Putting your hand up to pay for the licensing of H.264?
At least with flash adobe was nice enough to make a linux version at no cost.

What makes this "little known"?
This is the whole reason we have SSL(TLS) and happens all the time, except usually nobody notices.

Getting a 200% increase in processing speed is reasonable. Most home computers are full of malicious software running in the background, removing that is definitely a speed increase.

If you're running a distributed system where each node is exactly the same and you just push out a standard image then you could have a 1:1000 ratio.
But if you have a a bunch of computers doing very specific things each one being different the ratio has to be less.

An average doesn't really make sense unless you can specify the usecase for these systems.

does this amount take in to account the massive amounts of money made by ignoring bugs and pushing forward anyway?
sure a program might have a bunch of bugs that costs $$ to patch and deal with on a daily basis, but the fact that you now need 90% less staff or that you can do 1000 times more business is likely to far outweigh the cost. Which of course is why businesses still love IT.

Sure better and less complex solutions could be created, but they take thinking and planning time and usually then have to deal with the massive mess anyway.

who cares about the computer, it's all about the keyboard.

huh?
ok, safe browsing 101:
1. install virtual box
2. install your operating system in virtual box
3. install a web browser in virtual box
4. get checksum of everything in virtual box image
5. open and use browser to access a page
6. close browser, check all checksums are fine, reboot vitural box image
7. goto 5

Don't open anything from inside the virtualbox on your main system and everything will be fine.

This isn't common sense, this is madness!
There is not way to be safe with just common sense. Every major browser constantly has vulnerabilities, every major plugin has vulnerabilities.

The hype works like this,
1. Replace IRC with IM(msn,yahoo etc.) in the user population which is more about one-to-one conversations and terrible at group conversations. These users are now completely unaware of IRC and are stuck with email for one-to-many communication.
2. Next you sell them various ways they can get back the one-to-many communication method(facebook,myspace,google wave)
3.???
4. PROFIT!

It's really that simple, everything old is new again...oh and now it's in your web browser so you can use those CPU cycles you're missing out on when your CPU would otherwise be sleeping.

If you sell people a 'computer' they'll expect it to run windows or at least run all their 'PC' software, but if you sell it as a PDA or a smartphone, or a netgadget thingy then they won't expect it to run 'PC' software and so won't mind that it doesn't.
eg. the iPhone is widely populate.

umm...RMS doesn't advocate Open Source. RMS advocates Free Software

"'People still don't understand SSL. This isn't much of a surprise... no one expects that grandma and grandpa know how to what SSL is and what it does"

Actually, everyone expects that grandpa nad grandma will understand SSL..if they want to do any secure transactions online.
Not matter how the browsers display certificates, unless people know what they are and why they are there then they won't be secure.
What percentage of people would call their bank to complain if they internet banking website didn't give an SSL certificate?
Browsers make a big deal about fake certificates, or self-signed certificates, but don't say anything when you go do an unencrypted site.
It's a terrible state of affairs, and until either secure transactions get eaiser or certificates are used widely enough that browsers can warn when a site isn't using one transactions of the average joe won't be secure at all.

- Jesse McNelis

huh? so instead of standing up for your rights you advocate giving in to your employers insane demands by hiding your life.
If the company thinks you're on their clock all the time, then they should be paying you all the time.

The problem with dress codes is that they spill out of the work environment and in to the rest of your life. If you're employer doesn't want you to have piercings or green hair then you can't really have them at the times you're not a work either. Which is bullshit.

Carrier grade NAT would be fine for a lot of users. Just make cheaper plans with NAT for the facebook,myspace,email crowd.
Mobile phones don't need public IP addresses and there are only a handful of things that most users do that requires incoming connections.
P2P, VOIP, IM file transfers all of which the ISP could proxy in some way.

2 years is also not long enough to deploy IPv6 for a lot of ISPs. I imagine it's just going to get more and more hacky until they can't hack it anymore, which will probably be in 10 years.

looks like it's about time for the US to start their invasion of iran, the ground work is pretty well set government subverting democracy and shit! they have nukes too.

If they stopped the stupid nature reference it wouldn't be impressive at all and you'd realise they had made something completely useless.

1. If you know enough about a security threat to detect it, then you also know enough about the threat to actually prevent it.
This is computer security(where you can have complete security) not physical security(where all it takes is time to bypass).

2. These 'ants' are software running on infected machines, and thus any response they give can't be trusted.

3, you want to find a computer on a network with suspicious behaviour then you have to monitor it's network activity. which for a lot of the actually dangerous malicious software(industrial espionage,keylogging etc.) is not going to look suspicious at all.