Except that Netflix would have preferred to provide Comcast with a CDN server rather than peer with them, and Comcast refused. I wonder why?

One important point is missing, however: why are Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/TimeWarner refusing to host CDN servers for Netflix? That would solve all the peering/traffic issues.

Comcast is refusing to host any CDN servers and instead insisting on a peering agreement.

Answer: Sometimes.

Untrue. Just last week, during his UN Speech, Obama did exactly that:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/25/world/la-fg-obama-un-20120926

Oh man, you have to be trolling, right? Right?

You've obviously never had to troubleshoot issues caused by a bad/mismatched stick of RAM. I feel real bad for the kid in IT who has to investigate why "all of a sudden" this computer is having occasional blue screens, application crashes, or some other symptom which could just as easily be attributed to a dozen different causes. Of course the person who installed the RAM won't own up to it at that point, as the "user" knows what they did is wrong but has probably convinced themselves that installing RAM couldn't possibly have been the cause ... after all the computer turns on, right?

I've seen all this happen just because a kingston dimm didn't want to play nice with a corsair dimm, or vice-versa. Sometimes things that, in theory, should never be an issue end up being the cause of my greatest headaches. Users playing DIY don't make things any easier.

I guess my point is: if the intruder good enough to crack your WPA key, then disabling SSID broadcasting and enabling MAC filtering isn't going to help.

Spend a little time playing with aircrack-ng http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php and you will see just how little an inconvenience a hidden SSID or MAC filter really is. It's actually a lot of fun trying to break into your own network. It's not a big deal to leave airmon-ng running for a few hours or even days on a netbook attached to a cantenna to sniff out the ssid and a mac, waiting for a device to connect (obviously it's much faster if you can de-auth one). However, using WPA/WPA2 with a non-default SSID (like "dlink" or "linksys") is much more effective, since the SSID is used as a seed in the encryption and thus would require an intruder to generate their own rainbow tables.

From your description it sounds like you never use the wireless network though, so it is really necessary to even have one on all the time? Just toggle the switch on a power bar the router is plugged in to.

Sounds to me like this guy pissed off the wrong geek, who set out to make his life hell. Easy enough to do if you want the owner of the network to get 'caught'.

Wouldn't something like the Intel Classmate PC's been a better choice? Not as flashy, but at least the software is built with schools in mind. For example, being able to lock out the kid's screens so they pay attention is a feature I bet a teacher would enjoy. Also being able to push material/content to all of the devices, or view what's being done on the devices, etc ...

Office 2010 can natively "save as" PDF ...

Crap, wrong SP2. That 2nd link should have been:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=4F97AB2F-1F7D-49A3-9123-7CA3E703B916&displaylang=en

Or you could just install the patches for Office XP/2003 ...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=B444BF18-79EA-46C6-8A81-9DB49B4AB6E5

That sounds like an awesome idea, and it appears we Canucks have plenty of Thorium. Why isn't this being done??