I work for a carrier, and we occasionally use 18GHz or 38GHz equipment to provide access or access diversity. It'll carry up to an OC3 or so depending on exactly which equipment you use, requires line of sight, etc. The limiting factor for us as a carrier is that we're expected to offer a service level agreement, and the amount of heavy rain an area gets determines how long a distance we can go before we drop below 99.99% uptime. So Phoenix can get up to 10 miles or so - Seattle's a lot lower (though not as low as you'd expect, because they get lots of light rain. Houston's worse.) Most of the US older-48 states get 2-3 miles.
Then there's backhoe fade. Guys named Bubba driving heavy equipment are not your friends....
I strongly agree about not trusting the transmission equipment to provide your security. Depending on the bandwidth, you either need a pair of Linksys routers or maybe a pair of PCs running Linux to do IPSEC for you. It's cheap, trustable, standard, and reliable. It may bloat your bandwidth a bit for some applications like VOIP, but that's generally not a big deal (or if it is, you're running your bandwidth too hot anyway.)
Presence Servers in VOIP, IM have Prior Art
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Net2phone Sues Skype
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· Score: 5, Informative
The summary of their patent lists two methods - the first one uses a presence server, and the second does something hokey with email. The claims in their patent list provide lots of gory detail, but are pretty difficult to read.
Many Instant Messaging protocols and the major standard VOIP protocols use presence servers to keep track of the users. When you want to call somebody, you check with the server to see if they're logged in (and optionally whether they're busy), get their IP address, and connect to them, or alternatively the server tells the destination client that you're going to call them or that you want them to call you. (There are other kinds of IM protocols that funnel all the messages through the central server, and some of the protocols support relay servers which let you connect directly within an administrative zone and go through the relay to get to other zones.)
H.323, dating back to 1996, is the most common VOIP standard, and it uses a presence server to communicate the IP address (and also UDP port number) of the endpoints. SIP is a newer protocol that everybody _says_ they're going to support, and many vendors have their own proprietary protocols (e.g. Cisco Skinny) that either predate H.323 or provide additional functions that it doesn't use, but basically almost everybody out there supports H.323 at least as a fallback. SIP's proxy servers make it a much more flexible protocol for the long run.
At least based on the summary and an initial reading of about half the claims section, their first method doesn't have any fundamentally new concepts. It might implement some of the standard concepts in novel ways, and perhaps that's what they're arguing, but at the level of the summary there nothing new there. Their second method says in the summary that they use email, and unless they mean something other than SMTP, it's a pretty crude mechanism to use for automated processing, but saying "email your IP address to the human at the other end so he can read it and call you" doesn't strike me as either novel or non-obvious to someone skilled in the trade.
I'm not currently using Knoppix on DVD, but having much larger capacity than CDROM versions is convenient for some things. CDROM Knoppix has been a save-your-ass part of my repair toolkit for years now, and it's also useful for demos of various things.
Leaving the Supreme Court behind
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Back to the Bunker
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Sounds like they were only concerned about preserving the Executive Branch, rather than protecting American citizens by making sure the Supreme Court's still around.
Civil Defense planning for large-scale nuclear war had faded out long before the Cold War ended, but it was always pretty much a joke; the dried food in the bomb shelters has mostly faded out, and in spite of Reagan-era bureaucrats saying you should dig a 3-foot hole and cover it with a door, there wasn't much that could be done. But terrorist attacks aren't likely to hit the whole country - they'd necessarily be limited in scope, and Washington and NYC are the obvious targets, which perhaps a couple of small random actions elsewhere for fun.
DC basically has government workers, Beltway Bandits, museums, and black people. So the government gets its high-level workers out of town, the Beltway Bandits can do their own planning or telecommute, museums are too heavy to move, and George Bush doesn't care about black people.
This past week there were a number of articles in Google News about studies showing that marijuana doesn't cause lung cancer. The earlier publicity saying that it did was from studies that showed that if you smoked one pack a day of marijuana you'd get about as much tar as three packs of tobacco - I don't know about you, but I'd _really_ have trouble lighting the joints if I were smoking that much:-)
But marijuana today is much safer than marijuana in the 1960s - in the US, it's mainly high-potency buds, rather than low-potency leaves, so you're smoking a tenth as much green plant material to get high. Europeans seem to smoke it as hashish instead, probably because their supplies are imported from places like Morocco where you can grow it outside and pay off the police rather than being locally grown inside or on hidden farms, but either way the concentrated stuff seems to be more useful commercially. I did once meet some Americans out at a hot spring who were extracting hashish oil from leaves - they'd soak it in butane to dissolve the THC, squeeze it out, and evaporate the butane using the heat from the hot spring so they didn't need to risk using fire.
Either way, you ought to be protecting your lungs by using a decent bong instead of one of those little pipes.
About 10 years ago I had a customer who wanted to set up movie stores like this - they'd always have the current movies in stock, and they'd always have every movie that had ever been made. (They'd done a similar model with record stores, and had some fast digital-to-VHS burning technology.) The main catch was that you needed an OC3 network connection (155 Mbps) to be able to do 5-minute downloads, which was laughably unrealistic at the time, as opposed to today when it's only fairly unrealistic. Since this was before DVDs, they also had issues with the costs of data storage for movies they had cached - 500GB was still pretty big, though there were some digital tape technologies that might work if you had a robot, or you could copy videotapes if you didn't mind the quality hit.
On-Demand downloads weren't very practical - but pre-loading movies as they're released works quite well, especially since that's what you're most likely to sell. A 1 Mbps network connection lets you download 75 GB a week, which is about 15 movies, depending on resolution, 2-disk-sets, etc. Hollywood seldom produces more than 10 movies a week, and Bollywood's pretty similar. (The pr0n industry produces a lot more.) So if you've got a cable modem or decent DSL connection, you can keep ahead of the mainstream movies and have some bandwidth available for CD-quality ad-hoc downloads. Network availability can be a problem - the obvious place to put DVD burner kiosks is in malls, but they often don't have cable, and they're usually far away from telco offices so DSL bandwidth is lower. On the other hand, grocery stores are usually in/near residential neighborhoods, so they've usually got cable nearby and often have decent DSL.
The webmaster isn't giving up space on the website, because he's providing the same material to authorized users. (Ok, there's a little bit of space consumed by username registry and logfile entries, but that's really de minimis, considering that disk drives cost $1/GB these days.) The bandwidth might cost something, though if the website has ads on it (banner, Googletext, whatever), you might contend that the webmaster is making a profit showing the material to the unauthorized viewer.
He's definitely fearmongering for more budget - but it's a lot more than that, because all of these things reinforce each other. When the public is afraid and angry because the government got caught with a policy of widespread unwarranted wiretapping, fearmongering helps divert the anger, and Angermongering (against child pornographers and other scum) helps get them more budget as well. More budget for "anti-cyberterrorism" really means more budget for tools and regulations that let them eavesdrop on more of the Internet and Telephone Networks, which can be used to stalk more of the Administration's political enemies (including real criminals and real terrorists as well as leakers, liberals, Quakers and journalists), and catching more enemies gives them more political things to brag about, whether it's really child pornographers or just skr1p7 k1dd13z, and it helps divert the public's attention and anger from the spying they're doing on citizens. And it gets them more budget, so more tools, so more successes, so more positive PR, rinse&repeat.
And it doesn't matter if they don't succeed as long as they brag a lot, because the public _knows_ there are more real scum out there than they can catch. And a scumbag who escapes or a cyberterrorist who hasn't done enough to get caught at it yet are both fine publicity (as long as they don't look like bleeding incompetents in the process) - it means they obviously need _more_ powers so they can catch the next one.
You've got the wrong childrens' story here. The Bush Administration has been crying "Wolf Wolf" since they started running for office, and their military-FBI-spook allies in Washington have been crying it for years before that. Their most important political strategy has been to keep announcing things that Americans should be afraid of and announcing that they're strong decisive leaders who can protect us from the enemies that are trying to kill your children and hate your freedom. (Their other main strategy has been to preemptively smear their potential opponents, usually by saying that they're not strong enough or decisive enough to protect our families from our enemies as well as saying they don't share our values - "Kerry the Flip-flopper" trumps "Kerry the War Hero" any day, much more effectively than "Kerry the Liberal".) It doesn't matter that the wolf didn't show up this time, or that the "credible evidence" or "terrorist chatter" didn't turn into an attack, because We Scared The Wolf Away Again, But There Are Still More Wolves To Be Afraid Of.
Cindy Sheehan was really effective against Bush for a while because she's a strong family-protection figure who made it clear that Bush had endangered her family rather than protecting it. And Katrina was even more effective, because it demonstrated that Bush wasn't decisive, or strong, or competent, when faced with an actual threat that he couldn't control but could have responded to. Osama bin Laden was just fine - if you're crying Wolf Wolf and a real Wolf shows up on occasion, that demonstrates that your strong leadership is needed just like you said.
America's Army is a propaganda tool\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ "... an accurate portrayal of Soldier experiences.." video game put out by the US Army. Does it count as encouraging violence, or does it count as permitted "political education"?
There's a lot of scientific programming that's complex, but a lot of it really involves doing lots of setup and transformation twiddling that hands big chunks of data to a standard package like a matrix multiplier or a Fourier Transformer or Linear Programmer etc. that really burns most of the CPU cycles. Or maybe you're doing graphics and it's a ray tracer / shader / lighter / etc., but you've still got one side of your program that's harder-to-parallelize complexity and another that's just raw standard number crunching.
So if somebody writes a couple of dozen standard routines that crank the number-crunching part of the Cell processor well, and there's a halfway-adequate compiler for the conventional-processing side, you can still get a big win from a small budget.
I did a lot of scientific-style programming on VAXes in the early-mid 80s, and my iPod Shuffle has more CPU, more disk-equivalent, faster I/O bus, and probably more RAM (? not sure, but all the non-shuffle versions do.) Our applications sped up by 2 orders of magnitude once we could get enough RAM:-)
RTFA again. Wombat isn't a "massive performance gain", though there are some functions for which it's several times faster and therefore there may be some real-world applications for which it could be faster. If you look at the AIM7 benchmarks, which are modeling average workloads for a typical Unix system, Wombat was actually 2-3% slower than Linux, in spite of having those functions go faster. That's still really pretty good, given the reputation for slowness than microkernels have. If they can port those optimizations to Linux, then maybe Linux would be even faster.
Go read the article again (the article with the actual numbers). Yes, there are lots of functions for which the Virtual version is a lot faster, at least on the ARM platforms, so there may be specific kinds of applications where it really rocks - I'd look at routing and real-time control.
But the AIM7 benchmark, which models typical general-purpose Unix system usage, has consistently faster results for regular Linux than for the Wombat virtualized version, even though there may be individual functions that are faster. The cool thing, though, is that the performance hit is only about 2-3% - not bad at all for a microkernel with some provable security and reliability features.
It's 2006, and they've been mining data since 2001 - that's five years! Now, they probably got some of this data after 2001, but that still means they've been doing this for a long time without getting caught - outrageous!
You can get 4GB USB sticks or Compact Flash for about $100-150 these days, and CF-to-PCMCIA adapters are ~$20. Most newer BIOSes support booting from USB, so if you've got a desktop machine you can just use a USB stick as your primary disk. For laptops, that's not mechanically safe if you want to carry them around - you'd probably want to do something with a PCMCIA adapter for CF (I haven't tried that yet), though I suppose you could use one of those card-adapter-on-a-wire things if you don't mind getting unplugged occasionally.
Even 2GB should be enough to keep your root filesystems and the programs you use frequently, so you can get the fast booting and low hard-disk usage, and even without load-leveling drivers you can still run read-mostly apps without worrying about write-cycle limits. If you can use a compressed disk format for part of your space, it'll let you do a lot more (compare with Knoppix on a 700 MB CDROM.) That's not hard with Linux, though with Windows you'd probably either need to use two separate drive letters unless you can get NTFS to run on the flash drive.
Outlook Express is a lousy analogy - Exchange is a better one, even though Outlook and Outlook Express were the easier bits to exploit. Sendmail's finally become fairly secure the last few years, but during the 80s it was pretty much the Mos Eisely of networking applications, a wretched hive of scum and villainy in a big monolithic clump running with root privileges as well. Leave aside the complexity of the sendmail.cf file, which you could write Turing Machine programs in - that at least had a certain baroque style to it, as well as keeping most users from doing anything much more dangerous than setting machine names. And because it ran as root, every hole in sendmail tended to be a system-takeover exploit.
The System V mailers and the V8 mailers (AT&T Bell Labs Research stuff between Version 7 and Plan 9) mostly ran with group-mail privileges instead of root, and the Upas derivatives had simple and elegant rewrite rules. Both sendmail and the AT&T versions dealt with UUCP as long as that mattered, which was another can of worms (though Honey DanBer cleaned it up a lot), but sendmail couldn't really defend itself well against UUCP problems.
As far as monoculture goes, the BSD side of the world almost all ran sendmail, the System V world mostly didn't (but most of the Internet ran BSD variants including SunOS), and it took a while for SMTP to supplant UUCP, largely because of the Acceptable Use Policies that kept the Internet quasi-non-commercial until the Commercial Internet Exchange opened it up.
RAM also burns a lot of heat - if you're using compact flash, you should be able to get away with less RAM in return for accesses to the flash. Older USB equipment can't boot from USB, but check your BIOS to see if you can. If you can't, you can still set things up to use a flash stick for much of your disk.
The 750GB drives are still a bit pricey - 500GB drives are about $250, so that's about $500/TB. Of course, you can't just pile up 60 of the things on a shelf in a rack - you need some kind of computers to drive them, and you can probably handle about 4 drives on a $200 motherboard (depending on whether SATA's available), so it's maybe an extra 10%-20% for the computers and power supplies.
End users really can't do much to protect themselves against DDOS, because at most they can discard packets _after_ they get delivered across their access lines, and robot zombie armies can deliver gigabits per second of attack traffic that'll melt anybody much smaller than a Tier 2 ISP or Google. But ISPs can grab the traffic while it's still on their backbone, at the gigabits per second level, and feed it to cleanup servers like Cisco's Riverhead and only deliver the genuine-looking stuff down to the target. (Some kinds of attacks are easier to clean, e.g. UDP-based smurfing.) Doesn't mean that it's a cheap way to do things, but it's about the only way to get enough scalability to defend against a big attack. (The alternative is to have a broad distributed network, e.g. thousands of small servers or small relays, which might be run cooperatively to protect multiple potential victims at once, or to be an extremely agile moving target, able to keep your friends up to date on your location faster than the attacker can do it.)
The real subtle nasty DDOS attacks, of course, are the ones that use the structure of the target's site, e.g. filling out the target's forms with bogus information, which takes much less bandwidth to make a much bigger impact than simple shutdown. This is what Blue was doing - I hope now that they've had to stop, that they'll at least publish a good story about it.
BlueFrog, like SETI, like Napster, all have central control systems and distributed workload, whether the workload is CPU-crunching or transmitting copies of music or filling in spammer's forms or whatever. The central server's still a target.
Laws only help if the spammers all live within the same jurisdiction as the lawmakers, can't move around much, and are easy to trace. They don't, and they're not, and the Internet and cheap foreign corporations make it easy to move to anywhere in the world without leaving home so that even if they do get caught, the perp that gets caught is just a paper shell corporation in a file-drawer, not the cracker in his double-wide who's the stockholder.
Spam laws mainly let politicians claim to be Doing Something, and they at best encourage spammers to do a better job of hiding, so it's harder to identify and block their stuff (though filters and blocklists do the same thing.)
Most of the ISP installation disks out there are installing PPPoE on their victims\\\\\\customers and also including versions of IE with logo-branded decorations on them. PPPoE is an ugly-hack protocol that makes it easier for ISPs to force end users to log in (and therefore makes it easier to block customers who aren't paying their bills and do more traffic accounting or rate-limiting.) I forget if MCI or UUNET were the originators of it, but a number of other ISPs have picked it up. DSL is really ATM underneath, so you can simply run IP native over Layer 2, but their are ISPs who like the extra control, or who don't want to buy ATM all the way back to their head end, so they use PPPoE instead. (My home DSL is from Sonic.net, who are using SBC for the Layer 2 connectivity, and they run native, and tell you NOT to install the PPPoE setup disk.)
But there's no reason to accuse them of bugging you or other bogus FUD just because they want PPPoE. Linux doesn't need the disk because it already has PPPoE drivers available - Windows doesn't (or at least didn't), and Linux users can be trusted to type in the configuration commands correctly or hack them until they're working. There probably are some ISPs that like to include spyware, but for most of them it's just making sure that their branding is out there and making sure that the kinds of users who can't get the coffee-cup holder on their PC to stop auto-ejecting at 12:00 do still get connected. Also, except for encrypted payload, the ISPs can see everything from their end of the connection anyway.
Can't bug them too hard for not having a graphical browser, since X Windows has only been running for a week (:-), but does anybody know if there's work on porting Firefox or other graphical browser to Minix?
More importantly, what hardware is supported? The FAQ talks about 386-or-better, disks, RAM, and Ethernet, but doesn't talk about video cards, PCMCIA, or sound cards, which are typically the problem areas. The machine I'd really like to run a lightweight operating system on is an old laptop - is it likely that Minix will be able to recognize the fairly lame graphics system, and is it easy to test X from the CD so I don't have to install the whole thing first?
My current 1987 Chevy van needed a new engine after ~110,000 miles, and the new one isn't quite an exact match for the old one. Every once in a while I'll drive it in ways that the engine behaviour doesn't look right to the on-board computer (e.g. accelerating uphill at highway speed to pass somebody) and it'll turn the "Check Engine Soon" light on. Nothing particularly wrong, but it won't turn off unless I shut off the car, so I'll usually reboot it the next time I'm stopped.
My first Chevy van was an old beater '71, the first "second vehicle" we could afford after college, 80,000 miles, only wrecked badly once, then used for salt-water fishing. Being a Chevy, the electrical system would occasionally gronk out, and I'd have to put it into neutral and shut the engine off and on while driving down the road. Later the neutral safety switch died, and rather than replace it my garage recommended that I just wire around it, so I no longer have to put it in neutral to reboot.
I don't play games much, but NetHack really picked a good mixture of playability, plot, twitchiness, and portability. I might use the graphics overlay a bit more if my laptop screen had more pixels, but colored text mode is really just fine. You don't need 5.1 sound if all the sound comes from your imagination...
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Then there's backhoe fade. Guys named Bubba driving heavy equipment are not your friends....
I strongly agree about not trusting the transmission equipment to provide your security.
Depending on the bandwidth, you either need a pair of Linksys routers or maybe a pair of PCs running Linux to do IPSEC for you. It's cheap, trustable, standard, and reliable. It may bloat your bandwidth a bit for some applications like VOIP, but that's generally not a big deal (or if it is, you're running your bandwidth too hot anyway.)
Many Instant Messaging protocols and the major standard VOIP protocols use presence servers to keep track of the users. When you want to call somebody, you check with the server to see if they're logged in (and optionally whether they're busy), get their IP address, and connect to them, or alternatively the server tells the destination client that you're going to call them or that you want them to call you. (There are other kinds of IM protocols that funnel all the messages through the central server, and some of the protocols support relay servers which let you connect directly within an administrative zone and go through the relay to get to other zones.)
H.323, dating back to 1996, is the most common VOIP standard, and it uses a presence server to communicate the IP address (and also UDP port number) of the endpoints. SIP is a newer protocol that everybody _says_ they're going to support, and many vendors have their own proprietary protocols (e.g. Cisco Skinny) that either predate H.323 or provide additional functions that it doesn't use, but basically almost everybody out there supports H.323 at least as a fallback. SIP's proxy servers make it a much more flexible protocol for the long run.
At least based on the summary and an initial reading of about half the claims section, their first method doesn't have any fundamentally new concepts. It might implement some of the standard concepts in novel ways, and perhaps that's what they're arguing, but at the level of the summary there nothing new there. Their second method says in the summary that they use email, and unless they mean something other than SMTP, it's a pretty crude mechanism to use for automated processing, but saying "email your IP address to the human at the other end so he can read it and call you" doesn't strike me as either novel or non-obvious to someone skilled in the trade.
I'm not currently using Knoppix on DVD, but having much larger capacity than CDROM versions is convenient for some things. CDROM Knoppix has been a save-your-ass part of my repair toolkit for years now, and it's also useful for demos of various things.
Civil Defense planning for large-scale nuclear war had faded out long before the Cold War ended, but it was always pretty much a joke; the dried food in the bomb shelters has mostly faded out, and in spite of Reagan-era bureaucrats saying you should dig a 3-foot hole and cover it with a door, there wasn't much that could be done. But terrorist attacks aren't likely to hit the whole country - they'd necessarily be limited in scope, and Washington and NYC are the obvious targets, which perhaps a couple of small random actions elsewhere for fun.
DC basically has government workers, Beltway Bandits, museums, and black people. So the government gets its high-level workers out of town, the Beltway Bandits can do their own planning or telecommute, museums are too heavy to move, and George Bush doesn't care about black people.
But marijuana today is much safer than marijuana in the 1960s - in the US, it's mainly high-potency buds, rather than low-potency leaves, so you're smoking a tenth as much green plant material to get high. Europeans seem to smoke it as hashish instead, probably because their supplies are imported from places like Morocco where you can grow it outside and pay off the police rather than being locally grown inside or on hidden farms, but either way the concentrated stuff seems to be more useful commercially. I did once meet some Americans out at a hot spring who were extracting hashish oil from leaves - they'd soak it in butane to dissolve the THC, squeeze it out, and evaporate the butane using the heat from the hot spring so they didn't need to risk using fire.
Either way, you ought to be protecting your lungs by using a decent bong instead of one of those little pipes.
On-Demand downloads weren't very practical - but pre-loading movies as they're released works quite well, especially since that's what you're most likely to sell. A 1 Mbps network connection lets you download 75 GB a week, which is about 15 movies, depending on resolution, 2-disk-sets, etc. Hollywood seldom produces more than 10 movies a week, and Bollywood's pretty similar. (The pr0n industry produces a lot more.) So if you've got a cable modem or decent DSL connection, you can keep ahead of the mainstream movies and have some bandwidth available for CD-quality ad-hoc downloads. Network availability can be a problem - the obvious place to put DVD burner kiosks is in malls, but they often don't have cable, and they're usually far away from telco offices so DSL bandwidth is lower. On the other hand, grocery stores are usually in/near residential neighborhoods, so they've usually got cable nearby and often have decent DSL.
And it doesn't matter if they don't succeed as long as they brag a lot, because the public _knows_ there are more real scum out there than they can catch. And a scumbag who escapes or a cyberterrorist who hasn't done enough to get caught at it yet are both fine publicity (as long as they don't look like bleeding incompetents in the process) - it means they obviously need _more_ powers so they can catch the next one.
Cindy Sheehan was really effective against Bush for a while because she's a strong family-protection figure who made it clear that Bush had endangered her family rather than protecting it. And Katrina was even more effective, because it demonstrated that Bush wasn't decisive, or strong, or competent, when faced with an actual threat that he couldn't control but could have responded to. Osama bin Laden was just fine - if you're crying Wolf Wolf and a real Wolf shows up on occasion, that demonstrates that your strong leadership is needed just like you said.
America's Army is a propaganda tool\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ "... an accurate portrayal of Soldier experiences .." video game put out by the US Army. Does it count as encouraging violence, or does it count as permitted "political education"?
So if somebody writes a couple of dozen standard routines that crank the number-crunching part of the Cell processor well, and there's a halfway-adequate compiler for the conventional-processing side, you can still get a big win from a small budget.
I did a lot of scientific-style programming on VAXes in the early-mid 80s, and my iPod Shuffle has more CPU, more disk-equivalent, faster I/O bus, and probably more RAM (? not sure, but all the non-shuffle versions do.) Our applications sped up by 2 orders of magnitude once we could get enough RAM :-)
RTFA again. Wombat isn't a "massive performance gain", though there are some functions for which it's several times faster and therefore there may be some real-world applications for which it could be faster. If you look at the AIM7 benchmarks, which are modeling average workloads for a typical Unix system, Wombat was actually 2-3% slower than Linux, in spite of having those functions go faster. That's still really pretty good, given the reputation for slowness than microkernels have. If they can port those optimizations to Linux, then maybe Linux would be even faster.
But the AIM7 benchmark, which models typical general-purpose Unix system usage, has consistently faster results for regular Linux than for the Wombat virtualized version, even though there may be individual functions that are faster. The cool thing, though, is that the performance hit is only about 2-3% - not bad at all for a microkernel with some provable security and reliability features.
It's 2006, and they've been mining data since 2001 - that's five years! Now, they probably got some of this data after 2001, but that still means they've been doing this for a long time without getting caught - outrageous!
Even 2GB should be enough to keep your root filesystems and the programs you use frequently, so you can get the fast booting and low hard-disk usage, and even without load-leveling drivers you can still run read-mostly apps without worrying about write-cycle limits. If you can use a compressed disk format for part of your space, it'll let you do a lot more (compare with Knoppix on a 700 MB CDROM.) That's not hard with Linux, though with Windows you'd probably either need to use two separate drive letters unless you can get NTFS to run on the flash drive.
The System V mailers and the V8 mailers (AT&T Bell Labs Research stuff between Version 7 and Plan 9) mostly ran with group-mail privileges instead of root, and the Upas derivatives had simple and elegant rewrite rules. Both sendmail and the AT&T versions dealt with UUCP as long as that mattered, which was another can of worms (though Honey DanBer cleaned it up a lot), but sendmail couldn't really defend itself well against UUCP problems.
As far as monoculture goes, the BSD side of the world almost all ran sendmail, the System V world mostly didn't (but most of the Internet ran BSD variants including SunOS), and it took a while for SMTP to supplant UUCP, largely because of the Acceptable Use Policies that kept the Internet quasi-non-commercial until the Commercial Internet Exchange opened it up.
RAM also burns a lot of heat - if you're using compact flash, you should be able to get away with less RAM in return for accesses to the flash. Older USB equipment can't boot from USB, but check your BIOS to see if you can. If you can't, you can still set things up to use a flash stick for much of your disk.
The 750GB drives are still a bit pricey - 500GB drives are about $250, so that's about $500/TB. Of course, you can't just pile up 60 of the things on a shelf in a rack - you need some kind of computers to drive them, and you can probably handle about 4 drives on a $200 motherboard (depending on whether SATA's available), so it's maybe an extra 10%-20% for the computers and power supplies.
The real subtle nasty DDOS attacks, of course, are the ones that use the structure of the target's site, e.g. filling out the target's forms with bogus information, which takes much less bandwidth to make a much bigger impact than simple shutdown. This is what Blue was doing - I hope now that they've had to stop, that they'll at least publish a good story about it.
Laws only help if the spammers all live within the same jurisdiction as the lawmakers, can't move around much, and are easy to trace. They don't, and they're not, and the Internet and cheap foreign corporations make it easy to move to anywhere in the world without leaving home so that even if they do get caught, the perp that gets caught is just a paper shell corporation in a file-drawer, not the cracker in his double-wide who's the stockholder.
Spam laws mainly let politicians claim to be Doing Something, and they at best encourage spammers to do a better job of hiding, so it's harder to identify and block their stuff (though filters and blocklists do the same thing.)
But there's no reason to accuse them of bugging you or other bogus FUD just because they want PPPoE. Linux doesn't need the disk because it already has PPPoE drivers available - Windows doesn't (or at least didn't), and Linux users can be trusted to type in the configuration commands correctly or hack them until they're working. There probably are some ISPs that like to include spyware, but for most of them it's just making sure that their branding is out there and making sure that the kinds of users who can't get the coffee-cup holder on their PC to stop auto-ejecting at 12:00 do still get connected. Also, except for encrypted payload, the ISPs can see everything from their end of the connection anyway.
More importantly, what hardware is supported? The FAQ talks about 386-or-better, disks, RAM, and Ethernet, but doesn't talk about video cards, PCMCIA, or sound cards, which are typically the problem areas. The machine I'd really like to run a lightweight operating system on is an old laptop - is it likely that Minix will be able to recognize the fairly lame graphics system, and is it easy to test X from the CD so I don't have to install the whole thing first?
My first Chevy van was an old beater '71, the first "second vehicle" we could afford after college, 80,000 miles, only wrecked badly once, then used for salt-water fishing. Being a Chevy, the electrical system would occasionally gronk out, and I'd have to put it into neutral and shut the engine off and on while driving down the road. Later the neutral safety switch died, and rather than replace it my garage recommended that I just wire around it, so I no longer have to put it in neutral to reboot.
I don't play games much, but NetHack really picked a good mixture of playability, plot, twitchiness, and portability. I might use the graphics overlay a bit more if my laptop screen had more pixels, but colored text mode is really just fine. You don't need 5.1 sound if all the sound comes from your imagination...