Two reasons. First the obvious: most would-be attackers are clueless, even little increase in the complexity of attack will stop lots of them. The second you already note:

That is *the* reason I'd want to be able to use https without expensive certificates without scaring the user (but also without showing the lock symbol or otherwise advertising security, just make it look like unencrypted http to the user).

I've been using syncevolution on the N900 for over six months now, and it's been working like charm, no problems whatsoever.

Unless (unlike Appelbaum) you're a non-citizen trying to enter the country. In that case, refusing to talk or requesting a lawyer means with practically 100% certainty that you won't get in. What you can do, however, is ask for an interpreter - and it may be a good idea however good your command of the local language is (as long as you aren't a native speaker). Interpreter's presence may defuse the situation with a suspicious border control official, interpretation gives you more time to think about your answers, and interpreters are often quite helpful and less, eh, scary than the interrogators (not without exception, of course).

As far as I know that is pretty much a US-only phenomenon. At least in most of Europe, the notion of "positive credit history" is all but unknown, when applying for a loan it doesn't matter if you've ever had a credit card unless you've failed to pay up. In many European countries many people don't have credit cards at all.

Sorry, typo: I meant OSI of course.

So do I (yeah, I'm old). Did you really use the term "open source" then? I'm sure I didn't, the vendors certainly didn't, actually I'm pretty sure I never heard the term back then.

Of course I may have missed someone using it, but it certainly wasn't a common term.

As far as I can tell, the very term was invented as a generic term for freely redistributable source - as a substitute for "free software", which had too heavy political and philosophical connotations.

Can you point out any references to "Open Source" that predate the current common meaning (that includes free redistributability)?

I don't think you can. Feel free to try though. OSI is not bound to your reading of their definition - or any other outsider's reading of it for that matter, and they can ignore obviously unintentional loopholes, or amend the definition to close them if they choose.

No. It used to be fairly common to sell software with source code, with explicit restriction that it may not be redistributed: source was only provided for in-house use. That is certainly not open source.

Open Source does imply the right to redistribute, and that's explicitly allowed in every OSI license, snowgirl's legalistic quibbling notwithstanding: the definition referred is not a license or any other legally binding document, and if someone really tried to make a license that explicitly forbids redistribution of the program in unmodified and non-aggregated form, I'm sure ISO would reject it - possibly clarifying their definition, if they thought it was necessary - but the intent of the definition is clear enough, whether or not it appears legally watertight.

Actually quite a few, if not indeed most countries have provisions in their laws to prosecute for crimes committed outside their territory, in particular crimes committed not only by but also against their citizens (although typically with caveat that the it must be criminal also in the country where it occurred), some crimes are often prosecutable no matter what (genocide, airplane hijackings, child abuse being common). And often there's a proviso that prosecution is possible in any case if decided high enough (state attorney or similar).

I'm not aware of any comprehensive survey of this around the world, I know only of a rather random sample of countries - if anyone knows of such a study, I'd be very interested.

There is some truth in it, certainly. One glaring example is Manuel Noriega: he was not only foreign citizen but head of state, abducted by force by the US and flown to USA for trial. (Yeah, he was a thug and deserved what he got, but that's beside the point here.)

Because they're powerful enough to get away with it. I suspect everybody else would do it, too, if they could, and sometimes do. Israeli abduction of Eichmann is a good example: they got away with it not because of their military power but because those more powerful supported them, Eichmann being rather deserving of punishment, too. Most countries prefer to do such things less openly, resorting to assassination rather than claiming any legality to their actions - a bit further back in history, Trotsky is a prime example.

It would depend on how it'd suit the politics of the day. If the abductee was someone they wanted to get rid of, perhaps nothing but indignant speeches; if an American hero, anything up to full-scale war.

That's a good point. Where I live (about 62 degrees North) air conditioning isn't much of an issue, but heating is, and I've always tried to take that into account when doing power savings calculations and measurements. Hatta is right that surprisingly often old boxes turn out to be more efficient in the end - but not always. You really need to do the measurements and calculations to know, and sometimes results may be surprising.

There are people who like old gear for philosophical reasons, even when money isn't really an issue. I recently found a good home for an Athlon XP 1500+ (1.3GHz) -based box as an email/www terminal in a used car parts shop (put in a 40GB disk and two 512MB DIMMs scavenged elsewhere and installed Ubuntu in it), and they've been happy with it - suits their business idea of recycling old stuff, they told me.

I can remember many other amazingly old and slow machines that have found happy owners in people who could easily have bought new stuff if they wanted to.

In general, though, I'd discard (= recycle properly) stuff that's been significantly superseded in terms of electricity consumption - if a new one saves its price in one year's electricity bill, there's no point in keeping the old one. But stuff that's just slow by modern standards, like 802.11b gear, may well find a happy owner in someone who ideologically likes recycling and doesn't need more speed (and quite a few people don't). But people in low income brackets are more likely to feel using old stuff is somehow demeaning and reject it for that reason, even if it'd be perfectly usable.

IpCop was indeed originally forked off smoothwall, but it's not a dead project yet - indeed, it looks like the next major release (2.0) is going to materialize after all.

Yeah. There're several Linux-based firewall distros, though; IpCop is perhaps closest to pfSense.

I guess you've never seen a real lemming. They most certainly are not blind, nor do they move blindly in a metaphorical sense. They do not follow each other thoughtlessly either, however, so that part of your rebuttal was correct.