The router isn't going to affect their ability to reach other sites in your LAN, just their connections to the outside world. If you've got a LAN switch that supports VLANs, you could restrict the local connections as well.
The real questions are how much you trust your users not to mess around with the box and why you've got a policy against putting in extra firewall boxes if you need them. The answer may be to get better management:-) If the policy against routing through another box is just a budget thing, you can get a Linksys for $29, and you'll spend more time than that (even at grad student wages) haggling about policies.
I'd really like to run a virtual machine environment, so I've got Linux or OpenBSD underneath and a Windows client OS on top for when I want to run Windows applications. There seem to be a range of choices if I want Linux client OS, including Xen, VMWare, User-Mode Linux, etc., and some for BSD client OS, but is the VMWare server for Linux the only free choice if I want to support Windows clients? Free-beer is good enough, and I'm not a gamer, so accelerated graphics performance isn't critical either. If platform matters, I'm running Intel Celeron, so some of the newer hardware tricks probably aren't available.
Especially early on, you'd see a lot of spam activity where Johnny Singlewide thought he could make big money as a spammer, and bought himself a spamware kit and a case of Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra, and found he couldn't sell the stuff. Sure, he doesn't reorder, but there were a lot of other wannabee spammers like him to sell to, and the spamware vendors didn't *mind* if he actually made a profit and ordered more because they can use him as an example instead of making up their own.
Fortunately, a lot of that market has gone away, now that the Internet boom's over and the early-adopter spammers either did or didn't make money, and it's mostly run by professionals with armies of zombies instead of armies of wannabees spammers.
Some of the spammers selling Nigerian Herbal Fake Ci41iz may be pushing it for other people, but at least in the past, many of them are doing the sales themselves. If you're the customer, you're sending your money to Johhny Singlewide, the spammer. Johnny may be buying it by the case and shipping it himself, or he may be ordering it from the manufacturer who ships directly to the end user. He might even have the manufacturer accept payments, but that takes a higher level of trust on his part. Some of the bigger operators were also involved in product design ("This week let's call it 'Nigerian Super-Herbal Enhancement Pills' and change the box color!")
On the other hand, instead of Johhny being the scammer selling "marketing" services to the sucker manufacturer, sometimes he was the sucker and the manufacturer was the scammer, selling Johnny the case of product and the spamware tools and some lists of "qualified leads".
We did just lose Syd Barret... His mental illness was credited to LSD, though he probably tended that way beforehand.
One of the early problems with LSD and mental illness was that hospitals would treat badly tripping people the way they would anybody else who was highly disoriented and uncontrollable - dose them up with heavy tranquilizers, which in those days meant Thorazine, a mean nasty drug if ever there was one. Today there's Haldol, which isn't the nicest stuff either, but at least it doesn't cause anywhere near as much long-term damage as Thorazine.
Alcoholism is especially common among the mentally ill - seems to be the popular way to self-medicate manic cycles. A friend of mine who was hypomanic would use marijuana if she could get it, or else lots of rum, but eventually got on some more precise medication.
Direct toxicity doesn't appear to be a problem, or at least a fatal one - there was a French soldier who attempted to commit suicide by eating a pound or two of hash, slept for a while and wasn't quite normal for a while after that, but recovered just fine. There are people whose neurochemistry doesn't get along well with it, and it can trigger mental problems, though it's more common that it'll be a way of self-medicating things like mania that can be better treated with more precise drugs.
As the drug warriors will tell you, today's high-priced California Sensemilla is 10-20 times as strong as 1960s cheap ditchweed (and Hashish was always about that strong, and so was the stuff Cheech&Chong used to sing about.) But that means it's much safer, because you're smoking 5-10% as much green leafy stuff when you want to get high. The drug warriors tell you that the same 60s ditchweed has three times the tar as tobacco - so if you smoke two packs of dope a day, every day, you're probably at a higher risk of cancer, as well as at a much higher risk of doing something stupid because you're too stoned. Doesn't mean that a couple of joints at a concert are going to trash you, especially because (as other people have said) it's a bronchodilator.
However, if you're worried about lung cancer, or general lung-burn from hot smoke, you could protect your lungs by using a bong or a waterpipe, if the evil drug warriors hadn't banned the things and made people switch over to those little tiny easily-hidden pipes. Or you can make brownies, or alcohol extracts, though those have somewhat different effects than smoking. And blunts are, needless to say, a really stupid idea.
Drug addicts are often highly productive workers - just look at Rush Limbaugh, or the Chinese railroad workers in the Western US during the late 1800s, or the tobacco addicts we stomped out in the 1980s-90s, or those of us who are still caffeine junkies, or the truckers who use various forms of speed to put in long hours, or Ritalin-dosed school kids..
Tobacco addicts don't give their allegience to Marlboro or a particular tobacco store just because they need their two-packs-a-day fix, nor did Heroin (trademark of Bayer) users in a free market. Back when most of the amphetamines were legal, you'd get them from the drugstore with a doctor's prescription; you might do what your doctor told you or prefer to use your corner drugstore, but it wasn't an allegience sort of thing. (Now, I do like one of my local liquor stores because they've got good prices and a good selection of single-malts....)
But yes, it's largely about control, whether it's banning opium smoking or pushing Ritalin or keeping blacks in jail. But a lot of it has become a self-sustaining industry, keeping cops and prison guards and the military busy, and leading to lots of real crimes which also keep cops and prison guards busy - here in California, prison populations grew about 10fold during the 1980s-90s, and the prison guards' union is as big a campaign contributor as the teachers' union.
The drug war wasn't just for Mexicans and Negroes - it was also about the Yellow Peril of those Chinese immigrants coming over here to work on railroads and gold mines and smoking opium to deal with the harsh living conditions. Banning opium was part of the rest of the bandwagon of banning Asian immigration after the railroads were mostly built, banning Asian land ownership, and similar racist abuses. Friends in Canada tell me that their legislators were just as blatant about it as America's.
> The truth is that there is a group of people out there who only want to kill.
Nonsense - you could just as much say that about the Pentagon. People usually want to kill strangers because they're really angry, or because they're at war and their leaders have whipped them into a killing frenzy ("Shock and Awe, Yee-hah!" isn't much different from "Jihad against the Great Satan!").
And it's not just religious fanatics who are willing to get killed in the process of killing their enemies.
There's lots of American rhetoric praising people who "make the ultimate sacrifice for their country".
A former boss of mine seriously considered being a kamikaze pilot when he was a university student in Japan. Fortunately, one of his professors talked him out of it.
British and German soldiers in WW I got sent over the trenches into machine gun fire because of their duty to their country.
People who aren't part of big armies are the ones who go for dramatic individual statements like suicide bombing - if you've got an army to join and some chance of winning you don't need to do it that way.
The Bush Administration policies of attacking Iraq for no good reason, supporting Israel's apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank, and generally making arrogant inflammatory speeches, have been very effective in pissing off lots of people who don't have standing armies to join, and the Pentagon's overwhelming military effectiveness has demonstrated that conventional armies don't stand a chance against us in a conventional war. They've also demonstrated that they didn't do any decent planning for conquering a country once they've stomped the army, and that they're not very good at it, and that's inviting lots of meddlers to come to Iraq and fight the Great Satan, even though pre-war Iraq was the kind of secular corrupt military that the purity-minded fanatics hated almost as much as they hated the US and Israel.
Just when laptop fuel cells were going to be practical "Real Soon Now", and would let us run our laptops all the way across the continent or ocean.... Now you're not going to be allowed to carry the fuel, and may not be allowed to carry the laptop.
And if they're not going to allow us to carry liquids on the plane, they really should make it up to us by letting us bring dope.
RIAA sues lots of people for copyright infringement, often for allegedly using P2P to share copyrighted music.
Sometimes their evidence is dubious, e.g. only an IP address, which might be dynamic, or used by multiple people, such as your kid or the neighbor piggybacking on your wireless.
Defending yourself against them is really expensive, so some people settle.
... PROFIT!! (For RIAA.)
Debbie Foster claims to be innocent, defends herself in court (I can't tell if she paid for her attorney herself, or got pro bono help), RIAA keeps up lawsuits.
Eventually her kid owns up to file sharing, but RIAA doesn't drop their suit against her, keeps it going for another year, cranking up Debbie's legal costs, before dropping it.
If somebody sues you and loses, in the US, sometimes you can get awarded your attorney's costs, especially if their suit was bogus, but you can't always win that. (It's easier to get awarded costs if you're the plaintiff and win.)
EFF, ACLU, other good guys filed amicus brief encouraging the court to side with Debbie Foster and pay her legal costs, asserting bogusness and nastiness of RIAA's suit.
Did we RTSameFA? While the IBM article wasn't a tutorial on how to program the things, it covered a lot of the basic technology options out there. It also answered my fundamental question about them, which is "Is that all a Mash-up is?" ("Yes, that's all" - it's a Web-2.0-Jargonification for handing data from one source to a program that does something with it, and a little bit of techno-wrapper like using XML and maybe getting the user's browser to do most of the data handling. There's nothing fundamentally deep or non-obvious about it, unlike, say, the connections in mashing up "The Wizard of Oz" with "Dark Side Of The Moon", but it can still be really useful sometimes.) It also had some good commentary on issues like whether you can depend on the user running Javascript and ActiveEvilX.
RTFA - it's about virtual machines, not virtual-domain web servers (which by now are old technology and an obvious win.) Yes, virtualization does take some extra resources, and you need a disciplined approach to administration to use them successfully in a production environment, but production environments already needed disciplined administration and enough resources - the assertion of the virtual-machine people is that it's actually easier than maintaining multiple boxes, especially given the extremely fast CPUs and cheap RAM available these days.
In a Unix environment, you can argue about whether the basic multi-user permissions environment and extra tricks like jails are enough to provide security in a multi-user multi-application market or whether it's helpful to use virtual machines as well. In a Windows environment, there's really not much question, even with XP-Pro and server versions - there's just not enough help from the OS. But even in a Unix environment, there are applications that want to use specific directories, or specific TCP and UDP port numbers, and virtualization lets you run multiple instances at the same time managed by different people. It also provides you some Least-Privilege-Principle separation of powers between your administrators - you can have one person who needs root to manage the firewall, but doesn't need to muck with the database, and somebody else who needs to control the database but doesn't need to touch the web servers.
For some applications, like virtual colo, virtualization environments really do rock, whether they're VMWare, UML, Xen, or whatever. I've seen people renting out virtual machines for ~$20/month or less, when physical colo costs would be $100, and it works fine (if there's enough cheap RAM) because usually you don't really need a big CPU full-time just to run an email server and web server or whatever.
Running multiple OS's at once is mainly useful in a desktop environment, or for specialized tasks like running an OpenBSD firewall, a Windows domain administration system, and a Linux general-purpose environment including web server and database all on the same box. I agree that it's usually cleaner to run everything in a single environment, even if it's multiple VMs - but there are times that the tools you want to use won't all run on the same OS.
Basically, it's still a kid's toy - it can't fetch you a beer, or find the TV remote, or cook food for you, or carry anything useful. A humanoid form is good for doing a wide range of activities - but at under 2 feet tall, it's not big enough to do any of them, but by trying to act like a bipedal adult, it's also missing the crawling and hand-manipulation skills that a human baby or toddler has or the coordination that a medium-sized dog has.
One of my email service providers lets me filter based on (estimated) country of origin. I don't know anybody in China, Korea, or Brazil, so all of that gets marked spam, but I do know a few people in Japan, so that doesn't get immediately discarded, but does get heavily filtered (because it's usually spam.)
It would be nice if my email provider could let me filter based on language or character set - I don't read Russian, Chinese, Hangul, or Hebrew, so anything in those character sets is spam. The ISP where my email ends up lets individuals whitelist people, but doesn't let me pick per-language SpamAssassin weights (and doesn't want to block those languages because some of his customers do speak them.)
Unix had multitasking years before (and Multics and other predecessors did as well), and Unix 680x0 boxes had it as soon as there were 680x0 boxes. f you'd prefer, you could rate it "+1 Well it's about time" instead....
Culver City's an LA suburb a bit north of LAX. It's flatland, not hilly. I'm sitting in my hotel room using the city's free WiFi right now. Performance isn't great, but I'm on an upper floor, and the hotel people said it really works a lot better down in the lobby. There's a bit of technical description here - there are three Firetide Hotpoint mesh routers fed by a 3 Mbps DSL gateway.
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware:-)
Culver City's an LA suburb a bit north of LAX. It's flatland, not hilly. I'm sitting in my hotel room using the city's free WiFi right now. Performance isn't great, but I'm on an upper floor, and the hotel people said it really works a lot better down in the lobby. There's a bit of technical description here - there are three Firetide Hotpoint mesh routers fed by a 3 Mbps DSL gateway.
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware:-)
Sterno's article and Brew Bird's parent article both have significant technical misunderstandings. First of all, even if there are only two companies providing wire into your house (one telco, one cable), that doesn't mean you only have two ISPs available. The copper wire from the telco may be rented to a DSL provider like Covad or New Edge, who run DSLAMs on it to provide Layer 2 ATM service, or the telco can provide the Layer 2 ATM service, and the layer 2 provider can rent the ATM connectivity to a Layer 3 ISP or aggregator or provide IP services themselves, and the IP provider can either provide Internet connectivity or provide PPPoE or similar tunneling service to another ISP. It's that last ISP who decides what order to put the packets on ATM or PPPoE and set policies about what you can or can't do with your broadband connection, and you've got hundreds of choices of ISPs who sell that kind of service. I use Sonic.net, who get ATM DSL from the former PacBell, who provide that on their copper; many years ago I had business DSL service from AT&T, who got ATM DSL from Covad, who used copper from PacBell.
The big impacts on latency are how far you're going (speed of light is about 100,000 miles/sec in fiber or copper), which isn't affected by what provider you use unless you get backhauled to the other coast or something, how long it takes to put a packet on a wire (depends on the packet size and wire size), and how many packets you have to wait for (at the DSL layer, it mainly depends on how oversold your ISP's regional ATM connections are, and at the IP layer, it depends on what order the packets get put on the wire - do your VOIP packets go first, or do they get stuck waiting for a bunch of BitTorrent or FTP packets?
The newer proposals from the telcos propose splitting ADSL or FTTH bandwidth into two parts - one used to carry Internet and one used to carry television. The pricing models I've seen in the press are mainly clueless about people who'd _want_ to buy a whole 25 Mbps of internet and 0 Mbps of TV; TV needs about 15 Mbps, and they're assuming they'll get to sell you 1.5, 3, or 6 Mbps of internet at prices similar to the current services, and we'll see how long that lasts:-) One channel of HDTV needs about 9 Mbps, and the most cut-throat pricing I've seen for Internet transit bandwidth is about $10/Mbps/month, so don't expect to get unicast any-source Internet access to watch HDTV at prime-time as part of the $19.95 loss-leader special; the ISPs will need to use multicast feeds from the content providers to your telco office.
As far as natural monopolies go, the economics and technology were much different back when Theodore Vail and the other robber barons got government monopolies on local telephone service and on radio broadcasting, and the argument was pretty dubious mercantilism back then (and the unnatural monopolies on wireline and radio services prevented them from competing with each other.) They're much more bogus today, but the regulatory bureaucracies are bigger than ever. I may be an official old geezer by now, but that was still way before my time. However, I _was_ around to see cable TV networks installed in much of the country, and the big issues weren't the real cost of deployment - they were the rent-seeking by towns and counties who were much less concerned about the future of telecommunications competition than they were about whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contracts, and about how much free air time the city council and public-access videos got.
Yes, a couple of telco execs said things about wanting to get money from the big content providers, and got thoroughly spanked by the pundits, but it's not about the backbones - it's very much about the broadband access connections.
If you read the discussions about the telcos' TV-over-Internet proposals, the newer flavors of DSL can deliver about 20-25 Mbps to your home, and the FTTH offers can mostly provide that much shared delivery capacity, and it takes about 15 Mbps to provide an HDTV channel and a few SDTV channels. The telcos are pretty much clueless about people who'd _want_ to have all 25 Mbps for data, and they want to make money selling you television to compete with the cablecos, who are trying to make money selling you voice telephony. If you look at the scalability problems, there's no way that a telco office can support 10000 homes all watching HDTV in prime time with Unicast feeds from upstream - that'd be about 100 Gbps, and 10,000 homes isn't a big central office; they need to run multicast, and even if they do use multicast, a GigE upstream is enough for about 100 channels of HDTV; an OC48 would give them some mixture like 100 HDTV and 500 SDTV or 200/200. So they're expecting that they'll deal with the broadcast content providers the way the cable TV companies do, and sell you 1.5-6 Mbps of Internet service, which (like 640KB) should be enough for anybody.
From a VOIP standpoint, I don't know if they're planning to deploy CoS queuing on broadband or not - it depends a lot on the capabilities of the DSLAMs. The queuing that matters is downstream from the POP to your house - obviously it would be nice if VOIP got priority over web browsing and BitTorrent got lower priority, but they'd have to implement it with some mechanism like IP DSCP or TOS bits rather than trying to parse TCP and UDP port numbers. Most ISPs talk about charging money for implementing CoS - they may or may not allow you to send CoS-marked packets if you're not a subscriber, and won't do differential queuing if you're not, and almost none of them have figured out business models or technical support for different carriers to support CoS at peering points (e.g. what if they don't use the same 4 choices from the 8, 16, or 64 options?)
Dance Dance Immolation is "Dance Dance Revolution. With Flamethrowers. Pointed at you." (See the DDI URL for a picture by Kristen Ankiewicz.) I saw it at The Crucible's recent Fire Arts Exhibition. You don't get flamed every time you miss - it's more like every N times or so, and might depend on whether you or the other person you're playing against is ahead. (Oh, and you do get to wear a fireproof suit...)
OK, occasionally there are cases where you not only care that the utilities are GNU-flavored and the underlying OS is Linux as opposed to BSD or something, but you don't care which Linux, so probably only 99.99% of the uses of "GNU/Linux" are spurious and 0.01% are legitimate:-)
But generally anybody who rants about how you SHOULD use the term isn't saying anything meaningful and can be ignored.
Oh, nonsense, of course it's about credit. Referring to Debian or Mandrake is disambiguation, but referring to GNU/Linux is purely a credit ploy. It's an expanded version of credit - it's bragging about the whole Free-As-In-Speech-Not-Beer Software movement, and not just abour RMS, but it's definitely about credit.
As far as research goes, do you even have your Mentally Contaminated button? I've worked on far more non-Linux variants on Unix than I have on Linuxes - I started with v6 using Mashey Shell, then v7 with Bourne Shell (and csh, and later a variety of bsh and ksh versions, Adventure Shell, etc.), then System III, VENIX, XENIX, several AT&T 4.x, 4.1BSD, System V, VR2, VR2.0p beta, a bunch of SunOSes on 68K, 386i, and Sparc platforms, later Solaris, at least three different windowing systems on Sun (not counting different versions of X - I'm talking things like NeWS), a number of dodgy Unix ports to IBM and Amdahl mainframes, the AT&T System V/MLS multi-level secure Unix system, lots and lots of POSIX certification stuff, V8, several different SVR4 variations as it was fractionating, 4.3BSD, Onyx, QNX, Pyramid, Symmetric, the AT&T 7300 Coherent things, a wide range of 3B20, 3B2 and followons, and then there were a bunch of things I dealt with on paper for evaluation but didn't get to do hands-on with, like Masscomp, Convex, Perkin-Elmer and a bunch of other real-time vendors, actually read the 4.3BSD book that's on my shelf, and that doesn't count the non-Unix-like OS's I've dealt with or the N different Unix-like environments I've used on non-Unix OSs or various post-Unix things Rob Pike built. Eventually Linux showed up, though I probably didn't play with it until after I was done with SVR4 versions in the mid-90s. I've known a number of the Cygnus people from years before they started Cygnus, played magtape frisbee with ESR, made bizdev proposals to Transmeta, seen the "we are under attack" email train nearly live, had RTM's father crack into my computer accounts, probably didn't actually meet RMS until the early 90s, though I've known Len Tower (and emacs) a lot longer.
The GNU stuff was very helpful in porting Unix-like environments to open source, and was good motivation for a lot of people, but the BSD work was also really critical, and so was the X Window System effort - "mechanism not policy" may not be the best policy, but it's allowed a lot of very different window manager development. GCC has been a really useful tool - and it couldn't really have happened without the Portable C Compiler before it. A lot of the userland tools are GNU versions of traditional Unix tools these days, but that's not that critical for most applications, or for differentiating between different Linux distros; things like file systems and window managers and TCP/IP stacks and packet filtering are at least as important.
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The real questions are how much you trust your users not to mess around with the box and why you've got a policy against putting in extra firewall boxes if you need them. The answer may be to get better management
I'd really like to run a virtual machine environment, so I've got Linux or OpenBSD underneath and a Windows client OS on top for when I want to run Windows applications. There seem to be a range of choices if I want Linux client OS, including Xen, VMWare, User-Mode Linux, etc., and some for BSD client OS, but is the VMWare server for Linux the only free choice if I want to support Windows clients? Free-beer is good enough, and I'm not a gamer, so accelerated graphics performance isn't critical either. If platform matters, I'm running Intel Celeron, so some of the newer hardware tricks probably aren't available.
Fortunately, a lot of that market has gone away, now that the Internet boom's over and the early-adopter spammers either did or didn't make money, and it's mostly run by professionals with armies of zombies instead of armies of wannabees spammers.
On the other hand, instead of Johhny being the scammer selling "marketing" services to the sucker manufacturer, sometimes he was the sucker and the manufacturer was the scammer, selling Johnny the case of product and the spamware tools and some lists of "qualified leads".
One of the early problems with LSD and mental illness was that hospitals would treat badly tripping people the way they would anybody else who was highly disoriented and uncontrollable - dose them up with heavy tranquilizers, which in those days meant Thorazine, a mean nasty drug if ever there was one. Today there's Haldol, which isn't the nicest stuff either, but at least it doesn't cause anywhere near as much long-term damage as Thorazine.
Alcoholism is especially common among the mentally ill - seems to be the popular way to self-medicate manic cycles. A friend of mine who was hypomanic would use marijuana if she could get it, or else lots of rum, but eventually got on some more precise medication.
As the drug warriors will tell you, today's high-priced California Sensemilla is 10-20 times as strong as 1960s cheap ditchweed (and Hashish was always about that strong, and so was the stuff Cheech&Chong used to sing about.) But that means it's much safer, because you're smoking 5-10% as much green leafy stuff when you want to get high. The drug warriors tell you that the same 60s ditchweed has three times the tar as tobacco - so if you smoke two packs of dope a day, every day, you're probably at a higher risk of cancer, as well as at a much higher risk of doing something stupid because you're too stoned. Doesn't mean that a couple of joints at a concert are going to trash you, especially because (as other people have said) it's a bronchodilator.
However, if you're worried about lung cancer, or general lung-burn from hot smoke, you could protect your lungs by using a bong or a waterpipe, if the evil drug warriors hadn't banned the things and made people switch over to those little tiny easily-hidden pipes. Or you can make brownies, or alcohol extracts, though those have somewhat different effects than smoking. And blunts are, needless to say, a really stupid idea.
Tobacco addicts don't give their allegience to Marlboro or a particular tobacco store just because they need their two-packs-a-day fix, nor did Heroin (trademark of Bayer) users in a free market. Back when most of the amphetamines were legal, you'd get them from the drugstore with a doctor's prescription; you might do what your doctor told you or prefer to use your corner drugstore, but it wasn't an allegience sort of thing. (Now, I do like one of my local liquor stores because they've got good prices and a good selection of single-malts....)
But yes, it's largely about control, whether it's banning opium smoking or pushing Ritalin or keeping blacks in jail. But a lot of it has become a self-sustaining industry, keeping cops and prison guards and the military busy, and leading to lots of real crimes which also keep cops and prison guards busy - here in California, prison populations grew about 10fold during the 1980s-90s, and the prison guards' union is as big a campaign contributor as the teachers' union.
The drug war wasn't just for Mexicans and Negroes - it was also about the Yellow Peril of those Chinese immigrants coming over here to work on railroads and gold mines and smoking opium to deal with the harsh living conditions. Banning opium was part of the rest of the bandwagon of banning Asian immigration after the railroads were mostly built, banning Asian land ownership, and similar racist abuses. Friends in Canada tell me that their legislators were just as blatant about it as America's.
Nonsense - you could just as much say that about the Pentagon. People usually want to kill strangers because they're really angry, or because they're at war and their leaders have whipped them into a killing frenzy ("Shock and Awe, Yee-hah!" isn't much different from "Jihad against the Great Satan!").
And it's not just religious fanatics who are willing to get killed in the process of killing their enemies.
The Bush Administration policies of attacking Iraq for no good reason, supporting Israel's apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank, and generally making arrogant inflammatory speeches, have been very effective in pissing off lots of people who don't have standing armies to join, and the Pentagon's overwhelming military effectiveness has demonstrated that conventional armies don't stand a chance against us in a conventional war. They've also demonstrated that they didn't do any decent planning for conquering a country once they've stomped the army, and that they're not very good at it, and that's inviting lots of meddlers to come to Iraq and fight the Great Satan, even though pre-war Iraq was the kind of secular corrupt military that the purity-minded fanatics hated almost as much as they hated the US and Israel.
And if they're not going to allow us to carry liquids on the plane, they really should make it up to us by letting us bring dope.
The wifi really isn't consistently reliable up here on the 5th floor :-)
Did we RTSameFA? While the IBM article wasn't a tutorial on how to program the things, it covered a lot of the basic technology options out there. It also answered my fundamental question about them, which is "Is that all a Mash-up is?" ("Yes, that's all" - it's a Web-2.0-Jargonification for handing data from one source to a program that does something with it, and a little bit of techno-wrapper like using XML and maybe getting the user's browser to do most of the data handling. There's nothing fundamentally deep or non-obvious about it, unlike, say, the connections in mashing up "The Wizard of Oz" with "Dark Side Of The Moon", but it can still be really useful sometimes.) It also had some good commentary on issues like whether you can depend on the user running Javascript and ActiveEvilX.
In a Unix environment, you can argue about whether the basic multi-user permissions environment and extra tricks like jails are enough to provide security in a multi-user multi-application market or whether it's helpful to use virtual machines as well. In a Windows environment, there's really not much question, even with XP-Pro and server versions - there's just not enough help from the OS. But even in a Unix environment, there are applications that want to use specific directories, or specific TCP and UDP port numbers, and virtualization lets you run multiple instances at the same time managed by different people. It also provides you some Least-Privilege-Principle separation of powers between your administrators - you can have one person who needs root to manage the firewall, but doesn't need to muck with the database, and somebody else who needs to control the database but doesn't need to touch the web servers.
For some applications, like virtual colo, virtualization environments really do rock, whether they're VMWare, UML, Xen, or whatever. I've seen people renting out virtual machines for ~$20/month or less, when physical colo costs would be $100, and it works fine (if there's enough cheap RAM) because usually you don't really need a big CPU full-time just to run an email server and web server or whatever.
Running multiple OS's at once is mainly useful in a desktop environment, or for specialized tasks like running an OpenBSD firewall, a Windows domain administration system, and a Linux general-purpose environment including web server and database all on the same box. I agree that it's usually cleaner to run everything in a single environment, even if it's multiple VMs - but there are times that the tools you want to use won't all run on the same OS.
It's too small to use as a shabbas robot - sorry.
Basically, it's still a kid's toy - it can't fetch you a beer, or find the TV remote, or cook food for you, or carry anything useful. A humanoid form is good for doing a wide range of activities - but at under 2 feet tall, it's not big enough to do any of them, but by trying to act like a bipedal adult, it's also missing the crawling and hand-manipulation skills that a human baby or toddler has or the coordination that a medium-sized dog has.
It would be nice if my email provider could let me filter based on language or character set - I don't read Russian, Chinese, Hangul, or Hebrew, so anything in those character sets is spam. The ISP where my email ends up lets individuals whitelist people, but doesn't let me pick per-language SpamAssassin weights (and doesn't want to block those languages because some of his customers do speak them.)
Unix had multitasking years before (and Multics and other predecessors did as well), and Unix 680x0 boxes had it as soon as there were 680x0 boxes. f you'd prefer, you could rate it "+1 Well it's about time" instead....
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware :-)
The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware :-)
The big impacts on latency are how far you're going (speed of light is about 100,000 miles/sec in fiber or copper), which isn't affected by what provider you use unless you get backhauled to the other coast or something, how long it takes to put a packet on a wire (depends on the packet size and wire size), and how many packets you have to wait for (at the DSL layer, it mainly depends on how oversold your ISP's regional ATM connections are, and at the IP layer, it depends on what order the packets get put on the wire - do your VOIP packets go first, or do they get stuck waiting for a bunch of BitTorrent or FTP packets?
The newer proposals from the telcos propose splitting ADSL or FTTH bandwidth into two parts - one used to carry Internet and one used to carry television. The pricing models I've seen in the press are mainly clueless about people who'd _want_ to buy a whole 25 Mbps of internet and 0 Mbps of TV; TV needs about 15 Mbps, and they're assuming they'll get to sell you 1.5, 3, or 6 Mbps of internet at prices similar to the current services, and we'll see how long that lasts :-) One channel of HDTV needs about 9 Mbps, and the most cut-throat pricing I've seen for Internet transit bandwidth is about $10/Mbps/month, so don't expect to get unicast any-source Internet access to watch HDTV at prime-time as part of the $19.95 loss-leader special; the ISPs will need to use multicast feeds from the content providers to your telco office.
As far as natural monopolies go, the economics and technology were much different back when Theodore Vail and the other robber barons got government monopolies on local telephone service and on radio broadcasting, and the argument was pretty dubious mercantilism back then (and the unnatural monopolies on wireline and radio services prevented them from competing with each other.) They're much more bogus today, but the regulatory bureaucracies are bigger than ever. I may be an official old geezer by now, but that was still way before my time. However, I _was_ around to see cable TV networks installed in much of the country, and the big issues weren't the real cost of deployment - they were the rent-seeking by towns and counties who were much less concerned about the future of telecommunications competition than they were about whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contracts, and about how much free air time the city council and public-access videos got.
If you read the discussions about the telcos' TV-over-Internet proposals, the newer flavors of DSL can deliver about 20-25 Mbps to your home, and the FTTH offers can mostly provide that much shared delivery capacity, and it takes about 15 Mbps to provide an HDTV channel and a few SDTV channels. The telcos are pretty much clueless about people who'd _want_ to have all 25 Mbps for data, and they want to make money selling you television to compete with the cablecos, who are trying to make money selling you voice telephony. If you look at the scalability problems, there's no way that a telco office can support 10000 homes all watching HDTV in prime time with Unicast feeds from upstream - that'd be about 100 Gbps, and 10,000 homes isn't a big central office; they need to run multicast, and even if they do use multicast, a GigE upstream is enough for about 100 channels of HDTV; an OC48 would give them some mixture like 100 HDTV and 500 SDTV or 200/200. So they're expecting that they'll deal with the broadcast content providers the way the cable TV companies do, and sell you 1.5-6 Mbps of Internet service, which (like 640KB) should be enough for anybody.
From a VOIP standpoint, I don't know if they're planning to deploy CoS queuing on broadband or not - it depends a lot on the capabilities of the DSLAMs. The queuing that matters is downstream from the POP to your house - obviously it would be nice if VOIP got priority over web browsing and BitTorrent got lower priority, but they'd have to implement it with some mechanism like IP DSCP or TOS bits rather than trying to parse TCP and UDP port numbers. Most ISPs talk about charging money for implementing CoS - they may or may not allow you to send CoS-marked packets if you're not a subscriber, and won't do differential queuing if you're not, and almost none of them have figured out business models or technical support for different carriers to support CoS at peering points (e.g. what if they don't use the same 4 choices from the 8, 16, or 64 options?)
Dance Dance Immolation is "Dance Dance Revolution. With Flamethrowers. Pointed at you." (See the DDI URL for a picture by Kristen Ankiewicz.) I saw it at The Crucible's recent Fire Arts Exhibition. You don't get flamed every time you miss - it's more like every N times or so, and might depend on whether you or the other person you're playing against is ahead. (Oh, and you do get to wear a fireproof suit...)
But generally anybody who rants about how you SHOULD use the term isn't saying anything meaningful and can be ignored.
As far as research goes, do you even have your Mentally Contaminated button? I've worked on far more non-Linux variants on Unix than I have on Linuxes - I started with v6 using Mashey Shell, then v7 with Bourne Shell (and csh, and later a variety of bsh and ksh versions, Adventure Shell, etc.), then System III, VENIX, XENIX, several AT&T 4.x, 4.1BSD, System V, VR2, VR2.0p beta, a bunch of SunOSes on 68K, 386i, and Sparc platforms, later Solaris, at least three different windowing systems on Sun (not counting different versions of X - I'm talking things like NeWS), a number of dodgy Unix ports to IBM and Amdahl mainframes, the AT&T System V/MLS multi-level secure Unix system, lots and lots of POSIX certification stuff, V8, several different SVR4 variations as it was fractionating, 4.3BSD, Onyx, QNX, Pyramid, Symmetric, the AT&T 7300 Coherent things, a wide range of 3B20, 3B2 and followons, and then there were a bunch of things I dealt with on paper for evaluation but didn't get to do hands-on with, like Masscomp, Convex, Perkin-Elmer and a bunch of other real-time vendors, actually read the 4.3BSD book that's on my shelf, and that doesn't count the non-Unix-like OS's I've dealt with or the N different Unix-like environments I've used on non-Unix OSs or various post-Unix things Rob Pike built. Eventually Linux showed up, though I probably didn't play with it until after I was done with SVR4 versions in the mid-90s. I've known a number of the Cygnus people from years before they started Cygnus, played magtape frisbee with ESR, made bizdev proposals to Transmeta, seen the "we are under attack" email train nearly live, had RTM's father crack into my computer accounts, probably didn't actually meet RMS until the early 90s, though I've known Len Tower (and emacs) a lot longer.
The GNU stuff was very helpful in porting Unix-like environments to open source, and was good motivation for a lot of people, but the BSD work was also really critical, and so was the X Window System effort - "mechanism not policy" may not be the best policy, but it's allowed a lot of very different window manager development. GCC has been a really useful tool - and it couldn't really have happened without the Portable C Compiler before it. A lot of the userland tools are GNU versions of traditional Unix tools these days, but that's not that critical for most applications, or for differentiating between different Linux distros; things like file systems and window managers and TCP/IP stacks and packet filtering are at least as important.