If you're worried that the possibility someone is going to perform an MITM attack on you is greater than infinitesimal

...or the DNS cache gets poisoned, as I once saw. (Thankfully, SSH does a reverse lookup as well and checks the result matches the input, and bails if they don't.)

That and certain drives also have a mind of their own and ignore any hdparm APM setting after a short while in favour of their own, absurdly aggressive setting. One I have (by default) unloads after 8 seconds of inactivity and the only way to change it is by some obscure DOS utility that I can't get to work. 8 seconds is crazy-low, and because the typical interval for disc activity on a Linux system under enthusiastic use is typically 10-15 seconds (or even when a bit idle, as lots of other things touch the filesystem in the backgrounds), the heads spend a lot of time loading and unloading. It's possible to tune the Linux VM subsystem to ouch the disc less often, but in practise doesn't make much of a difference. Windows XP does exactly the same. The disc manufacturer says Linux should not wake up the disc so frequently, but I don't see how that squares with the way a modern, multitasking operating system works; things touch the filesystem, and this must be synced in good time (I don't want 30 seconds' worth of dirty data just sitting in RAM). And besides, disc manufacturers should just make discs and leave VM policy to kernel designers.

ACPI does not normally (and from what I've seen, never) export any controls over battery charging, or even allow the user to choose power supply. The job of handling power is usually done by the embedded controller and its firmware, which also handles any charging (along with circuitry designed specifically for the job). This is designed for optimal performance of the system in mind and usually works very well. The operating system just monitors the state of the power supply and can make demand-related decisions (CPU power-state, screen brightness, sleep/shutdown) based upon a chosen policy. If batteries really are packing up early in the manner suggested, this is more likely down to a hardware/firmware/miscellaneous-ACPI-EC-horkage defect in the notebook itself, not the operating system.

Because 3D requires a lot more complex heavy lifting that I don't want in the kernel when it fucks up. Teletype is quite lightweight by comparison.

the rest of us poor suckers would do it too.

Install a wire cage in exchange for getting my leg over?

Yeah, I'd do it.

another British show from that era that might be worth another go around is U.F.O.

1980

Well given (I think, though may be wrong on this) that pretty much any finite sequence of digits will show up in the decimal expansion of pi at some point, there should be a raster image of a circle in 1s and 0s buried in it somewhere. Along with a greyscale raster of Goatse.

I believe a filesystem with tail-packing support would overcome this.

The entry-level model has two processors. That's, like, much less than 4096!

Sarah O'Connor? Would she be the mother of Jonny O'Connor from County Cork, who'll lead humanity to victory in the war against the machines and the English?

So don't load the DRI modules. Or are they doing away with the video BIOS all together?

Frosty piss y'all...

I don't think you should be finding much aluminium in your piss.

I didn't know there was actually anybody living in Llanelli. Went there a few months ago, I thought it was the town The Specials were singing about.

Heheh, yeah... way to flush out all the FreeBSD zealots.

They're called orders of magnitude.