If you could get a DS-3 (can you?) or an OC-3 interface on an x86 box with the right software you could aggregate a whole bunch T1s, Frame Relay Circuits, DDS Circuits, etc thereby eliminating the need for the ~100 serial ports. Having the LEC aggregate for you is usually cheaper than buying and maintaining the hardware.
Go FreeBSD, yay, rah rah rah. I'd be the first person to note that FreeBSD generally has better performance than both Linux and Solaris but you're painting an inaccurate picture here. Juniper routers consist of a bunch of custom ASICs that do most of the routing work in hardware. The *BSD is in there to manage the whole thing. I'm pretty sure that they didn't take the IP stack out of FreeBSD and implement it in hardware. It very well could be based on the BSD stack as a lot of different things are (the MS stack up till recently) but I doubt it's the same or even very similar to the stack in FreeBSD.
I know for a fact that power supplies for the Catalyst 6509 switch are manufactured by Sony Electronics. I know this because I was installing one and saw the Sony sticker on it and thought to myself, "wow, I didn't know Sony electronics makes power supplies for Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches, cool"
cisco 7206VXR (NPE300) processor with 253952K/40960K bytes of memory.
R7000 CPU at 262Mhz, Implementation 39, Rev 2.1, 256KB L2, 2048KB L3 Cache
6 slot VXR midplane, Version 2.0
Hmm, MIPS R7000 256MB of RAM, 2MB Cache, that'd make a pretty decent web server, too bad that it cost 5 times more than an X86 that's twice as fast.
Also, I don't know of any motherboard that will give you more than 2 PCI slots @66Mhz*64bits. However I do know a guy that contributes to the Zebra project and wrote his own implementation of 802.1Q. He uses these guys (supermicro boards, I think) with 2x1000BaseSX NICS to do bandwidth policing in his data center. He is routing all the traffic in the entire data center through a group of these boxes and limits each user to the amount of bandwidth that they actually pay for. He's explained that he can get ~800Mbps out of each NIC with a 1Ghz CPU.
Check the specs of the $61k car vs. the one being auctioned on ebay. The one on ebay is a one-off boxed aluminum chassis with a mid-engine/transaxle setup. The $61k car that you can order is based on a front engine/rear wheel drive kit chassis. Which in my mind is way less cool. The only really unique thing about the $61k car is that it is apparently officially licensed and has a fiberglass body that's made from what is probably the same molds as the prototype.
Hmm, let's see, I'm running RH6.2/Xfree86 4.0/E 16.4 on my 770Z and it works perfectly. The sound isn't painless, but it can be gotten to work. No problems with the PCMCIA ethernet devices or serial, and I've never had a docking station. The bios is not really secret, only different from the standard AMI/Phoenix style bios. They won't have to port the configurator because it's already been ported, check out the tpctl homepage. I've used several different brands of laptops over the years and I've found that brand doesn't necessarilly matter, though specific models may, or even small batches of a single model may exhibit certain problems. Your circumstances may very well be unique.
I can guarantee you that if there was an "emergency" IP number change that Pac Bell had nothing to do with it. In the case that you describe, Pac Bell is providing the copper and back-hauling the service to your ISP which does the IP address administration. Pac Bell has nothing to do with the IP addresses that you have.
Consider yourself one of the lucky few. I work for Concentric and my DSL line took approximately 4 months to get installed. There are many, many horror stories about people ordering DSL lines, getting tired of waiting, and just canceling the order. Unfortunately, when you have so many different companies involved (LEC, CLEC, ISP)if any one person at any of the three companies makes a mistake then your order gets delayed. People are human and mistakes do happen, it's just a matter of probability. With more people handling your order, the probability is increased.
I live in the same area of the silicon valley, have 144Kbps IDSL from Covad and can attest to the fact that the product that he is referring to is in fact IDSL (DSL over ISDN) at 144Kbps. It's a nailed up BRI (2B @64kbps each and 1D at 16Kbps each) and capable of being installed anywhere ISDN is capable of being installed. Since it is ISDN the cost is significantly higher than standard DSL.
They are going after posters who are distributing Penthouse Copyrighted material. ( Which falls under stealing )
Why do people insist that copyright infringement is theft, this is categorically wrong.
Theft - the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
In the case of copyright infringement the person responsible for the infringement is not depriving any the rightful use of their property. Theft is a bad thing, and has been considered such for a while now (it is one of the commandments). Copyright protection is simply something provided by the government fairly recently. There's a little of it in the Constitution, and some more in Title 17 of US Code.
This may certainly be overkill but the theory behind the practice is sound. The "goo" in question has a higher thermal resistance than aluminum. So, the more aluminum you can cause to meet, the better the heat transfer you'll get. Without thermal grease however there will be small air gaps in the porous surface of the metal. Unfortunately air has a higher thermal resistance than both "goo" and aluminum. To solve this problem you add a little thermal grease, which will improve heat transfer where there is an air gap. If you apply too much thermal grease however, you risk the possibility of increasing the thermal resistance of your heat sink instead of decreasing it.
If a person is wise, or if auto-negotiation works on their NIC then the links will be full-duplex. When a fast ethernet link is full duplex there are no collisions, CSMA/CD is completely turned off. Having multiple NICS is still a valid architecture for performance reasons though.
US Code Title 17 - Copyrights has all the information, DMCA is section 1201, which consequently happens to be under chapter 12. The site is also searchable.
It may very well be considered fair use. I was speaking with one of the attorneys from the copyright office at Stanford today and asked her this specific question, whether the document posted in whole would be considered a violation of copyright. She explained that it would be for a court to decide, but that it could be considered fair use.
US Code: Title 17, Section 107 Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Thus the nature of the question: 8. Why shouldn't Slashdot users and the general public be able to view this protocol for purposes of commentary and criticism in light of its apparent relevance to issues in the government's antitrust litigation?
I think that in this particular case that it might fall under the "criticism and commentary" definition of fair use.
This is certainly not true in many cases. Some firewalls use proxy services and network address translation which does in fact break the host to host paradigm of the Internet. There are many firewalls that are either a combination packet filter, proxy server, or just a packet filter. Certainly routers don't break the end to end paradigm of the Internet, do they? Very many routers on the Internet have access lists which is the same thing as a packet filter. In this case, they were referring to some *BSD firewall, I'm assuming IPF, which is exactly what its name implies, an IP filter. The firewall itself is a router that simply makes a decision about whether or not to forward traffic. In the case of a syn flood, the firewall box is not going to fill up with TCP connects because it isn't the target of the flood, and the web server is not going to fill up with TCP connects because it's never going to see the packet. So you are wrong on point 1, a firewall correctly configured does in fact create more resources to deal with an attack. You are wrong on point 2 as well, some firewalls, and the one I'm assuming is being used in this case is in fact a router with a very tight access list, so it doesn't violate the paradigm you describe. I won't address points 3 and 4 as they are both opinions, seemingly uninformed ones as well.
The MSFC, the multi-layer switch feature card does the routing. There is a PFC (policy feature card) which will provide QoS, Load-Balancing, access lists, etc. There is no RSM for the 6509. Check Cisco's site for reference. The MSFC/PFC combination will forward 15Mpps if the routed traffic goes through the hardware. If there's some exception that doesn't allow it to get routed by the ASIC then the traffic will go through a software router that will do 200Kpps, the software router is equivalent to a 75xx series router in terms of speed.
ATM is not necessarilly the best connectivity solution for this particular application, nor is routing. ATM is a cell-based OSI layer 2 technology that breaks each cell down into a 53 bytes. On an OC-3 (155Mbps) one can incur quite a bit of overhead for LAN-based traffic so you won't necessarilly see your full 155Mbps of traffic. ATM works well for native ATM devices that require real QoS and are able to manage the setup and tear down of the various types of circuits that are available in an ATM cloud. IP in all it's forms have to be adapted to ATM in one of a couple of ways, LAN emulation being one of the most popular. Setting up permanent point to point PVCs is also another way to do it.
One of the qualitative differences between clustering and MP is that in a clustering environment one has to be able to write applications that can be made parallel and are capable of taking advantage of the massive amounts of CPU time available while not suffering from the relatively small amounts of memory bandwidth available. Most ACs don't understand this, so we get comments like "I want to run quake on a Beowulf". It follows that increasing the amount of bandwidth between machines will make the clustering environment less restrictive from a memory bandwidth point-of-view. One never wants to "route" in a clustered environment. Devices that make forwarding decisions at OSI Layer 3 are all inherently slower than devices that make forwarding decisions at OSI Layer 2. There are L3 switches that forward packets at wire speed, but these are expensive and pointless to use in this type of environment, as it's not needed. Basically, one would want to put their cluster into a single subnet (and vlan) in a completely switched environment and endeavour to minimize broadcast traffic. At a minimum I would recommend a completely switched 100Mbps environment for a low-cost cluster.
It should be noted though, that all 100BaseTX switches are *not* non-blocking. I wouldn't consider using anything that isn't. If one requires additional bandwidth for a particular type of application there are a couple of other options. Gigabit ethernet will provide approximately 3 times the bandwidth of fast ethernet in a Linux machine, mainly being limited by the throughput of the stack. One also may want to consider HIPPI if the need is there. HIPPI is very very expensive, and to the best of my knowledge only available from a handful of vendors. One of those being Essential/ODS (my previous employer). I believe that there is a driver for Linux for the Essential/ODS HIPPI NIC, though I'm not certain what the throughput is. HIPPI is being used by the big boys, Sandia National Labs, Nasa Ames, Lawrence Livermore, mostly in SGI environments. Beyond HIPPI, there is something called GSN (Gigabyte Switch Network) a 6.4Gbps environment being adopted as the next level of bandwidth by both ODS and SGI. ODS filled the first order for GSN switches sometime in January of 1999 I believe. I'm not even sure there is a NIC available for the type of hardware that's supported by Linux. For info on HIPPI and GSN stuff check out ODS' web site I would recommend HIPPI, then Gigabit Ethernet for a high performance cluster. The Lanblazer from ODS and the Cajunswitch 550 (the same switch, one is OEMed from the other)for gigabit ethernet or fast ethernet. In addition, there are products from Extreme Networks, Fore Systems (Berkeley Systems Gig E stuff), HP and I'm sure there are a few others. Most of the stuff from the top 3 (Cisco, Nortel, 3Com) are not non-blocking, one should do the research before making a purchase.
I just started working for a large (publicly traded) ISP in the silly-con valley. They are mostly an NT shop with lots of Solaris. Their main applications run on Oracle/Solaris servers and some of their smaller apps run on NT, including file and print. As it is an ISP, every engineer has an Ultra on his desk running Solaris. Their current policy disallows any use of Linux as Linux is currently unsupported and they're afraid of people installing it and leaving it wide open for crack attempts. On the other hand, on my first day at this organization a Sun Ultra10 landed on my desk that was fully loaded with gcc, perl, blackbox WM, The Gimp, and a variety of assorted libraries. I've since installed bash and some other stuff. I'm pretty sure that all of the other engineer's workstations have as much or more OSS as well. The main reason that they choose not to allow Linux is that one or two user's unsupported machines have been cracked in the past and used as a jumping off point for other attacks. A part of my responsibility in the organization is helping them develop IT policies, I plan to lobby to not only allow Linux on the network, but to provide support for it as well. I don't expect to encounter much resistance provided security is improved to the point where the PHBs feel comfortable about it. It's pretty ironic that they do feel comfortable with NT though.
How can you claim that the system as it is now works when statistics show that less than 50% of the voting age population voted in the last presidential election? Voting over the Internet is nothing more than a technical challenge that can be overcome with the appropriate resources. The real question does not lie in the logistical issues, but whether or not the politicians want to make it any easier for the general public to cast their vote.
I wondered the same thing as well, some people believe that it has something to do with licensing issues. There are some however, but they're not direct copies and are on slower sites which became annoying to download from (on an OC-3). Instead of finding a proper image, I just downloaded/i386 from cdrom.com as a giant tarball and made my own image following the howtos available from LDP.
OpenBSD is developed in Canada and incorporates strong encryption right into the kernel. The OpenBSD folks state, and this is essentially hearsay mind you, that encryption technology may be freely exported from Canada provided that the technology itself is free, or for academic purposes. It is in this sense that they claim to be able to allow OpenBSD to be exported to any country.
Slashdot Mirror
If you could get a DS-3 (can you?) or an OC-3 interface on an x86 box with the right software you could aggregate a whole bunch T1s, Frame Relay Circuits, DDS Circuits, etc thereby eliminating the need for the ~100 serial ports. Having the LEC aggregate for you is usually cheaper than buying and maintaining the hardware.
Good luck making those gigabit interfaces go any faster than about 180Mbps.
Go FreeBSD, yay, rah rah rah. I'd be the first person to note that FreeBSD generally has better performance than both Linux and Solaris but you're painting an inaccurate picture here. Juniper routers consist of a bunch of custom ASICs that do most of the routing work in hardware. The *BSD is in there to manage the whole thing. I'm pretty sure that they didn't take the IP stack out of FreeBSD and implement it in hardware. It very well could be based on the BSD stack as a lot of different things are (the MS stack up till recently) but I doubt it's the same or even very similar to the stack in FreeBSD.
I know for a fact that power supplies for the Catalyst 6509 switch are manufactured by Sony Electronics. I know this because I was installing one and saw the Sony sticker on it and thought to myself, "wow, I didn't know Sony electronics makes power supplies for Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches, cool"
cisco 7206VXR (NPE300) processor with 253952K/40960K bytes of memory. R7000 CPU at 262Mhz, Implementation 39, Rev 2.1, 256KB L2, 2048KB L3 Cache 6 slot VXR midplane, Version 2.0
Hmm, MIPS R7000 256MB of RAM, 2MB Cache, that'd make a pretty decent web server, too bad that it cost 5 times more than an X86 that's twice as fast.
Also, I don't know of any motherboard that will give you more than 2 PCI slots @66Mhz*64bits. However I do know a guy that contributes to the Zebra project and wrote his own implementation of 802.1Q. He uses these guys (supermicro boards, I think) with 2x1000BaseSX NICS to do bandwidth policing in his data center. He is routing all the traffic in the entire data center through a group of these boxes and limits each user to the amount of bandwidth that they actually pay for. He's explained that he can get ~800Mbps out of each NIC with a 1Ghz CPU.
Check the specs of the $61k car vs. the one being auctioned on ebay. The one on ebay is a one-off boxed aluminum chassis with a mid-engine/transaxle setup. The $61k car that you can order is based on a front engine/rear wheel drive kit chassis. Which in my mind is way less cool. The only really unique thing about the $61k car is that it is apparently officially licensed and has a fiberglass body that's made from what is probably the same molds as the prototype.
Hmm, let's see, I'm running RH6.2/Xfree86 4.0/E 16.4 on my 770Z and it works perfectly. The sound isn't painless, but it can be gotten to work. No problems with the PCMCIA ethernet devices or serial, and I've never had a docking station. The bios is not really secret, only different from the standard AMI/Phoenix style bios. They won't have to port the configurator because it's already been ported, check out the tpctl homepage. I've used several different brands of laptops over the years and I've found that brand doesn't necessarilly matter, though specific models may, or even small batches of a single model may exhibit certain problems. Your circumstances may very well be unique.
It's not any slower in Win2k on my P3 550 with a Matrox G400 than Openwindows on my Sun Ultra 10 Creator 3d with 512MB of RAM.
I can guarantee you that if there was an "emergency" IP number change that Pac Bell had nothing to do with it. In the case that you describe, Pac Bell is providing the copper and back-hauling the service to your ISP which does the IP address administration. Pac Bell has nothing to do with the IP addresses that you have.
Consider yourself one of the lucky few. I work for Concentric and my DSL line took approximately 4 months to get installed. There are many, many horror stories about people ordering DSL lines, getting tired of waiting, and just canceling the order. Unfortunately, when you have so many different companies involved (LEC, CLEC, ISP)if any one person at any of the three companies makes a mistake then your order gets delayed. People are human and mistakes do happen, it's just a matter of probability. With more people handling your order, the probability is increased.
I live in the same area of the silicon valley, have 144Kbps IDSL from Covad and can attest to the fact that the product that he is referring to is in fact IDSL (DSL over ISDN) at 144Kbps. It's a nailed up BRI (2B @64kbps each and 1D at 16Kbps each) and capable of being installed anywhere ISDN is capable of being installed. Since it is ISDN the cost is significantly higher than standard DSL.
They are going after posters who are distributing Penthouse Copyrighted material. ( Which falls under stealing )
Why do people insist that copyright infringement is theft, this is categorically wrong.
Theft - the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
In the case of copyright infringement the person responsible for the infringement is not depriving any the rightful use of their property. Theft is a bad thing, and has been considered such for a while now (it is one of the commandments). Copyright protection is simply something provided by the government fairly recently. There's a little of it in the Constitution, and some more in Title 17 of US Code.
This may certainly be overkill but the theory behind the practice is sound. The "goo" in question has a higher thermal resistance than aluminum. So, the more aluminum you can cause to meet, the better the heat transfer you'll get. Without thermal grease however there will be small air gaps in the porous surface of the metal. Unfortunately air has a higher thermal resistance than both "goo" and aluminum. To solve this problem you add a little thermal grease, which will improve heat transfer where there is an air gap. If you apply too much thermal grease however, you risk the possibility of increasing the thermal resistance of your heat sink instead of decreasing it.
If a person is wise, or if auto-negotiation works on their NIC then the links will be full-duplex. When a fast ethernet link is full duplex there are no collisions, CSMA/CD is completely turned off. Having multiple NICS is still a valid architecture for performance reasons though.
My company does things in a similar fashion, which begs the question: Why aren't they using a Network Appliance Filer?
US Code Title 17 - Copyrights has all the information, DMCA is section 1201, which consequently happens to be under chapter 12. The site is also searchable.
It may very well be considered fair use. I was speaking with one of the attorneys from the copyright office at Stanford today and asked her this specific question, whether the document posted in whole would be considered a violation of copyright. She explained that it would be for a court to decide, but that it could be considered fair use.
US Code: Title 17, Section 107
Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Thus the nature of the question:
8. Why shouldn't Slashdot users and the general public be able to view this protocol for purposes of commentary and criticism in light of its apparent relevance to issues in the government's antitrust litigation?
I think that in this particular case that it might fall under the "criticism and commentary" definition of fair use.
This is certainly not true in many cases. Some firewalls use proxy services and network address translation which does in fact break the host to host paradigm of the Internet. There are many firewalls that are either a combination packet filter, proxy server, or just a packet filter. Certainly routers don't break the end to end paradigm of the Internet, do they? Very many routers on the Internet have access lists which is the same thing as a packet filter. In this case, they were referring to some *BSD firewall, I'm assuming IPF, which is exactly what its name implies, an IP filter. The firewall itself is a router that simply makes a decision about whether or not to forward traffic. In the case of a syn flood, the firewall box is not going to fill up with TCP connects because it isn't the target of the flood, and the web server is not going to fill up with TCP connects because it's never going to see the packet. So you are wrong on point 1, a firewall correctly configured does in fact create more resources to deal with an attack. You are wrong on point 2 as well, some firewalls, and the one I'm assuming is being used in this case is in fact a router with a very tight access list, so it doesn't violate the paradigm you describe. I won't address points 3 and 4 as they are both opinions, seemingly uninformed ones as well.
The MSFC, the multi-layer switch feature card does the routing. There is a PFC (policy feature card) which will provide QoS, Load-Balancing, access lists, etc. There is no RSM for the 6509. Check Cisco's site for reference. The MSFC/PFC combination will forward 15Mpps if the routed traffic goes through the hardware. If there's some exception that doesn't allow it to get routed by the ASIC then the traffic will go through a software router that will do 200Kpps, the software router is equivalent to a 75xx series router in terms of speed.
Check out Intel's Developer Site for info.
ATM is not necessarilly the best connectivity solution for this particular application, nor is routing. ATM is a cell-based OSI layer 2 technology that breaks each cell down into a 53 bytes. On an OC-3 (155Mbps) one can incur quite a bit of overhead for LAN-based traffic so you won't necessarilly see your full 155Mbps of traffic. ATM works well for native ATM devices that require real QoS and are able to manage the setup and tear down of the various types of circuits that are available in an ATM cloud. IP in all it's forms have to be adapted to ATM in one of a couple of ways, LAN emulation being one of the most popular. Setting up permanent point to point PVCs is also another way to do it.
One of the qualitative differences between clustering and MP is that in a clustering environment one has to be able to write applications that can be made parallel and are capable of taking advantage of the massive amounts of CPU time available while not suffering from the relatively small amounts of memory bandwidth available. Most ACs don't understand this, so we get comments like "I want to run quake on a Beowulf". It follows that increasing the amount of bandwidth between machines will make the clustering environment less restrictive from a memory bandwidth point-of-view. One never wants to "route" in a clustered environment. Devices that make forwarding decisions at OSI Layer 3 are all inherently slower than devices that make forwarding decisions at OSI Layer 2. There are L3 switches that forward packets at wire speed, but these are expensive and pointless to use in this type of environment, as it's not needed. Basically, one would want to put their cluster into a single subnet (and vlan) in a completely switched environment and endeavour to minimize broadcast traffic. At a minimum I would recommend a completely switched 100Mbps environment for a low-cost cluster.
It should be noted though, that all 100BaseTX switches are *not* non-blocking. I wouldn't consider using anything that isn't. If one requires additional bandwidth for a particular type of application there are a couple of other options. Gigabit ethernet will provide approximately 3 times the bandwidth of fast ethernet in a Linux machine, mainly being limited by the throughput of the stack. One also may want to consider HIPPI if the need is there. HIPPI is very very expensive, and to the best of my knowledge only available from a handful of vendors. One of those being Essential/ODS (my previous employer). I believe that there is a driver for Linux for the Essential/ODS HIPPI NIC, though I'm not certain what the throughput is. HIPPI is being used by the big boys, Sandia National Labs, Nasa Ames, Lawrence Livermore, mostly in SGI environments. Beyond HIPPI, there is something called GSN (Gigabyte Switch Network) a 6.4Gbps environment being adopted as the next level of bandwidth by both ODS and SGI. ODS filled the first order for GSN switches sometime in January of 1999 I believe. I'm not even sure there is a NIC available for the type of hardware that's supported by Linux. For info on HIPPI and GSN stuff check out ODS' web site I would recommend HIPPI, then Gigabit Ethernet for a high performance cluster. The Lanblazer from ODS and the Cajunswitch 550 (the same switch, one is OEMed from the other)for gigabit ethernet or fast ethernet. In addition, there are products from Extreme Networks, Fore Systems (Berkeley Systems Gig E stuff), HP and I'm sure there are a few others. Most of the stuff from the top 3 (Cisco, Nortel, 3Com) are not non-blocking, one should do the research before making a purchase.
I just started working for a large (publicly traded) ISP in the silly-con valley. They are mostly an NT shop with lots of Solaris. Their main applications run on Oracle/Solaris servers and some of their smaller apps run on NT, including file and print. As it is an ISP, every engineer has an Ultra on his desk running Solaris. Their current policy disallows any use of Linux as Linux is currently unsupported and they're afraid of people installing it and leaving it wide open for crack attempts. On the other hand, on my first day at this organization a Sun Ultra10 landed on my desk that was fully loaded with gcc, perl, blackbox WM, The Gimp, and a variety of assorted libraries. I've since installed bash and some other stuff. I'm pretty sure that all of the other engineer's workstations have as much or more OSS as well. The main reason that they choose not to allow Linux is that one or two user's unsupported machines have been cracked in the past and used as a jumping off point for other attacks. A part of my responsibility in the organization is helping them develop IT policies, I plan to lobby to not only allow Linux on the network, but to provide support for it as well. I don't expect to encounter much resistance provided security is improved to the point where the PHBs feel comfortable about it. It's pretty ironic that they do feel comfortable with NT though.
How can you claim that the system as it is now works when statistics show that less than 50% of the voting age population voted in the last presidential election? Voting over the Internet is nothing more than a technical challenge that can be overcome with the appropriate resources. The real question does not lie in the logistical issues, but whether or not the politicians want to make it any easier for the general public to cast their vote.
I wondered the same thing as well, some people believe that it has something to do with licensing issues. There are some however, but they're not direct copies and are on slower sites which became annoying to download from (on an OC-3). Instead of finding a proper image, I just downloaded /i386 from cdrom.com as a giant tarball and made my own image following the howtos available from LDP.
OpenBSD is developed in Canada and incorporates strong encryption right into the kernel. The OpenBSD folks state, and this is essentially hearsay mind you, that encryption technology may be freely exported from Canada provided that the technology itself is free, or for academic purposes. It is in this sense that they claim to be able to allow OpenBSD to be exported to any country.