Peer discovery is the very essence of the Gnutella protocol used by Gnutella. The Limewire client probably uses Limewire's servers to get an initial list of peers to connect to but beyond that, they shouldn't be needed. There are alternative methods to do this initial peer discovery as well so even if you take away Limewire's servers, things should still work fine, it just may take longer for your client to discover a decent amount of peers.

I can't believe how many people here seem to misunderstand this... As you say, the Volt is an EV. It can run without a drop of gasoline if you want it to, something a hybrid can't do. The drivetrain of the Volt is purely electric. The gasoline part of the Volt is just a generator to keep providing juice to the electric motor if the battery pack runs out. If you stay within the range of the battery pack, the generator will never need to turn on.

There is a key value on the SIM. The same key value is also provisioned in your subscriber profile in your provider's main subscriber registry (aka an HLR - Home Location Register).

When you're connecting to a mobile network, the serving switch sends a request to your provider's HLR. The HLR sends a set of tokens and an "expected result" value to the serving switch. The serving switch then sends those tokens down to your mobile. Your mobile then sends those tokens to your SIM card and your SIM card sticks them into a function along with the key value and produces a result value. The result value is passed back to your phone and your phone passes it back to the serving switch. The serving switch then compares the result value from your phone with the "expected result" value from your provider's HLR and if they match up, you're good to go.

Only the SIM and the HLR know your individual key value. Your mobile and the serving network are never provided this value. That's why your phone can't simply replicate the function of your SIM, because it would need to know the key value.

I think the problem alot of people have is they think of the SIM as just a dumb piece of storage. It really is a separate little computer in it's own right that just so happens to live behind your phone battery.

On the plus side, it means they'll sell the new Palm phones for practically nothing!

However, replacement batteries will cost $100. Also, they can't be recharged and the one that comes with the phone will only last you about 10 minutes.

The differences between iDEN and GSM are primarily on the access side. The network side is GSM, as is most of the access side messaging. The "attack" being described here is on the network side, so that would make Sprint susceptible to the same thing, at least its Nextel customers.

The Nextel portion of Sprint is actually GSM.

EveryDNS is more like the "custom DNS" feature in DynDNS which uses their servers to provide nameservers for your own domain. DynDNS's custom DNS service is $30/year if you aren't hosting with them, while EveryDNS is/was free.

Sure, Linux is a capable multi user system but the vast majority of Windows machines that /. would love to see converted to Linux will be single user systems. The fact that malware running with user-level privileges can't touch the files of other users would be of little comfort to single user machines.

Does the sudo part really matter anyway? The most important files on my system are those in my home directory and they're owned by my own user account, thus no privilege escalation is required to touch them.

Having great security around the base OS is a good thing but if you don't also provide good security for the users' files, it's kind of like getting a bunch of guards to protect a bank but leaving the vault in an unprotected building next door.

On the other hand, I really don't want to have to deal with UAC/sudo/etc. every time I edit one of my own documents, so it's kind of an unwinable situation that only good backups can protect against.

I suppose if you're ridiculously pedantic, you'd interpret "can you put peroxide in your ear?" as meaning "is it physically possible to put peroxide in your ear?" and the answer, of course, is yes and you'd have a good LOL and go back to counting the number of hairs on your arm.

Normal people, on the other hand, will interpret it as "is it a good idea to put peroxide in your ear?" which is indeed a valid and good question.

I ran into "error 15" too. I have two hard drives and I think GRUB got the drive ordering mixed up. It put the boot drive as "drive 1" in the boot file when it really should have been "drive 0". Unlike GRUB1 though, it didn't give me an option to manually try altering parameters at that point, which was annoying.

I ended up removing my 2nd drive, reinstalling Karmic (this time it did mark it as "drive 0"), and then reinstalled the 2nd drive after the installation was complete and everything worked fine after that. Hopefully GRUB won't mess things up again at the next kernel upgrade though. I think GRUB has some configuration options to fix bad drive mappings so I'll have to look into that.

Nokia is starting to release phones with its Maemo operating system. Maemo is Linux based and uses a Mozilla-based web browser. The new N900 is, I believe, the first phone to use it.

Nokia hasn't made any statements about phasing out Symbian in favor of Maemo but it at least it's a good start.

It's true Google Groups can be used to view Usenet groups, but you can also create groups that are completely independent of Usenet with it. That seems to be the case here.

Or sell the house to Ted Stevens and tell him that's where his Internet comes out of.