Xen!

Same non-existent support, lower cost.

You'll need to do a little tinkering beyond that.

My MSI Wind boots up and one of the options (F3 if I recall correctly) reinstalls Windows XP to the factory settings off a hidden volume.

I totally agree. I have an MSI Wind (U100) and I use TrueCrypt as someone above recommended. I've not noticed a huge performance decrease on the machine. I have one mount point and I add all personal files in there, leaving apps and OS files unencrypted. On my HP notebook I use Safeboot, which uses whole disk encryption. I used it without safeboot for nearly two years, and so far about six months with it installed. Again, I have no noticeable performance loss. Someone else who uses their computer more heavily than I might have more to add here, but for normal use whole disk encryption works fine. I don't have any problems with streaming youtube (or netflix) on either of the computers. Netflix and compiling C#/.Net stuff on VS2008 are about as CPU heavy as I get on these machines though, so again, there may be others with different experiences.

What happened to all the wankers who hooted and hollered about boycotting them after that?

Still here... still boycotting... just not as vocally anymore...

"What's the difference other than everyone has to own the game?"

The big obvious one is that battlenet was slow, crashed a often and was flooded with other problems. Back when starcraft was out I had high speed internet, along with very few others, but we still had LAN parties because social interaction was (and may still be) fun, and there is just no way you're going to out perform my LAN, even with today's high speed Internet. There's probably a lot of people out there who would just rather play online, typing or talking through a cold microphone, i'm not one of em.

"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."

I highly doubt it.

Just one more reason I no longer support Bizzard. Just as soon as I begin to forget why I dislike them they give me more reasons.

This is in fact why NXDomain breaks things in the way the poster describes, however, unless you're the kind of employer who wants to see EVERYTHING your subordinates are doing it's not actually the best practice to filter everything through the VPN.

Filtering everything through their VPN increases overall costs in bandwidth and hardware as Intron indicated. These are very real, very costly expenses that many employers overlook when implementing broad policies... and it's a fantastic point you raised that all too many companies forget.

Why should my connection to slashdot.org, for example, be secure on the company VPN? My ssh and nfs connections have very real reasons to be secure however!! On the other hand you could fix this by filtering DNS traffic through the VPN, but not web traffic. The cost of DNS traffic is marginal comparatively to other services, but the benefit for companies facing these specific issues is obvious.

The amount of co2 released when making beer is very marginal. As another poster pointed out, brewers yeast is designed to create more alcohol byproduct than co2. True that co2 *does* gets released into the air when making beer, but the release of co2 happens for three - four days of the brewing process. During this time it may peak for about 24 hours releasing one nickle sized bubble of co2 every 2-3 seconds. After that you can expect activity to decline very rapidly that by the third or fourth day you'll see fewer than a dozen of those nickle sized bubbles.

With home brewing this is the point where you either bottle it up, or move it into "secondary" for further conditioning. I go for the later, where it sits in another "carboy" (5 gal glass jug) for as much as 4 months. During this time I'd be shocked if there is enough co2 released to fill a medium sized balloon. The reason is at this point the yeast has already consumed nearly all the fermentable sugars and has gone dormant. They lay dormant at the bottom of my carboy until one day when I am ready to keg, then the beer and yeast mixture is revived with a little "priming" sugar, which causes the yeast to go active. Except this time it's contained in a keg. With no where to go the co2 builds, creates pressure, and with the help of cold conditioning some of it dissolves into the liquid giving the beer that carbonated quality. What does not help with carbonation helps to push the beer out of the keg. On a few occasions I have had to use a co2 tank to help push it out. Though I suspect you may be misinformed about how much co2 is actually used to push liquid out of a keg. Generally 5-10lbs of co2 will do it. Any more and your beer will be uber foamy.

However, they said they would only use his name if:
1) he could demonstrate he was fluent in Hungarian, and
2) he was dead.

So... if I update wikipedia that Colbert spoke fluent Hungarian before his death, will that suffice?

D. Piracy is theft, but sense Lars has deep ties to the recording companies they may turn a blind eye.

Wow, fantastic link to the freestateproject, I had never heard of it before. Being in top income and sales tax state this info is very interesting.

Ron Paul was on the Republican ticket, not the Libertarian one. It's true that, as a *real* fiscally conservative / minimal government republican, he gained the support of many libertarians, but we had our own nominee (Bob Barr) running to muck things up however. I could not bring myself to vote for Barr, his history has shown that he does not share our core belief of individual liberty IMO. I can't see how you can claim to support individual liberty while at the same time supporting bans on same sex marriage, drugs and certain religions.

"Is 'disgruntled libertarian' redundant?" - YES, more so now then ever. The past 8 years have been a big "Eff you" to all libertarians, and with the expected growth of this new government of "change" the next 8 don't look very good either.

The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'"
 
IT workers are generally compensated fairly well, and are usually short handed. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most IT orgs can't afford to have their admins drudging through data by request without any compensation.

"I look forward to Obama getting the same punishment"
 
I look forward to the day when people stop bickering about petty crap and do something good for this nation. I did not care when Palin was accused of it and I am not going to care when Obama takes some heat (and he probably will) for using his BB.

I don't think that PDC's are designed to be effectively wiped at the "flip of a switch".
 
I've got a degausser that begs to differ ;)

It does not shock me. It's all in good fun... like the W keys being removed from all the keyboards when Clinton left office. We had to replace a few keyboards, so what? I ask fora new keyboard every time I take a new job anyway. Its the ones like these that kind of bug me "A few of the messages used profane or obscene language." and "graffiti derogatory to Mr. Bush on the wall of a stall in a men's room".... these are not in the spirit of good fun, but oh well what are you going to do? You can't keep an eye on everyone in your last week(s), and would you even want to? Personally I'd hold a few parties at the white house on my way out, get some kegs on tap, have some card tables going, a few strippers, you know go out with a bang! Hell I'd probably invite the president elect and his transition staff. That will ease up some tension between staff a bit.