Comment Re:And after the pigeons get loose and take over.. (Score 2) 209
I feel compelled to point out that pigeons are dinosaurs.
its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment
As a stable, homogenous environment, and a source of heat, I find this worrying.
(Yes, I know that, jokes aside, it wouldn't last an hour against a modern immune system.)
On a modern network, it is.... at least at the consumer level where nobody knows how to configure a subnet manually, but if you're managing any kind of large scale network it becomes very difficult to work with static configurations on every workstation even when you know how.
My point is that it is *incredibly* trivial to connect to a wireless router that has DHCP enabled and just use an IP address of your choosing. It's a perfectly normal thing to do if you want to be able to predictably SSH a machine or something, and even MS Windows has a GUI way of doing it. Somebody who is sniffing network traffic and cracking encryption keys can easily determine which addresses are already in use, and in practice, if you take an address at the high end of the range (e.g. 192.168.1.250), you won't run in to any trouble with other clients.
It allows for a certain amount of changes over time, e.g. changing disk. It contacts the activation servers during activation, but after that it *never* phones home.
A single motherboard swap can trip it.
If it is because you hope to use lack of an ABI to force drivers to be open what do you say to the fact that the most stable graphics driver in Linux is Nvidia, who is closed?
Having used it and also used the open Radeon driver, the answer is that it simply isn't. It may be the best-performing Linux graphics driver, but it is far from the most stable.
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.
