If you're considering giving him internet access, consider what it means. It means the ability to interact with random strangers on the internet. I don't mean to over-exaggerate the risk of this, but it's something you would never consider doing in-person unattended.

If he has internet access at all, make sure it's supervised.

Make sure there's some form of security/anti-virus. Other than that, let him run wild, and see what he comes up with, as opposed to what you'd give him :)

Not if you make it equal equal.

Let gay couples have civil unions. Let straight couples have civil unions too.

Let people figure out for themselves what a "marriage" is or isn't, without any government meddling whatsoever.

Is H264 incumbered by any patents not held by the MPEG-LA? Their argument is that if you pay to use their codec, you're in the clear patent-wise, but there's no guarantee that another 3rd party won't pull out a patent they're infringing.... and the MPEG-LA has stated they're going to start charging everybody for access to H264 anyways.

Theora and VP8 are in a better position patent-wise anyways. They both have tearms that have done searches patents (i believe VP8 has, I *know* Theora has), and they've publicly said that you're not going to get in trouble for using their stuff, EVER.

But how do you find a new friend that's got similar connections?

This is/was the problem with instant messaging networks: Unless you were on the right network, along with your friends, you got nothing.

The solution that's quickly gaining ground is federated XMPP, where your identity is tied to a server, but the server can talk to other servers, so you're not stuck in one walled off garden.

Any outlook for good federated, multi-server, distributed and de-centralized social networking? I know there's status.net, where interesting stuff is happening...

The main feature of Facebook seems to be friend suggestions. How to manage the friend graph without the central server could be a challenge...

Just a thought, maybe Linux could be aware of what those cores look like, and what their sensitivities to temperature are.... and change the amount or type of work pushed to that core? Although I suppose heat from the other cores would most likely transmit very quick to the "zombie" core. Any CPUs have seperate temperature tracking per core?

The ipod touch and iphone run darwin, a *nix with full shell/root access... but locked down.

As long as Microsoft had a decent standard, that could be implemented without patent/IP-rights, I don't even care that much. A workable standard people follow is better that a perfect standard that 70% of deployed browser instances promptly ignore.

Slashdotted before a first-post. That's unfortunate.

The flip-side of course is that if the company is submitting their code for security checking, they're paying at least some attention to security. The company that doesn't care may have many many more vulnerabilities.

I was just searching for this same thing today and a friend of mine suggested this product:

http://www.netsys-direct.com/proddetail.php?prod=NH-310CEKIT&cat=27

It's a 200Mb ethernet-over-coax solution that makes use of existing coax installs and uses traditional cable. We'll be testing it soon for a 200 metre install.

Our University is looking at switching, and a bunch of students have opted to move early, since Google's offering the services whether we switch entirely or not.

Our contract says they give us free service, and explicitly says they do *NOT* mine our emails for anything, ever.