They DO run Linux/BSD with custom modifications. No way is either Google or Amazon reinventing the wheel and writing their entire stack from scratch, nor paying anyone a per-server license.

The problem is it still isn't Open Source. They are not redistributing the software so do not need to release the source. (And because no one else would have the hardware to run it in the way they do, they wouldn't get any benefit if they did)

If you want your structure and presentation intertwined then use ODF.

If you want them separated:

For structure use the book inspired DocBook, or the journal inspired (and generally more flexible) DITA.

To format either of these for presentation (either on screen or in print) you can either use an adaptive layout with HTML+CSS or a predetermined layout with XSL:FO.

Can't think of any way of avoiding CSS as all three solutions use it.

I find it much harder to imagine a sentience without the ability to evolve.

Lets focus less on the 16 disks we can't yet rip, and a bit more on the thousands of discs that rip fine, but then have difficulty playing back (particularly TrueHD audio).

Patents cover independently derived solutions. Most of the c# patents probably cover Java anyway. MS also hold a host of patents related to HTML. I am not planning to stop using it till they sue me.

You need benchmarks to reflect your real world use. If you always run your benchmarks on idling systems then filesystems with on the fly compression would usually win. However they are not popular because this isn't a good trade off for most people. Parallel BZIP2 compression sounds a good choice as it should stress memory and CPU, whilst giving a common IO pattern, and a fairly low inherent performance variance. Obviously you are looking for a fairly small variance in performance, and the are a lot of other factors that must be accounted for before the results have any significance. Not publishing their data pretty much guarantees they don't know what they are doing.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Perhaps the players would be the aliens? Fetch me 20 soft human hides!

Surly if the government was any more trustworthy this would be illegal?

Most maybe, but they can contain native binaries (and other things), hence the security warnings.

Actually the would be a way of implementing Jedi that make sense both from the story and game points of view. Make them uber beings, but unable to own land, bank, trade etc (either declaring it against their creed or just have even more powerful Sith NPC's always gank it). This would allow 'casual' gamers that can't invest the time to develop an MMRPG character to play the game. I don't have enough experience to know if this would work for core player, (Last time I had enough time to play these games they were still called MUDs), but could have fun joining in on raids (even if I couldn't share the loot) if I didn't have to first spend days grinding.

I expect it wouldn't take much fiddling with http://mozplugger.mozdev.org/ to get this working. It can plug any X11 window (including a WINE IE6) into Firefox as the handler for a particular MIME type. You would just need to update ieTab to change the MIME type of the pages you wanted to render in IE6. Still not sure why you would want to.