My OpenVPN/Raspberry Pi proxy was a miserable failure...

Dare I raise the suspicion, that the underlying Linux is to blame? pfSense, on contrast, is based on FreeBSD and is — as mentioned by numerous people here — quite usable even on old celerons...

GNOME 3 is very innovative, and is built with no patent incentives.

Grandparent didn't say, the incentives are eliminated by the ruling. Only that there are fewer now... Still enough for GNOME 3 to be developed, obviously, but, possibly, not as well as it could be.

Nature has exactly zero precedent for lighter-than air flight

Most fish regulate their buoyancy using air-bubbles inside their bodies. Water is not air, but for a precedent it would do because Archimedes' law applies to gases and liquids equally...

And even in the air — the way plants like dandelions spread their seed... Well, they aren't lighter than the surrounding air of the same volume, but they are light enough to not require any power for flight.

In the general case, however, you'll find a pipe is probably faster, because the two processes can run on different cores.

The poster I was responding to referred to "Unix tradition". The tradition started on single-CPU systems...

Even on modern multi-core computes, piping data from stdout to stdin is inefficient. Very convenient, but inefficient nonetheless. When the cost of developing (such as shell scripts written to either be one-offs or rarely executed) exceeds the costs of the inefficiency, it is justified.

But with storage — the code, that is used by millions thousands (millions!) times per day, it makes all the sense to invest in developing the subsystem.

Indeed, various OS-vendors (free and otherwise) all spend a lot of effort (and money) on improving their offerings. ZFS is just an example of something better than all (or most?) of the competition.

The Unix tradition is small, single purpose tools that do one thing well. Witness sort, grep, wc, etc.

The cost of this approach has always been performance. It is faster, for example, to use grep's -c switch than to pipe grep's output into wc -l (as is commonly done in poorly-written scripts).

When it comes to storage, the performance penalty of using separate layers, which aren't well-aware of each other, becomes big enough to justify integration...

However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet.

You are quite right to put "enough" in quotes. What I don't understand is, how you can seriously accuse anyone of lying (without quotes) on a matter as subjective as this.

The minimum needs to keep rising.

Sure. And it will — when multiple providers begin competing with each other for each home. Until then, attempting to force incumbent monopolies to improve service will remain a losing proposition — they talk directly to the powers that be and, being a monopoly, aren't afraid to lose many customers.

Meanwhile, the popular anger is directed against the Koch brothers — the favorite target of fans of government's regulations.

They're now facing charges and lawsuits related to "impersonating police", and the ADA who was involved is likewise facing some severe penalties.

Exactly. Now, where is the movement to stop the property seizures? Is anyone even collecting signatures?

Much like the For Profit Prison model

Let's not get distracted, huh?

And how does a For Profit Police/Prison company make more money? By finding more criminals, and increasing criminality.

You are perfectly right that it is in the interests of such companies to find more criminals. However, the "increasing criminality" allegation needs citations... Got any? The article sure does not... It enumerates some questionable practices, but nowhere is there are an allegation of an innocent person getting locked-up "for profit".

Against corporations, how else do you deal with a bad actor?

By switching to a competitor, that's how... You don't like Coke, you switch to Pepsi, that's all.

A bunch of individuals acting in concert? Congratulations: that's what Government is.

It can also be a charity, a for-profit corporation, a collective farm, a non-profit corporation, etc. And, yes, any of those are "bunch of individuals acting in concert" — and, yes, they can do almost all, that the government is doing... And whereas government is necessarily a monopoly, all of those things compete with each other for our monies and attentions. Switching from Consumer Digest to Consumer Reports is just as easily as switching from Coke to Pepsi.

Private business performing the duties of cops using a privately run intelligence network with no oversight or rules but lots of personally identifiable information to track people whom the state isn't even legally interested in, in order to sieze their assets and then keep a piece of those assets and form a major portion of the business's profit stream?

Seriously? You find the fact, that it is a private business to be the most offensive? A private business can neither arrest nor prosecute — much less convict anybody. They can not even seize any assets themselves. Their personally identifiable information (PII) about us is unlikely to be any less regulated, than what Google or Slasdhdot collect. If anything, they are more cautious than NSA is likely to be.

That said, it is quite hilarious, how the big government types — who usually support its ever increasing role in our lives (because "corporations" are evil) — still get turned off by the police — as if the Department of Education and the FBI are not from the same government...

No, the only scandalously wrong thing described in the article is the ease, with law enforcement's can seize our assets... And the most offensive part is that the authors aren't even offended by this particular aspect.

Desert Snow encouraged state and local patrol officers to post seizure data along with photos of themselves with stacks of currency and drugs

Law enforcement doing their job — and bragging about it — is fine. All professions do that, it is normal.

I don't even mind them seizing the (illegal) drugs, but possession of cash is not against the law. Unfortunately, a loophole in the American legal thinking (as well as the British, which we inherited) does not provide much protection to a person's property . Nowhere near as much as to the person himself.

The Executive can seize cash, vehicles, and even real estate without Judiciary oversight or approval — and that ought to stop. Their justification — that what they are seizing things was used for "criminal activity" — comes into play, before anyone is convicted in any criminality.

That must stop. A judge may impose limitations on using of the suspect property (and fund-transfer) — the same way movement limitations are imposed on a person, while investigation is ongoing or a trial is pending. But no seizures ought to be permitted until a "Guilty" verdict is pronounced and the sentencing enumerates, what's to be seized as a punishment.

What's settled is that the climate is changing at the hands of man

Yeah, sure. And every time I jump, the Earth moves (a little bit) in the opposite direction. Right... No, what is far from settled, is whether the humanity's impact is anything to speak of — or whether a single volcano's eruption produces more "greenhouse effect gases", than the Earth's entire bovine population and thus there is little justification in limiting beef-consumption on that account.

In other words, what's very far from being "settled" is whether humanity's impact matches that of other factors. Counting CO2 — and making predictions based on that — has already been demonstrated to be stupid. By those predictions, for example, Arctic ice should've disappeared this summer — instead, it has grown.

Kudos for tossing in the pinch of anti-government paranoia, it has to be that and not the desire for massively profitable fossil fuel corporations to defend said profits.

The profits of fossil fuel corporations are not endangered by the "green" moves at all — the demand for oil and gas is unaffected. Besides, for each such corporation, there is a bunch of solyndras peddling their wares to the "green" crowd — you aren't going to convince many, that it is the corporate world, that opposes "green initiatives".

But for the government folks — those, who are sincerely convinced, they know better than their subjects — this is a perfect way to expand their control. And if the already government-heavy countries (like Cuba) are helping persuade the free world's scientists, then all the better. Let's look the other way...

A little scary when press cozies up to a law-enforcement branch of government, isn't it?

Unbeknown to most members of the public, among the first Executive Orders signed by President Obama upon taking office was the one, declaring Dissent is no longer patriotic .

So, whereas it was glamorous and noble to dissent against RethugliKKKan election-thieves of the past, you better get all your stories pre-approved by the loving and caring government officials as long as a Nobel Peace laureate is in office.