The only problem with your argument is that Red Hat has a huge base of paying customers, and money talks.

I manage a small research cluster at a university. It's running Red Hat linux on over 100 nodes. The university has a site license for Red Hat so licensing for the cluster isn't an issue. The decision to go with Red Hat had to do mainly with what distros are directly supported by commercial products like Matlab, Mathematica, Abaqus, Maple, Comsol, Ansys, etc. All these vendors sell lots of software & services to universities, research labs, etc. and they all support Red Hat linux.

I've personally dealt with support departments when trying to run commercial software on non-RH distros, and in some cases they pretty much tell you you're on your own if you're not using RH or one of the other top two or three distros. Most commercial vendors will only state that they support RedHat, SUSE, and maybe Ubuntu and/or Debian.

If/when Red Hat comes out with a new way of doing things then customers like us will start pushing on the vendors to support those new ways. After all, we're tied into using Red Hat, and we need their products to run on it. So the commercial software vendors will start supporting the Red Hat way of doing things to appease their customers. And once the commercial vendors start supporting it then it will slowly but surely make its way into other distributions as well so that these apps can run on distros that other people want to use.

Basically impossible to jam because of the very powerful land based transmitters

Any signal can be jammed, and LORAN has its own weaknesses. A simple jamming or disruption of the signal from a master station would effectively disable LORAN across a huge geographic area. And given that they're ground based, it would be trivial to drive a truck into an antenna tower, blow it up with a small amount of explosives, etc.

If you're going to use rsync then I'd recommend using rsnapshot, which is essentially a perl script that makes rsync even more powerful. It's basically a poor-mans version of Apple's Time Machine software. It'll keep hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots in such a way that disk usage is optimized, and the number & timing of snapshots can be fully configured.

I still have a Heathkit multimeter that I built in the late 80's. Still works like a charm. I think I also have an LED clock sitting in a box in a closet somewhere.
I built a lot of their kits as a kid, from shortwave radios to speakerphones. My dad was a ham radio operator and he got me hooked on them. I'd love to see them make a comeback in this arena.

Was there any thought whatsoever in terms of security when they developed this format? A document that can embed other objects sounds like an excellent method for distributing malware, etc.

and pretty soon you'll have Planet of the Bees instead of Planet of the Apes...

What kind of logging are they going to expect to come from all the VPS's out there? I have two VPS's, each of which I use for two different domains I own. I also manage a third VPS for a non-profit group. Unless the ISP starts to log every single bit of data that comes into and out of my VPS this law is going to be absolutely useless to dealing with traffic that goes through a VPS.

There's no way in hell I'm going to forward the syslogs, mail logs, etc. of my linux hosts to an ISP for them to archive for an arbitrary amount of time. I'll simply pay a little bit more to use a VPS provided by a foreign provider that's outside of the reach of US laws.

And even if they did somehow manage to force VPS users to forward logs to the ISP for storage, how would they know that what I'm sending them is everything? I'm a pretty decent professional linux systems administrator. It wouldn't be all that hard to filter out some stuff and only send the ISP's log server what I want them to see.

Once again we see an excellent of an example of a proposed law that only makes things more difficult for the innocent and ignorant, and will have little effect on those who have the knowledge and desire to avoid it.

Well I live just outside Boston, so I just forwarded this article to all the contacts I could find at the various local & national news organizations including:

newstip@globe.com
newsdesk@necn.com
iteam@wbztv.com
http://www.myfoxboston.com/generic/about_us/contact_us/news_tip
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/newscenter5/index.html

etc.

Wrong. Every corporation in the country that relies on VPN's for their employees would complain, as would every corporation in the country who has sysadmins who work remotely using tools like SSH to log into hosts. As would every single person/corporation who uses encryption like GPG to encrypt sensitive e-mails and other data.

And on top of that you could never trust on-line banking or anything else ever again. There are tools out there to help identify SSL man-in-the-middle attacks that more and more banks are starting to use. Either you'd no longer be able to use on-line banking or you couldn't trust your connection to your bank. Just think - all a black hat would have to do is hack into a major ISP and compromise their SSL-man-in-the-middle server(s) and they'd have full access to the bank accounts of all the ISP's customers who use online banking.

Oh yeah, and guess who would have to foot the bill for your ISP to set up these man-in-the-middle SSL snooper servers and to constantly monitor your traffic? It sure won't be them or the MPAA/RIAA.

http://tinyurl.com/d3yup4

Wow, you really aren't all that bright, are you?

Your ISP starts throttling bittorrent on you and doing deep packet inspection of those torrents to see what you're sharing. So you rent a seedbox at a different ISP and do all your bittorrent transfers there where your local ISP has no control. Once you've received the entire torrent at the seedbox then you simply download it to home over an encrypted connection. As I said in my original post you just use scp/ssh or something similar that's SSL encrypted (possibly even a VPN connection). Your ISP can't inspect it. You're not using bittorrent over your ISP's connection so they can't claim you're infringing by sharing.

And who is going to throttle/block the seedbox in India? Seedbox providers are explicitly providing services intended to allow bittorrent, so they won't block it. And who cares if your ISP or other ISP's do that since you're not using bittorrent through your ISP. That's the whole point of protocols like bittorrent. Let the ISP's block the idiots who are stupid enough to try downloading torrents of copyrighted movies while hundreds or thousands of others rent seedboxes and run bittorrent there. All the bittorrent peers on the seedboxes will continue to run unimpeded while the ISP's block a small percentage of people. You seem to think that only one or two people are using seedboxes which couldn't be further from the truth. If that was the case then it would be easy for ISP's to block those one or two. But with hundreds or thousands of people using seedboxes then any bittorrent throttling the ISP's can do only hurts those who haven't learned about seedboxes or decided to invest in one yet.

Here's how it works for people who are hardcore infringers: Somebody in the movie industry gets a hold of the latest & greatest Movie X. They upload it to their seedbox in India and fire up bittorrent. They let their friends & other people know about it. Those people fire up bittorrent on their seedboxes in other countries like China, Russia, Japan, etc. Pretty soon Movie X is being peered by dozens/hundreds of seedboxes all over the world. Each of those friends then scp or rsync the movie back from their own seedbox to their own homes over encrypted connections so that their ISP can't tell what it is. Eventually word of the movie gets out to the general public and the torrent files get uploaded to sites like The Pirate Bay. It's then that people try to download the movie over their cable connection at home. THAT is the only thing that your ISP would be able to throttle or block. All the transfers to/from the seedboxes and among the seedboxes are entirely out of the control of your ISP or even US Copyright law.

In other words your ISP has simply decided to take the stance of harming their own legitimate customers while not doing anything truly effective to the hardcore infringers. Somebody who really wants to share copyrighted material will simply rent a seedbox in a country like China or India, use that for all their torrents, then copy the completed torrents to their home machine. And they simply won't care if it takes a full day or so to download an entire DVD over an encrypted connection.

Answer: It won't.

Most people who are hardcore infringers are already using things like seedboxes for uploading & downloading torrents. How do these idiot lawyers expect these agreements to impact VPS's hosted in countries like India? Rent 100gig of disk space & bandwidth from another country for $20/month or so, run all your torrents there, then use rsync via ssh, scp, etc. to do an encrypted transfer to/from your home. Even with deep packet inspection the ISP couldn't possibly know that you're copying copyrighted material to/from your seedbox.

If I found one of these attached to my car I think I'd simply throw it in a box and mail it somewhere. Perhaps to an FBI office on the other side of the country. Let the FBI blindly trace the path it takes through the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.

Either that or I'd let a dog run around the neighborhood with it.