Promoted from VP to CEO by a single /. summary! Too bad she had to butcher her name in the process.

(For future reference, "executive" -- as the article states -- does not necessarily mean "CEO"...)

Not quite. Worst case scenario involves a cult-like user following who won't stop praddling on at parties about how cool and open their spiffy new phone/laptop is. Then we'll have to open FSF Friend Bars, too.

Most companies are smart enough to let sleeping dogs lie.

Doing battle with Microsoft (or any other big name company) means a lot of money spent on legal fees, whether you're on the serving or receiving end of the lawsuit. If you do sue them, you had better hope that you can fund your lawyers through the duration of the case and that the expected payout is worth the expense.

Ah, so it's vulnerable to a grep attack, then...

Oh, I don't *agree* with what I wrote. In fact, I wholly agree with everything you're arguing.

I'm just stating how the tax collectors will (try to) argue it. I've worked (as a developer) in the tax department at $LARGE_COMPANY, and I've seen some screwy legal interpretations put forth by tax collectors; they're hoping you won't have the willingness to challenge it in a court. (We frequently did, and probably won more than we lost.)

By not making up arbitrary rules like limiting taxes to state and federal levels. Philadelphia imposes this on the employer, so it's invisible to the employees; but if you live in Pittsburgh, for example, you're filling out three forms: the IRS 1040, a PA-40, and a PGH-40.

(I've thankfully moved to a state which doesn't have income tax...)

While technically true (due to accounting rules), you probably meant: "Gross Income != Profits."

Ah, most tax collectors in this situation would just argue that creating the content in Philly gives the city jurisdiction.

And this is peanuts. Illinois takes the trophy for overly broad interpretations of jurisdiction and nexus; take a look at this letter of ruling (PDF) for example of this abuse. In this case:

• This is a New York company running a vehicle database for insurance companies.
• This company does not have an office, data center, or any other physical property in Illinois.
• This company does not have any employees in Illinois.
• No employee of the company sets foot in Illinois for anything work related.
• Independent dealers and inspectors who do own shops in Illinois forward the results of their inspections to the company in New York.

The ruling? The company is liable for Illinois income tax. (And probably New York, as well, but the letter does not identify the company.)

Not necessarily true. Quite often you have to pay sales and title transfer taxes. Evading these can make it difficult to get the registration renewed.

If you own the IP block, you can make the reverse DNS point to anything you wish. That doesn't mean it belongs to Google.

Verifying the owner of the IP block requires whois, e.g.:

% whois 74.125.155.99

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

NetRange: 74.125.0.0 - 74.125.255.255
CIDR: 74.125.0.0/16
NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-74-125-0-0-1
Parent: NET-74-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2007-03-13
Updated: 2007-05-22

OrgTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
OrgTechName: Google Inc.
OrgTechPhone: +1-650-318-0200
OrgTechEmail: arin-contact@google.com

Linux's software RAID is quicker than fakeraid -- that is, the hardware RAID which is merely a bit of code which is executed on the CPU itself. However, it's definitely slower than a real RAID card -- decent ones run in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

In addition to offloading the RAID function (saving a fraction of the CPU and I/O bandwidth), decent RAID cards will contain a large amount of battery backed cache RAM. Any operation which requires writes to be committed to disk will complete in the time it takes to write it to the cache RAM -- a huge savings. If/when the battery fails, these cards fail back to committing the write to disk. The performance impact seriously hurts our databases (to the point where we typically fail over to the standby as quickly as possible). This is all on a host with 60-80 2.5" SCSI drives.

The form factor of the portable keyboard and screen are the big stumbling blocks to making the laptop obsolete. If I have to carry around something which is 95% of the bulk of a laptop, I might as well get a laptop. (Low storage and CPU capacity are minor issues, and the gap there is quickly narrowing.)

But someone smarter than I will probably come up with an elegant solution here, too. I just can't quite visualize what that will look like. (All the folding ideas I can come up with require non-existent technology or outright suck.)

Even if it's the goatse guy?

Heh... also on that page... interesting that they actually commented their exploit code. :-)
<!-- This object plays the "hey everybody, I'm watching gay porno!" sound -->
<object classid= "clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" width="1" height="1" id="hey">
<param name="movie" value="flash/hey.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
</object>