At first I thought that it was Sony's revenge on me for this: http://slashdot.org/submission/1535196/Why-doesnt-SONY-like-Canadians

Then, when I realized that no one else could log in either I relaxed a bit.
I am still concerned about whether my Credit Card is safe.

Just wait till they start enforcing the new one:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1535196/Why-doesnt-SONY-like-Canadians

I think that's a BS reason for keeping a 140 character limit on twitter.
Let SMS's character limit limit only the SMS user's messages. Twitter can break up longer tweets into 140 character segments and send them as "part1" "part2" "part3"... to people receiving tweets via SMS.

I think that while that was a legitimate argument when twitter started, it's evolved into a different kind of service these days and most folks using their phone for twitter are probably using something like twitterberry as a client anyway.

People stare at me as if I'm crazy when I say I use firefox as my twitter client, just like I do for other websites.

Living? It could still be called Colbert and named after Stephen's great-grandfather.

Of course, they would not be sued if they bothered to negotiate world wide distribution instead of only negotiating "domestic" distribution Limiting who they can accept money from to a tiny fraction of their possible customers, and instead paying loads of money for technology to make that possible.

See that's the good thing to come out of this. Now wireless router manufacturers will have to provide those features if they want to sell in the US.

"some cops will be pissed that he didn't find any weapon, drug or libertarian literature while reading your house"

Libertarian graffiti? That's something I haven't seen yet.

You are right that in desktop use scenario with over 1GB of RAM you will likely never use the swap.

If you run something very memory intensive like photo/video editing, VMware, etc. you may, but with today's standard RAM allotments most desktop users never touch swap in Linux.

A cat won't help.
Sure it'll probably get rid of your rats, but cats like to chew cables too.

I think that is why GP said the impact of swapping "for an average desktop linux user is almost non-existent" ...because for an average desktop linux user swapping is almost non-existent.

I've run Linux machines (for short periods of time, with no more than normal desktop use loads) without any swap, and they work fine... but when you hit that wall of running out of physical RAM you'll feel it a lot more without swap than you would with a swap file/partition.

Windows on the other hand seems to want to use several hundred megs of swap whether it needs it or not.