And get rid of Do? I don't think so. You can pry Do and docky from my cold, dead hands!

This is a distributed effort, and any one host will not hit your machine more than once. You could configure it to block entire country's subnets, but that's still only marginal protection.

What you want to do is disable username/password authentication on your ssh hosts. This is one of the first things I do. Set up your machine's public and private key, copy your public key to all your other machine's authorized_keys file, and edit your sshd config and add the line "PasswordAuthentication no". Now, broken crypto libraries aside, you will be safe from this sort of attack.

Why? Because the web is about much more than sending words and bytes back and forth. It's about communication, of which there are many forms. Wanting to use a certain font to convey a certain message is valid. And of course you will always have the choice of whether or not you want to display those fonts, just like you can choose to disable javascript, images, and css if you really want to. And the choice of whether or not you want to visit sites that wish to exercise greater creative control over their medium will always be yours as well.

I don't understand the objects to this all over Slashdot. Do you really want to be staring at Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman for the next 100 years?

I think we can all agree that not providing features for creative control of a medium because some people might make a pile of feces out of it is a terrible idea.

Also, flash worked out of the box somehow. I haven't investigated how yet, but I haven't had any flash problems yet and I certainly didn't install it manually. I'm on an AMD64 platform as well.

My experience with 9.10 so far has been extremely positive.

I did an upgrade at first, and then a complete reinstall. The upgrade process went very quickly, and I only had one problem - that my network card became "unmanaged" again. This is some remnant from my 8.10 install back in the day. Besides that, there were no problems and my desktop was exactly as I left it.

The install process from scratch also went well. The partition manager is pretty friendly, and the (I think) new time zone selector is actually easy to use. I also don't need to do a whole bunch of stuff to determine my keyboard layout -- it defaulted to US english and that was that.

The desktop system itself is much improved. The changes to Nautilus are welcome. The side bar is more user friendly, and the folders and such look a lot better.

The notification system has some improvements so it's not quite as useless -- multiple consecutive notifications from the same application drop into the same notification window, and there's a sort of glass effect when you "mouse under" the window, making that absurd behavior a bit more palatable.

My graphics card (GTX 280) was supported after downloading some binary drivers (although I had to restart to enable full desktop effects).

My sound card (X-Fi Fatality edition) is finally supported in kernel, although I had to use amixer in order to get my mic working. The new sound mixer, though, is FAR more user friendly.

I've had no problems so far with EXT4, and my load times in Heroes of Newerth have decreased since the upgrade.

The font rendering. It's much better across the board. Firefox sees the biggest improvement, likely due to the upgrade to 3.5. Font rendering used to be far worse than Windows and is now on par with Mac (I prefer the bolder, smoother look of Mac fonts, personally).

The HDD diagnosis tool is also handy. As soon as the upgrade completed and the tool ran, it warned me of some SMART errors on one of my drives. It's pretty easy to dig into the drives and run diagnostics and such.

Empathy is still bad, and I switched back to pidgin after a few minutes of use. For example, I had to find an hidden check box just to "enable" the account and get it to connect. The UI is also not so hot.

Overall I haven't regretted the upgrade at all, which is more than I can say to 9.04.

... will have wireless capability from an unspecified carrier ...

According to the comparison sheet, they're using AT&T.

I never claimed that there were problems with most documents in existence, just the documents that I typically deal with. However, I don't believe that my usage of OpenOffice and the types of documents that I want to create and receive is out of the ordinary, so it seems safe to say that OpenOffice has a substantial compatibility problem.

Whereas I wrote my resume in OpenOffice to begin with and it didn't look right in Office 2003 or Office 2007.

This is not my experience in the least. In my day-to-day, I have far more documents created in OO.o that end up looking mangled in all versions of Word than ones that come out looking right. And it's also a rare occurance when a .doc sent to me displays properly in OO.o, and I'm certain many are made in 2003 and some in 2007.

For example, I recently had to make a .doc format resume for a job application, and it was completely mangled on the other end even though it looked fine in OO.o. The only thing this had was some alignment changes, headers, and paragraph text. After getting the job, I had to coordinate with background check people, movers and the like, which included sending lots of word documents, some including forms, back and forth. The forms didn't work at all (they showed up mangled, I couldn't click them even though the fields were visible), and the layout of the non-form-encrusted documents were usually mangled.

In fact, I can't recall a single instance where a somewhat complicated word document (one that contains more than just text of various sizes in standard paragraphs) displayed correctly in Open Office when it was created with Word or displayed correctly in any version of Word when it was created with Open Office.

I own a business composed of 4 individuals. We all work from wherever we're comfortable doing so and collaborate using a variety of online tools. We have an online issue tracker, wiki, forum, use skype, instant messenger, email, and phone, and get together in person maybe once a month for a board meeting to set benchmarks and goals and make important strategic decisions.

There are rarely problems. One is when customers ask to meet at our office or ask us where we're located. There really isn't a straight answer to that, and a lot of the oldschool types are unimpressed by a business that doesn't have an office.

Seriously, who better to defend an OS against threats than the developers themselves? Antivirus is just another security feature.

People tend to forget that the SDEs working in the trenches on IE are very much like us. For the most part, they care about the web, they care about technology, and they care about standards, because they want their tech to be the best.

I have no doubt that the IE dev team as a whole feels like shit over standards compliance, at least somewhat. It's mostly a management concern -- if the resources were allocated in such a way to achieve Firefox level standards compliance, it'd get done and probably done very well. That's my theory, anyway.

The definition of life is somewhat squishy, even in Biological fields, but still, technically, viruses are not living as they do not exhibit many traits that living creatures do (eg. homeostasis, metabolism, growth, asexual or sexual reproduction, etc).

In common language, and philosophically speaking, the argument for calling a virus living could be made, but it's all just semantics.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on life and its varying definitions throughout time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

Buy every Linux release.

I have a policy: If I think I'll get more than a few hours of entertainment out of a game and it runs on Linux, I buy it.

I've purchased a bunch of Id releases (Q3, Q4, D3), a couple S2 titles (Savage 2, Heroes of Newerth), World of Goo, UT 2k3, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others. These games are WELL WORTH their box price, and I'm telling these developers to keep it up with their linux ports.

I would bet if every gamer that also runs Linux does the same, we'd see a lot more Linux games. So, Linux gamers, do your part!