all browser tabs. Fortunately, thanks to nspluginwrapper, it doesn't take Firefox down with it.
I can only assume your experience is likely thanks to a walled garden of simple, stable Flash apps, that just don't happen to trigger one of the overwhelming number of bugs it has.
They would have had all the early patents on digital photography, image formats, etc
Well, if they filed all their patents in 1975, they would generally have expired by 1995, before digital cameras became practical, let alone popular.
It's only a feel-good notion to think that innovation always pays off. Kodak could have spent a ton of money on R&D, and ended up WORSE than they are now. Business often works that way. It's especially true when switching from high-margin to low-margin products, and having to compete with hordes of cheap imports that aren't substantially lower quality than name brands. It's nice to think Zenith could have spent more on R&D and would be bigger than Microsoft today, but in reality, they would probably be in exactly the same spot...
It marks one of the first points where photography began to move away from chemical reactions on emulsions to light being recorded digitally.
Complete nonsense. Do you not even pay attention to the equipment they were using to accomplish this task?
TV cameras have been fully electronic from the very beginning, in the 1930's. No film required. They weren't digital, but were soon being recorded to tape.
Consumer video cameras were also available long before digital cameras, providing instant development, an LCD screen to view the photos you just recorded, and very inexpensive storage. Many even included (analog) camera modes, which would record a couple still frames to tape, simply pause there on playback, for a slide show effect.
The fact that digital won out in the end (on price) is pretty irrelevant. Digital music players won out as well, even though there's nothing inherently superior to digital, versus high quality analog. The key points of digital cameras are the instant development, instant review, huge capacity, incredible convenience, and unlimited cheap duplication. We could well have analog cameras, computers, internet, and smart phones today if things had gone differently, and all would look largely the same as they do now.
But I am in the group that believes that that idea is no longer true.
Good job being in the winning camp, 5 years after the battle ended... There hasn't been any debate on the subject for a long time now. It was first mathematically proven, based on the grain size of film, that digital cameras only needed to improve to about 6MP or so to surpass even high quality film, and quite some time ago, professional digital cameras overwhelmingly proved the point by greatly surpassing those resolutions, and providing undeniably superior photographs anyone can see.
Digital photography has, in my opinion, opened up new areas for creative exploration that were not possible with film.
".... basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization."
Strawman.
he said no such thing. He said they were using power point incorrectly.
Wow, you're incredibly dense... In fact, he doesn't have ANY complaints about Powerpoint at all. His complaints are ALL, DIRECTLY about how useless his current assignment is, saying "it was founded to provide some general a three-star command": "a stove-piped and bloated organization, top-heavy in rank". "little of substance is really done here".
He doesn't complain about Powerpoint, but instead about typical bureaucracy. Useless meetings, providing useless information to "cognitively challenged generals" who "listen to the CUA in a semi-comatose state." Provided information being of inconsistent quality at best... "Fortunately, none of the information provided makes an indelible impact". Where the manner in which the information is presented is important, and the quality and usefulness of the information is ignored: "Harried movement together with furrowed brows and appropriate expressions of concern a la Clint Eastwood will please the generals. Progress in the war is optional."
most of the energy we use to extract Hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels.
Guess where most of the electricity we generate comes from...
Hydrogen is renewable precisely because it "has to be generated". Or rather, CAN be generated.
(and we NEED nuclear, because there's no way solar/wind/geothermal can equate to even 25% of our current use, let alone what increased population will need), maybe.
In fact, solar is THE ONLY power generation technology that can supply all our power needs into the future. We would need to build a nuclear power plant each week to keep up with demand. Solar has incredible potential, there are just some growing pains getting it off the ground.
Not that I'd mind more nuclear. They're seriously impressive up close, with a thick white steam cloud (larger than most skyscrapers) billowing out the top... but in all honesty, going forward, the future is UNDENIABLY solar powered.
They had an amazing OS in the form of VMS and a decent UNIX (some horrible bits, some really impressive ones); Tru64. Then Intel came along and said they, and the other 64-bit CPU vendors, could reduce costs by consolidating their platforms on Intel's new Itanium chips.
Digital never had an OS called Tru64, and they never decided to hitch their wagon to Intel's. That would be COMPAQ you are thinking of, not DEC. DEC certainly did continue to develop Alpha and DigitalUnix up until the end, which is why COMPAQ got it, fully formed, and merely renamed the OS to get Digital out of the title. What COMPAQ did with Digital after they bought it out is hardly DEC's fault. DEC's fall from #2 in the computing world to a ruins, which COMPAQ could then aquire, was ALL DEC's doing, and it happened long before Itanium.
Nobody was fooled back then, we were quite aware of the graphics our computers/consoles could produce and the difference between that and box art.
I'm all for box art that looks nothing like the game. HOWEVER, it gets to be a grey area when it looks plausibly like the game, but is not. Putting a screenshot of the arcade version on the home version is decidedly deceptive. In the post-Atari days, it was more and more often possible to make a game look quite similar to the arcade version, and much work went towards that end. From a distance, you wouldn't see the difference between he arcade and Master System version of Outrun, Shinobi, etc.
And democrats would never resort to such questionable tactics would they?
Note that the Democrat (not plural) in question was thrown out by other Democrats for his fraudulent tactics. Republicans? Hell, they'd probably have made the guy chairman.
Here's a news flash, both sides suck and neither represents the general voting public. If the fanboy idiots of the political world would just realize that, we'd all be better off.
There's a medication out there that kill 1% of the people that take it, and another that kill 99% of the people that take it. Both undeniably kill people, so they're both the same, and there's no point in making a distinction on which is the lesser evil...
rest of my defense would involve the army stripping down into civilian clothing the second the invasion hits and dispersing into the population with a plan, and giving everyone a (civilians included) gun.
In Iran, the population is overwhelmingly pro-US, and against the current administration, who stole the last election. There were protests in the streets, which was very violently suppressed by the military.
Guerilla tactics require a population that is either sympathetic or petrified (as in Afghanistan), and the Iranian public is certainly not sympathetic...
How do we know that everything he posts on Wikileaks is legit and he didn't make the shit up?
We don't know that everything is legit. However, enough of it has been confirmed to be legit that accusations of inaccuracy have the burden of proof. At least one person is going to be court-martialed for providing classified information to Wikileaks, the New York Times has gone along with the leaked documents, lending it's own credibility to them, the US government has implicitly confirmed they are at least party genuine, in part because the FBI doesn't investigate leaks of classified document if the leaked information is fabricated, rather than legitimate, etc., etc.
No doubt as market saturation begins to plateau, we'll all see large caps (15gb, 20gb) installed, with a couple of neighbors splitting the cost of a pair of bonded T1s to skirt around it.
A T-1 is only 1.5Mbps, and will run you about $600/month. 10 neighbors sharing the bill might make that price reasonable, but then you're all SHARING 1.5Mbps, or 150kbps each at least during peak usage (worse than the cheapest $10/mo. DSL).
AND an allow-all rule is fat-fingered into the NAT box
This is where you prove you're an idiot, and not the network security expert you claim.
NAT can't possibly allow/deny anything. Allow/deny are FIREWALL RULES.
The idea of accidentally screwing-up your firewall rules is one YOU and ONLY YOU has brought into this discussion, and now you're trying to attribute that mindless nonsense to me. No chance.
A FIREWALL WILL KEEP YOU SAFE. A NAT BOX HAS NO SECURITY.
I've pointed you to a dozen other ways to get through a NAT. I've only provided a couple simplistic examples that any idiot can do at home because I knew from the start that you are, in fact, an idiot, and wouldn't be able to comprehend any of the more complex scenarios that involve crafting packets. Sentence after sentence you spew out misinformation and fundamental misunderstandings of networking. Go read up on the subject, or at least stop spewing out crap and pretending you know what you're talking about. Goodbye.
There's a firewall still in production that processes the source route option?
Firewall? No. Cheap NAT box? Yes.
There's at least a dozen different ways to accomplish the same thing. There's a whole field of NAT circumvention research.
Are you on the same subnet as the NAT box? Select it as your gateway, and it will dutifully forward packets to/from you and whatever (private) subnets it is attached to.
NAT has no security to speak of. That's why it's ALWAYS NAT+Firewall. The Firewall is just as secure without the NAT part of the equation, and a simple 3-line ruleset will give you the same one-way, stateful behavior that people expect of NAT.
not it doesn't mean any drive with a circuit, or even any drive with an onboard controller. It was the name of a specific interface, which is also known these days as Parallel ATA.
Nonsense.
Let's go back to the previous suggestion, and check WP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA : The terms "integrated drive electronics" (IDE), "enhanced IDE" and "EIDE" have come to be used interchangeably with ATA (now Parallel ATA, or PATA). However the terms "IDE" and "EIDE" are at best imprecise. Every ATA drive is an "integrated drive electronics" drive, but SCSI drives could also legitimately be described as having "integrated drive electronics". However the abbreviation IDE is rarely, if ever, used for SCSI drives.
most times the Server-Client OS is developed so the some of the servers exist in kernel space with the microkernel, but they are never part of the microkernel.
And that's different from loading kernel modules, how?
If everything is running in kernel space, you've given up all the advantages of a microkernel.
If you want to see a common OS using microkernel, there are lots of those from what to choose. Like from kFreeBSD, HURD, Minix, L4Linux, DragonFly BSD, NT and so on....
Searching for kFreeBSD only turns up Debian's efforts to put a GNU userland on a FreeBSD kernel. HURD is as useful as it is popular. NT is a "hybrid" microkernel just like Darwin, which gets it the worst of both worlds. DragonFly has message passing tacked on, but isn't a microkernel as far as I'm aware (I haven't paid that much attention). L4Linux might be interesting if they aren't just using it as a hypervisor, I'll have to look into it.
With enough money on the line, they will be... Criminals go to great lengths to get credit card numbers with skimmers, fake ATMs, and the like. A tine scanner in a post office would be relatively easy and low-risk.
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In that case, it's the same effect of the GPL as well.
Many companies contribute code to BSD-licensed projects, and even more fund them to continue their work. In short, you're utterly wrong about the practical effect.
The various BSDs are all BSD licensed, yet they remain non-unified. Repeating your blanket assertion won't make it any more true the second time around.
If you're not going to attempt to reconcile reality with your assertions, everyone should ignore all assertions you make.
Yes, though it's no their preferred format, they ALL include utilities for handling RPMs.
Nonsense. He can go back and re-license all of his stuff at any time. The GPL is not binding to him. He binds everyone else with it. Sure, with the GPL, you're giving up your freedom in exchange for someone else's code. It may be a reasonable trade, but it's NOT freedom.
The incentive is still there. Look at all the GPL violators out there. Ask Tivo why they aren't playing along.
Linux is more popular than the BSDs. This is likely due to an unfortunately timed lawsuit early on, and then self-propagated, as Linux continues to gets more developers and market share thanks to network effects. This will likely continue.
Your assertion that Linux is more popular BECAUSE IT IS GPL'ed is utterly laughable. Any number of very liberally-licensed software projects (like X11, OpenSSH, Apache, etc.) are every bit as popular as Linux. Your assertion requires extraordinary evidence, and you've provided absolutely none, thus far.
"right" has nothing to do with it. She has every right to provide terrible service and expect a tip as well... She has every right to expect anything she wants, but that doesn't mean it's moral or amoral to not give it to her.
No, but using a license that says free for commercial use, then EXPECTING to get a GIFT in return, and COMPLAINING when you don't, just makes you an idiot.
How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip? Just because your courtesy expectations don't meet-up with someone else's, doesn't give either any right to yell at them about it.
I expect a lot of BSD developers will step in here and call you an idiot for assuming you know what their motives are...
Except EVERYONE can go back to the original (free) code, and do with it whatever they want. You're right that it doesn't push the developer's personal agenda on everyone who wants to redistribute it, but that's not freedom, it's a different type of proprietary.
Proprietary software does the same thing...
Right. You are REQUIRED to contribute your changes to the public. Using your own metric: the freedom extends to only a depth of 0.
Now this is just stupid. The BSDs are all open source, under a single license. The fact that they aren't all unified isn't because somebody close-up the source code. It's the LSB that keeps one distro of Linux to another, largely compatible, NOT the GPL.
No, if it wanted to do that, it would simply require the original source code be provided. The GPL wants to FORCE you to provide any changes YOU made, to others.
Are you suggesting it's somehow easier to get the source code for (eg.) GNU tar than it is for BSD tar? I fail to see how that's even possible.
That was my thought exactly... BUT THEN I RTFA, took a look at the first picture of the old busted plastic case, and understood. Good thing, too. I'd hate to have posted a "why didn't he just..." comment on /. that makes me look like an idiot. Close call there...
I used to have people tell me that their Windows 98 systems were rock solid, kept running for months at a time between reboots, and simply never, ever had the slightest hint of any problems... I still don't know how to respond to something like that. Your statement is similar.
Meanwhile, with a stock Fedora 13 system (on older hardware), I have to kill Flash on an almost daily basis, because it pretty often gets into a CPU-eating mode, and locks up all browser tabs. Fortunately, thanks to nspluginwrapper, it doesn't take Firefox down with it.
I can only assume your experience is likely thanks to a walled garden of simple, stable Flash apps, that just don't happen to trigger one of the overwhelming number of bugs it has.
Doesn't that pretty well describe pretty much every tablet ever made? Not to mention the overwhelming majority of PDAs, smartphones, etc.
Well, if they filed all their patents in 1975, they would generally have expired by 1995, before digital cameras became practical, let alone popular.
It's only a feel-good notion to think that innovation always pays off. Kodak could have spent a ton of money on R&D, and ended up WORSE than they are now. Business often works that way. It's especially true when switching from high-margin to low-margin products, and having to compete with hordes of cheap imports that aren't substantially lower quality than name brands. It's nice to think Zenith could have spent more on R&D and would be bigger than Microsoft today, but in reality, they would probably be in exactly the same spot...
Complete nonsense. Do you not even pay attention to the equipment they were using to accomplish this task?
TV cameras have been fully electronic from the very beginning, in the 1930's. No film required. They weren't digital, but were soon being recorded to tape.
Consumer video cameras were also available long before digital cameras, providing instant development, an LCD screen to view the photos you just recorded, and very inexpensive storage. Many even included (analog) camera modes, which would record a couple still frames to tape, simply pause there on playback, for a slide show effect.
The fact that digital won out in the end (on price) is pretty irrelevant. Digital music players won out as well, even though there's nothing inherently superior to digital, versus high quality analog. The key points of digital cameras are the instant development, instant review, huge capacity, incredible convenience, and unlimited cheap duplication. We could well have analog cameras, computers, internet, and smart phones today if things had gone differently, and all would look largely the same as they do now.
Good job being in the winning camp, 5 years after the battle ended... There hasn't been any debate on the subject for a long time now. It was first mathematically proven, based on the grain size of film, that digital cameras only needed to improve to about 6MP or so to surpass even high quality film, and quite some time ago, professional digital cameras overwhelmingly proved the point by greatly surpassing those resolutions, and providing undeniably superior photographs anyone can see.
Wow, you're incredibly dense... In fact, he doesn't have ANY complaints about Powerpoint at all. His complaints are ALL, DIRECTLY about how useless his current assignment is, saying "it was founded to provide some general a three-star command": "a stove-piped and bloated organization, top-heavy in rank". "little of substance is really done here".
He doesn't complain about Powerpoint, but instead about typical bureaucracy. Useless meetings, providing useless information to "cognitively challenged generals" who "listen to the CUA in a semi-comatose state." Provided information being of inconsistent quality at best... "Fortunately, none of the information provided makes an indelible impact". Where the manner in which the information is presented is important, and the quality and usefulness of the information is ignored: "Harried movement together with furrowed brows and appropriate expressions of concern a la Clint Eastwood will please the generals. Progress in the war is optional."
Not true. You can rewrite every line of code in a program, and yet you've still got a derivitive work.
There are a handful of unix libc implementations out there, so someone, in fact, did.
Additionally, have you ever heard of a derivative work?
Guess where most of the electricity we generate comes from...
Hydrogen is renewable precisely because it "has to be generated". Or rather, CAN be generated.
In fact, solar is THE ONLY power generation technology that can supply all our power needs into the future. We would need to build a nuclear power plant each week to keep up with demand. Solar has incredible potential, there are just some growing pains getting it off the ground.
Not that I'd mind more nuclear. They're seriously impressive up close, with a thick white steam cloud (larger than most skyscrapers) billowing out the top... but in all honesty, going forward, the future is UNDENIABLY solar powered.
Digital never had an OS called Tru64, and they never decided to hitch their wagon to Intel's. That would be COMPAQ you are thinking of, not DEC. DEC certainly did continue to develop Alpha and DigitalUnix up until the end, which is why COMPAQ got it, fully formed, and merely renamed the OS to get Digital out of the title. What COMPAQ did with Digital after they bought it out is hardly DEC's fault. DEC's fall from #2 in the computing world to a ruins, which COMPAQ could then aquire, was ALL DEC's doing, and it happened long before Itanium.
I'm all for box art that looks nothing like the game. HOWEVER, it gets to be a grey area when it looks plausibly like the game, but is not. Putting a screenshot of the arcade version on the home version is decidedly deceptive. In the post-Atari days, it was more and more often possible to make a game look quite similar to the arcade version, and much work went towards that end. From a distance, you wouldn't see the difference between he arcade and Master System version of Outrun, Shinobi, etc.
Note that the Democrat (not plural) in question was thrown out by other Democrats for his fraudulent tactics. Republicans? Hell, they'd probably have made the guy chairman.
There's a medication out there that kill 1% of the people that take it, and another that kill 99% of the people that take it. Both undeniably kill people, so they're both the same, and there's no point in making a distinction on which is the lesser evil...
In Iran, the population is overwhelmingly pro-US, and against the current administration, who stole the last election. There were protests in the streets, which was very violently suppressed by the military.
Guerilla tactics require a population that is either sympathetic or petrified (as in Afghanistan), and the Iranian public is certainly not sympathetic...
Iran is running out of oil. That's their very justification for wanting nuclear power plants.
BTW, Afghanistan doesn't have any oil. Neither does Israel or Palestine.
We don't know that everything is legit. However, enough of it has been confirmed to be legit that accusations of inaccuracy have the burden of proof. At least one person is going to be court-martialed for providing classified information to Wikileaks, the New York Times has gone along with the leaked documents, lending it's own credibility to them, the US government has implicitly confirmed they are at least party genuine, in part because the FBI doesn't investigate leaks of classified document if the leaked information is fabricated, rather than legitimate, etc., etc.
A T-1 is only 1.5Mbps, and will run you about $600/month. 10 neighbors sharing the bill might make that price reasonable, but then you're all SHARING 1.5Mbps, or 150kbps each at least during peak usage (worse than the cheapest $10/mo. DSL).
This is where you prove you're an idiot, and not the network security expert you claim.
NAT can't possibly allow/deny anything. Allow/deny are FIREWALL RULES.
The idea of accidentally screwing-up your firewall rules is one YOU and ONLY YOU has brought into this discussion, and now you're trying to attribute that mindless nonsense to me. No chance.
A FIREWALL WILL KEEP YOU SAFE. A NAT BOX HAS NO SECURITY.
I've pointed you to a dozen other ways to get through a NAT. I've only provided a couple simplistic examples that any idiot can do at home because I knew from the start that you are, in fact, an idiot, and wouldn't be able to comprehend any of the more complex scenarios that involve crafting packets. Sentence after sentence you spew out misinformation and fundamental misunderstandings of networking. Go read up on the subject, or at least stop spewing out crap and pretending you know what you're talking about. Goodbye.
Firewall? No.
Cheap NAT box? Yes.
There's at least a dozen different ways to accomplish the same thing. There's a whole field of NAT circumvention research.
Are you on the same subnet as the NAT box? Select it as your gateway, and it will dutifully forward packets to/from you and whatever (private) subnets it is attached to.
NAT has no security to speak of. That's why it's ALWAYS NAT+Firewall. The Firewall is just as secure without the NAT part of the equation, and a simple 3-line ruleset will give you the same one-way, stateful behavior that people expect of NAT.
Nonsense.
Let's go back to the previous suggestion, and check WP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA :
The terms "integrated drive electronics" (IDE), "enhanced IDE" and "EIDE" have come to be used interchangeably with ATA (now Parallel ATA, or PATA). However the terms "IDE" and "EIDE" are at best imprecise. Every ATA drive is an "integrated drive electronics" drive, but SCSI drives could also legitimately be described as having "integrated drive electronics". However the abbreviation IDE is rarely, if ever, used for SCSI drives.
And that's different from loading kernel modules, how?
If everything is running in kernel space, you've given up all the advantages of a microkernel.
Searching for kFreeBSD only turns up Debian's efforts to put a GNU userland on a FreeBSD kernel. HURD is as useful as it is popular. NT is a "hybrid" microkernel just like Darwin, which gets it the worst of both worlds. DragonFly has message passing tacked on, but isn't a microkernel as far as I'm aware (I haven't paid that much attention). L4Linux might be interesting if they aren't just using it as a hypervisor, I'll have to look into it.
Yes, some banks don't do so. Most do, however.
An idiotic statement. Mass market RFID readers need to be within about 6 inches. However, there's NOTHING stopping someone from cranking up the power and getting far more distance out of it. How does 11 meters sound? http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Supply-Chain/Long-distance-RFID-reader
With enough money on the line, they will be... Criminals go to great lengths to get credit card numbers with skimmers, fake ATMs, and the like. A tine scanner in a post office would be relatively easy and low-risk.
A source routed packet will do just fine (if it's not filtered by the device). Look it up.
There's plenty of others ways to forge packets to do the same, but source routed packets are the best (absolutely trivial) example.