Could you explain to me, concisely:
1.) What an assault rifle is
And then, please explain to me in plain terms
2.) how said rifle is more dangerous than a shotgun - or even better - a hunting rifle.

I'm really curious.

http://www.pandigital.net/search.asp?Mode=Product&TypeID=26&ProductID=30
$.40 per 4x6. That's expensive as hell. I'll keep my color laser that costs me about $.14 per page for 8x11.
Or go to Walmart and borrow their dye sub printer for really nice 4x6's for less than a dime.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/High-Quality-4x6-Prints/5019648

No kidding. It's really easy to criticize when everyone is framing this like the guys' goals are to start with dirt and make tires and steel. His intention is clearly to make open source, practical designs for equipment with resources that are - frankly - easy to maintain. I really don't get all the criticism. He's working his ass off and giving all his designs away, and asking for donations. There's a lot of assholes out there, he really doesn't appear to be one of them. Maybe if he made really impressive sleek gadgets, closed all his designs, and ruthlessly stifled competition he would be venerated like Apple.

Yeah - I thought the same thing at first ... BUT ...
It looks like what he is trying to do is make it so that once you obtain the raw resources, you can "recycle" the materials into new stuff, what he calls a "closed loop" system. I think this makes sense - sure, you will need a "seed" of a lot of steel and such, but beyond that you can incrementally build. I think it's really about cost and maintainability, and making it possible to truly DYI a town from the ground up - a key concept being the ability to subsitute manpower from insurmountable upfront equipment costs.
In the end, I think if he follows through and makes all these designs, the ones who will benefit the most will be the poorer countries who have plenty of people but no engineering resources.

Here it is, 2011, when CEO's live and die by 10K's and stock prices, we have a company that layed off marketing and PR and kept their engineers. How much AMD stock can I buy? Sign me up!

No offense taken. The replication is something we have looked at, it is possible and we are talking about solutions right now.
I think you should take AoE a bit more seriously, to be honest. We're getting better perfomance on a 10Gb ethernet switch as a backplane with AoE that the bazillion dollar iSCSI fibre channel solutions we demo'd from HP and Dell.
This is running on a multiple racks in a leased floor in a datacenter downtown - not my basement - and provides a somewhat data intensive (backups among other things) SAS offering we have.
To be completely honest I think you should step back and ask yourself by you are so strongly against AoE. It's not a religious thing, we would have gone with iSCSI if it was a better value, period.

We were recommend AoE after talking with a contact at the Marine Corps, who use it right now it for a multi _petabyte_ array. YMMV, but for us it makes a lot of sense. Set one up, take the Pepsi challenge. IT's all free software, and from the sound of it you have all the hardware setup to try it out.

I'll have to give kdevelop another chance. Last time I used it, kdevelop4 was brand new, and it was buggy as hell. I'll have to check it out.

I wanted to explain why are are almost 95% free software house now.
About 4 years ago, I and a few guys spent an all nighter when our Exchange server myseriously stopped working. It was obscure enough I don't rememeber what the issue was at this point. We followed that up a couple months later by spending a few weeks wrestling with Sharepoint.
The logs only helped with superficial issues, and calling MS is downright expensive so it was only an option when we were at the end of our rope.

The whole time, I weighed the following qeustion - is access to source with no "official" support better than the best support with proprietary software?

At this point, I don't think I have ever experienced "the best support", and I know the answer to that question. I think the primary cause of this question is your ability to pass the buck. If you "allow" ShinyWidgets Inc. to sell your execs on their solution, you can then blame on problems on their support team if it doesn't work. Your complacency is your approval, so you never directly take responsibility for the solution. You get to keep your job, and you all have great talks around the water cooler about hoe much ShinyWidgets' support sucks, but in the end it's a frustrating experience for all involved, and it's expensive both in cost and labor for your company.

The other option is to find a couple good open source candidates to your needs, study up on them, don't be afraid to take responsibility for their ultimate success, and implement them. You will learn a lot and have some sweaty palm moments. You might make a couple serious mistakes. As long as you eventually succeed, you'll have advanced your career and - I feel - really advanced yourself professionally.

Just my 2 cents - but I'm a firm beleiver that if you have to call someone else, you are an expensive middleman and, generally speaking, part of the problem.

Did they do so? I'm of the impression Bluecoat hardware was sold through an intermediary in Dubai.
To quote TFA
"marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to,"
That's pretty vague. Do you know that they sold directly to Iran?
I think I hate biased or incorrect media about as much as censorship.

When I lived with my mom, she was on the same floor (ranch house). And she was awesome, but I don't think I could call here for IT or software questions. She could probably tell me how to assemble an F18 though, as she has worked on them for over 25 years :P

I'd imagine they could call anyone on our team, including myself. We know the code intimately at this point, and have put it through extensive testing.
This is more of a problem in the proprietary wold - there is a certain point that when something doesn't work you are forced to call for support because the logs only say so much. If you can trace the software and have access to the source, you honestly don't need to call anyone. At that point, it's just a matter of your own determination and the skill set of your team.

As an aside, we did not have to address P2V migration, because this was part of a new product offering. We are considering replacing our internal infrastructure with this, but that's probably going to happen gradually over time. We have very few windows servers left, and I'm frankly considering phasing them out so we don't have to go through the hassle of activation and the big problem Windows has with changing hardware.

about 2 months of testing before deployment in our case. We wrote tools to rapidly create different failures, new VM instances, and put it through the gauntlet.

I know, that might have been the most flagrant remark, following closely behind the idea of trusting the Fed... :P

I thought the same thing. It's a good indicator of an opinion piece.