This is an honest question (I don't know much about US law) - are there any other mechanisms other than impeachment? If not, then there are only two actions left for citizens in the US, and indeed across the world... #1 is political, and #2? well, noone wants that. Political action can be boring and unpleasant, but if ever there's a time it's now... because YEARS worth of sweat are required. There are already people doing this work but they are too few. Another honest question - who are these people, and how can the average Slashdot denizen help?

Our leaders in the west might as well have organised drops of militant recruiting leaflets and saved billions while achieving similar ends - it's shameful. If any militants have had their beliefs challenged it has been through citizens more-or-less working against government policy, and against western militarism. Take for instance Maajid Nawaz... he was rescued by Amnesty International from jail in Egypt despite them knowing he considered them his enemies. Maajid is now risking his life arguing against Islamism rather than risking his life recruiting for it. That raises another issue - these guys are brave idealistic defenders of their community who would be an asset to any nation had they not been twisted by toxic radical ideology. Unfortunately the toxic radical ideology on our side has made everything so much worse - it has been the perfect book-end to prop up an ideology which was not widely supported just after 9/11 in any case.

There was an ABC (Australia) series on several drugs some time ago, and the existing evidence (at least back then) was pretty good regarding nicotine. The ABC science unit are generally decent, and I'd trust them to filter out propaganda swinging either way, so I wanted to look into this more even though I've never been a smoker.

I haven't seen StorageReview mentioned. These guys were the first I'd seen who seemed to have a real clue about storage eg. they concentrated on latency rather than sequential transfer back in the day - latency is a much more interesting metric for most use cases. I don't follow their reviews as religiously as I used to, but they are the first guys I turn to when something new happens in storage technology.

I've heard it cynically said that this happened because it allows western oil companies wanted better deals on offshore oil fields - there was certainly a public outcry when the Howard government wanted to practically shove East Timor off the fields very soon after they became a nation. The boundaries are disputed, and I'd imagine negotiating with East Timor as a separate entity is much easier than with Indonesia.

This stuff is overdue in smaller shops - stay with me on this for a second. The smaller guys need to become more efficient and secure, and automation really helps. Potentially the small end could benefit MORE from automation than the big guys already have - automation is a much more disciplined and useful form of sharing information. Docs are often incorrect or incomplete - automation imposes discipline, and also allows the author to benefit from the end result. Time savings for everyone are often huge.

I'm regularly on #fusiondirectory on FreeNode (IRC) along with a few others who are working towards this kind of thing (using the Munich software as a base). Anyone else wanting to join us is welcome.

The vengence of the llama. I think I know why he lost his job.

Really. In my part of the world the government which went hardest for the free market and small government was New Zealand in the 80's. It was called Rogernomics, named after Reaganomics... except Roger Douglas actually did reduce the deficit unlike Reagan (by drastically cutting government services of course). How did it work out? Well, when the following administration continued largely the same policies under Ruth Richardson it was known as "Ruthenasia". Crime, poverty and unemployment kept increasing. My cousins and a significant portion of the population left the country. My country (Australia) tightened our mutually generous immigration arrangement with NZ to stem the tide.

Sooo... you're comparing a state actor with a bunch of terrorists who flew into buildings. The Japanese had to lose a war for years to get that desperate, and even then they had vastly more resources than those (late) terrorists. In 2001 how much popular support did the terrorists have? If I remember the almost universal condemnation from the muslim world I'd say "bugger all"... those terrorists had already worn out their welcome perpetrating violence in home societies. Ten years later and their fortunes have completely reversed - they're popular, the chances of glorious martyrdom are high, and Anti-US feeling is growing even in Europe and Asia. I wonder how that happened.

If the skills aren't there to do this and/or your users don't have the support... well, don't go there. Still, Linux is already in schools (at the very least in large printers, SANs and other devices, not to mention cloud stuff) so things are moving that way even if it gets outsourced from under school I.T.

I've played a little with GOsa and its non-Munich fork FusionDirectory over the years which I believe is a major part of the infrastructure of this project. GOsa is the graphical front-end of the LDAP directory and extra RPC glue. Supported services are many, though personally I've used it to manage Samba, Cyrus IMAP, Postfix, SOGo (groupware), DNS, DHCP, rsyslog, Squid, OS installation via OPSI (for windows) and FAI (for Linux - though I don't have this bit working satisfactorally yet). There are many more plugins I've never touched. Has anyone else played with it? A community outside of Europe needs to be build around this stuff so that people can get some support - it has all the setup pain of your average enterprise software. I hang out in #fusiondirectory on FreeNode (ie. IRC chat), and I believe there is a #GOsa also. These channels keep to European working hours usually (which makes life difficult for an Australian like me).

I don't know which community you belonged to but flamewars have happened from the beginning eg. Linus vs Tanenbaum, and before Linux there was GNU. You WANT these flamewars to happen because these guys DO things, especially to prove a point. If this issue proves to be a genuine security concern in some cases then expect the argument to end with an improvement of the software you use.

As soon as law enforcement ceases to be difficult and frustrating job requiring dedication and patience the nature of police power changes. The punks and sociopaths don't get weeded, and that's just as bad for the good cops as it is for the rest of society. I've seen this happen in my home town - police murders, theft, blackmail... never proven, though it was suspected the police station was firebombed to destroy evidence after an investigation . My entire state (Queensland, Australia) was notorious for corruption - in the 80's after a Royal Commission even the police commissioner was charged as was at least one judge and members of government. Today history seems to be repeating... there are laws being enacted (bikers are our bogieman) that limit freedom of association. These are an echo (even the bogieman is the same) from the beginning of the previous period of corruption. I really don't feel this will end well.

A "competent tribuneral"? Well, the UK managed to get all their gitmo prisoners released... the conservative Australian government was less interested, but after political pressure they at least got their prisoner (David Hicks) to an Australian prison. I remember the "burn him!" sentiment in my home city media contrasting with the seeming universal support he got in Adelaide (his home city) - down there he was "Adelaides David Hicks". Each and every one of those prisoners may be evil and guilty as hell... I certainly don't know... but a modern and just socienty doesn't do things the gitmo way.

Yes... every increase in complexity causes problems, and security is a feature that at best is imperceptible to the end user, and often changes the user experience for the worse. Also you're never sure if it's good enough - at best you discover a compromise when your bank account gets drained, and at worst... well... today whole societies can be subtly subverted for the worse while remaining completely ignorant. Still, suddenly everyone is aware it's important.