1) There is. For the last ten years it has been euphamised as "innovation".
2) Depends on what you define as "the estate of Jack Valenti".

Do you honestly think we'd be in the same world if every Windows program down the line had to be approved by Microsoft prior to it being available to anyone? Do you think Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera would exist if Microsoft could kill them in the cradle because they competed with IE?

If you're speaking literally about the estate of jack Valenti, then that's irrelevant. If you're talking about his legacy, or the "content owners" represented by the RIAA/MPAA and the other special-interest groups that wrote SOPA, then yes, it is. Hardware manufacturers lock boot loaders because the companies that commissioned the hardware from them told them to. Those same companies did so because content companies told THEM to lock down the device, lest some enterprising nerd out there figure out how to get access to said content.

So what if "most people" don't care about their code execution path. They won't take advantage of it anyway, so retaining it does nothing while removing it stops the people who DO contribute to the body of human knowledge from contributing, or at least raises the barrier to entry. The fact that "most people" don't want to work on their devices doesn't mean that those that do should be prevented from doing so.

Your argument about a Melissa or Slammer worm on all Android or IOS devices is also bogus. Melissa didn't need "root" access to do its job, and Slammer was facilitated by stupid programmer decisions by the original vendor. Neither of which will be abated by using a walled garden and in fact can be increased because of the perceived "safety" of the garden.

Yes, there will always be a small community of hackers, but said community will be smaller and more difficult to maintain as devices are increasingly locked down and lesser-skilled members decide it's not worth their time to break into their devices in order to realize whatever idea (however small) they have that could balloon into the next "innovation".

Speaking as a hobbyist here, I have done what you're asking about for the last eight years and I have very close to zero problems, however there was some ground work that had to be laid. Oh, disclaimer, I'm also a sys admin for a major hosting company (I won't tell you who) so my definition of "easy" may not match yours.

0) If you're hosting at home, make sure you have an ISP that doesn't suck (i.e. use a local ISP). I use a local ISP that has DSL/FTTC (If you happen to live in an area served by the FTTC) connections), so I pay the local ILEC for a DSL line and the ISP for the connection. If you're hosting at a VPS/colo, make sure you pick a good one that will help you out: sell you a dedicated IP AND either give you control of your reverse DNS or setup your reverse DNS for you to your specifications. This is actually a critical part. I have stayed on a 1.5Mbit DSL line for years because anything faster in my area removes my choice of ISP and that is unacceptable to me.

1) Setup your preferred e-mail infrastructure. A dedicated VM/box (I'm using a low-powered Via C7-based server. It draws 30W and handles more than just my e-mail) with whatever SMTP/IMAP server you want. I happen to use Postfix/Dovecot tied together with Procmail so I can do my own mail rules and interpose SpamAssassin in the chain to catch all the crap that comes in. You can use whatever MTA/MDA you want, but if you plan on using webmail, you should probably have an IMAP server for it to feed from.

          a) Make your SMTP/IMAP servers secure. This involves setting up TLS/SSL, creating some certs (Self-signed is okay if any users of the system know to accept the "unverified" cert the first time they connect), and enabling SMTP AUTH. There are HOWTOs aplenty on how to do this.

          b) Setup your filtering software, because spam handling is all on you. Personally I use SpamAssassin with whitelists/blacklists, some customized scoring for built-in rules, and a very old bayesian filter (Old meaning it has been in use for years and is very well trained, not that it has been neglected for years). I have

2) Contact your ISP or VPS/colo provider to make sure they don't filter ports and to request changes to your reverse DNS entries. I have a single IP address and I had problems with organizations like Comcast blocking me until I had my reverse DNS changed to my domain name.

3) Make sure you aren't part of the problem. I have a cron job that alerts me if I start picking up a lot of "undeliverable" bounce messages and I clean them out so I'm not annoying other mail admins by repeated attempts to deliver crap. You should also check various RBLs to make sure your IP isn't on any of their lists and if it is, contact them to get removed. I haven't had any problems with RBLs in years due to steps 0-2.

4) Happy mailing. Like I said in the beginning, I've used this setup for years and it has worked for me and several others. I routinely e-mail people on Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast, Cox, and other big ISPs and have not had any significant problems in years.

Notes
I've tried several webmail programs, squirrelmail, roundecube, even some "groupware" and "group office" ones, they all have their pros and cons, but they all talk IMAP on their back end, and you may end up having multiple devices accessing your e-mail like I do (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, etc).

To keep your bayesian filter updated, make sure you have a "spam" and "not spam" folder. Personally I have three, a "really spam" folder (For anything scoring 20 or higher), a "probably spam" folder (For anything marked as spam), and a "not spam" folder for anything that was mistakenly marked as spam. I almost never have to think about the "really spam" folder because I have never found anything in there that shouldn't be. I do go through the "probably spam" folder weekly looking for false-positives, and there have been a few. Those get moved to the "not spam" folder. Weekly I have a script kicked off from cron that trawls those three folders, reinforcing my spam rules and trimming back the false positives. This has so thoroughly solved my spam problem that using a Gmail or other account bugs me because it lets so much crap through. I have deployed variations of this to servers handling a few dozen accounts and had it run smoothly for months with no intervention required.

It's not just Gmail, Calendar, etc. It's the Market app itself also. That's the lynch pin. If you can't get the Market app on the phone, how are you going to get easy (customer-friendly) access to the rest of the things (Google-owned or otherwise) that you want? Sure geeks can side-load apps into Android devices, but non-geeks won't in any real numbers.

I used DESQview as well, and I ran a little 2-node BBS under it. I was solidly in the "love it" crowd. It ran on my 486dx33 w/4MB RAM and I was able to do up to four things at once, but typically would limit myself to 2 to save RAM.

I tried DesqView/X when it came out, but it wanted like 8MB RAM and didn't run very well, and I didn't have X Windows deployed elsewhere for it to make any real difference. I still have a DesqView/X book around somewhere.

Not that much (to version 9). RHEL doesn't do major version bumps for components before the whole OS bumps. However you will probably be able to find a community-maintained repo with PG9 packages for RHEL6 shortly (There may be one for RHEL5 now), google is your friend.

If you install EPEL you'll get an additional 4600+ packages.

However RHEL/CentOS are server operating systems, so a lot of packages that make sense on desktops are omitted.

I'm aware of irblasters and their downsides. Form everything I've read online they're a necessary evil for most of those that use them. I was hoping for a different interface, like an RS-232 that I've read some have used to control some Sharp units. Unfortunately the only Sharp's I can find are 60-oh-my-god-that-was-my-kidney-inch units that run to $3500+.

As originally stated in my submission, the front end will have an nVidia ION2 chipset. I know this can do 1080p content. ION (1) chipsets (anything over about a GeForce 8800GT actually) can do 1080p video just fine for supported codecs (H.264, VC1, MPEG 1/2) but ION2 adds support for more codecs, hence why I'm using that. MythFrontend supports the hardware (VDPAU) just fine as well.

As for a remote, I am working on getting a PS3 bluetooth remote setup, because pointing the remote is so last century.

I'm curious now that you've mentioned it, have you tried VM live migration in KVM? I don't have enough hardware to do it myself.

Really? Strange. I wasn't comparing ESXi to KVM, I was comparing VMware Server to ESXi. Personally, I run KVM, with KSM and VDE. I also wonder how VMware server "makes sales for ESXi" when ESXi is also free-to-download.

Yes, that's what I'm saying, and the fact that it runs as a program under an existing OS is why it isn't as fast or efficient as ESXi which is a "bare metal" hypervisor.

VMware Server and VMware ESXi are different. With ESXi, your VM server is basically a specialized appliance which runs VMs. The hypervisor isn't a regular Linux OS. It just shows a text-based message telling you to use the client or a browser to connect and manage VMs. You can ssh into the box after enabling some "maintenance mode" tweaks but even then it's not a full Linux OS, more like an embedded Linux OS since it makes heavy use of BusyBox to replace most of the command-line tools.

For enterprises, dedicating one or more physical machines to being VM servers isn't a problem, but for home use, not being able to use the VM server like a normal computer in addition to it being a VM server can be a deal-breaker.

I've been looking for something like this for a while, especially as my device herd has grown. What software would you use on the server side? I've looked into several (SOGo, eGroupware, DAVIcal, etc) but they all break in some form or other. The closest I've ever gotten is a mostly-sync (Contacts and Notes) with with eGroupware but it throws a very opaque error when I try to sync my calendar items (gets about 20 of 401 then throws an "invalid server address" error).

What software do you use to sync? I've also got an E63 and I'm thinking of getting an E72/E73 but I want something that will sync with Evolution.

I'm nearly there with you, but my experience has been somewhat different.

I rolled out my own MythTV backend (First as a VM on my workstation then promoted to an MSI Wind (Atom 330, 2GB RAM, 500GB disk)) connected to a HDHomerun which is connected to a large OTA antenna mounted in my attic. Picture quality has been really good on channels that have decent video sizes and bit rates, and most of the TV transmitters are located on one mountain top, so I don't have to move the antenna to pick up different channels. I looked into cable and satellite when I was in the planning stages, but I did not want to do a D-A-D conversion to get it into Myth and the only channels my local cable monopoly provides unencrypted are the locals anyway.

My main problem is that the kind of TV I like, I can't find, even on torrent trackers. There used to be one that specialized in it (DigitalDistractions), but they went dark a few years ago and every other tracker website I've been able to poke through doesn't have it or doesn't have any shows that I don't already have. And I guess I'm not cool enough to be invited to the private trackers.

I've found a few that are almost suitable replacements, and when they air on a local HD channel, I get them in 480/720/1080, which looks acceptable to really good, and Myth brings them in usually faster than I can watch them, so I always have new content to keep me entertained.