Mentions of Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust should also mention David A. Wheeler's "Fully Countering Trusting Trust" which provides a means of identifying and resolving a malicious compiler.

Nokia has a WebGL version of their web maps which has a Google Earth like functionality to it. While they don't label many places initially the search seems to recognise names of towns which are then labelled on the map and there are things like 3D buildings in certain locations (e.g. London). The regular Nokia Maps offers a more complete solution at the moment but it's surprising to see a web mapping solution that isn't Bing or Google especially using new web technologies (to the best of my knowledge Google are the only other ones using WebGL to serve up their maps).

The drivers for the GMA500 parts were written by Tungsten Graphics rather than Intel or Imagination Technologies. In a roundabout way other people did write the drivers :-).

The big gain in entropy when using multiple words is from password length. Having symbols, case changes and unusual characters all increase entropy but over a certain length there are just to many combinations of lower case letters for brute force to be effective. Why complicate it further and risk slower typing speed/mistyping?

• Multiple lowercase random words better than a few strange symbols and a short word
• Make sure you use different passwords on different sites or you'll fall prey to hat guy's evil plan
• What people do if they want your password badly enough

The recently released (11th May 2011) Pulseaudio 2.0 lists improved jack detection as one of its features so you will probably be waiting longer for a fix to show up in a non-rolling distro...

Matthew Garrett recommends against (natively) running Linux on Macs and as he is one of the developers active on Linux EFI/UEFI related stuff that would be required to natively boot Linux on a Mac...

From the rules page:

Back in 2008, Linux was a available as a target in Pwn2Own but in an interview Aaron Portnoy of TippingPoint explained that Linux is now not included in Pwn2Own to avoid controversy.

I don't like the argument that many are pirating software as some sort of protest against draconian measures. A few sure, but they are the exceptions.

I say this because even the Humble Indie Bundle sees piracy and that has no DRM.

Many pirates are doing it because they dislike the price/find it more convenient to pirate/want to share something cool with friends.

To the best of my knowledge, the ath5k/madwifi drivers are the only Linux drivers to be ported from the BSDs (OpenBSD/FreeBSD) to Linux. Which other drivers out of the 56 Linux wifi drivers were ported from the BSDs to qualify the "large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux" statement?

Linux has had its own 802.11 stack called mac802.11 since the 2.6.22 kernel four years ago which was developed by Devicescape. The only driver I know of that carried a (Net)BSD 802.11 stack over to Linux was madwifi which had net802.11, was never mainline and was superseded by ath5k... The madwifi driver never went mainline, nor did its net802.11 stack. Why do you think that the 802.11 stack from a BSD needs copying into a Linux driver when mac802.11 exists?

I do not doubt for one moment that you are seeing some sort of issue on your machine. The problem is you've effectively half mentioned a potential bug report but in a context (a Slashdot comment) where it is unlikely any one is going to follow up on it in a meaningful way. Instead of being useful I'm going to be tedious!

a) What is the nature of the death? Frozen screen? Screen corruption?
b) What graphics card are you using and which drivers are you using it with?
c) Which version of the kernel are you using?
d) Does it break the kernel or just X (i.e. does caps lock still work, can you still ssh into machine)?
e) When it crashes does anything appear in dmesg?
f) How frequently does the issue you are seeing occur? Can you reproduce it 100% of the time on demand?
g) Is your machine being forced to swap when the issue occurs?

I'm NOT going to follow up on the above but those are the questions that you would begin to have to answer to get insight into the problem you are seeing and attribute the issue to the correct location. Different answers to them would make different sets of people immediately stop investigating your issue which is why there are so many people complaining about bug reports that go nowhere.

For what it's worth an issue like this is either in the kernel or in X but it takes experience to be able to tell which and there is no guarantee of a resolution - a wild guess is that you have buggy graphics drivers (kernel/X) but that's about all anyone can say from the above. Regardless, Flash is the messenger and publicly linking it to complete system instability is pushing things too far...

RAR predates zlib and is very popular in circles you mention above but zlib is built into web browsers and is here to stay. Such issues aren't settled in just one place - give it time and we'll see what happens. Sometimes you end up with both...

My understanding is that 32 bit Ubuntu binaries are compiled with i686 instructions which means you will be able to go all the way back to Pentium Pro era machines (according to distrowatch the switch from i386 to i686 happened in Ubuntu 10.10). Those packages that are performance sensitive typically have multiple versions of the code (typically selected between at run time).

I would be amazed if typical 32 bit packages were compiled to use even SSE by default (rather than optionally) let alone SSE2 (which "only" arrived on AMD Athlon64 machines in 2003). I think the next step minimum will be 64 bit only...

However your point holds - would you want to run a recent Ubuntu on such an old machine given all the other requirements?

which was followed up by

So the poster was trying to point out why their personal data refuted the statement.

Surely people your age can sympathise when a post that mentions age attracts followup posts that mention age too?