The Jennifer Morgue isn't a science fiction novel.
If you would like to try Stross' science fiction I would suggest Accelerando (available free online here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/ ) or if you prefer near future science fiction Halting State would be worth a look.

I don't understand why everyone is against metered data costs whether it be on phones or one their home connections. Electricity and other utilities are metered by use and it doesn't seem to provoke the outrage that metering of data connections does. Adding metered data usage could make the iPhone data plan cheaper for light users. The concept of metered usage is not inherently any less fair than unlimited usage plans, it all depends on what price structure they propose. If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing. It's clearly too early to be worried, why don't you wait and see what happens? Why shouldn't the people who use a little data on their iPhone pay less than the people who use a lot?

This is interesting to me, do you have a link about the illegal groups thing?

Australians do have a "constitutionally upheld" right to free speech according to the High Court, see http://www.aph.gov.au/LIBRARY/Pubs/RN/2001-02/02rn42.htm for details. While the ruling isn't as broad as the the US 1st Amendment it still provides freedom of political communication. With this ruling it would be difficult for any Australian law to outlaw a political party.

I was under the impression that Linux ASLR was rather primitive unless you used non mainline patches.

Please direct me to your lawyer. I wish to engage him to explain the MySpace ToS with crayon drawings and hand puppets at an upcoming children's birthday party. It will be great!

Personally, I'd want the ammendment to be clear that it applies to network troubleshooting as well as network security so that network administrators can definitely use tools like Wireshark to fix their network.

The source code for their project is still available: http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/download/ or svn co http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/svn/graffiti/

Once again, that section is referring to the inter-server communications.

The author is saying that even though Openfire lists XMPP server to server communication as experimental it has worked fine for him.

The article is referring to the connector that allows your server to talk to the Google Talk server to pass messages.
My guess is that it's unstable because Google Talk uses some non-standard options when talking XMPP.

You must be new here.

The argument is that a few BT packets do not constitute proof of copyright infringement. The individual packets do not breach copyright so the ISP or copyright holder would require a record of a whole session before you could start reasonably making copyright infringement assertions.

From the article:

They also claimed that, because files are broken up into tiny "packets" before being sent over BitTorrent, this may not be enough to suggest a "substantial portion" of a copyrighted file was distributed.

iiNet are suggesting that observing a couple of bittorrent packets is not enough to infer a breach of copyright because each packet does not contain a substantial amount of the original work. Much more data would be required before you could assume a copyright breach.

If I had Karma I'd mod you up.
I too am reading the Jennifer Morgue and found it a bit creepy that the USN is giving away the ship that forms the premise of the book.