Squeezeboxes are AMAZING. I have 7 of them in my home, and with a few button-presses, they can all be synchronized for whole-house audio. Also the server is open-source (Perl) and you can create your own plug-ins. I'm using plug-ins for faster search, logging of all tracks played, and creation of sync groups (so with one press, you can, say, set all your upstairs squeezeboxes to play one tune and all the downstairs ones another tune). Some squeezeboxes have built-in speakers (the Boom) and others require a stereo system. I have never regretted buying them. For the ultimate in space-efficiency, you can connect a speakerless squeezebox (e.g., the Classic) to a tiny in-wall amplifier (www.wireless-experts.com) that fits into a lightswitch box, connected to wall-mounted speakers. All people see is the squeezebox, the speakers, and a volume knob on the wall. Nice.

MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) can transform a company's culture from "nobody ever documents anything" into "Is it on the wiki yet??" It's the "swiss army knife" of intranet applications, super-extendable and easy to use. Even non-techies can master wikitext syntax with about 15 minutes of training.

My mechanical engineer friend, who has designed hard drives for Seagate, Maxtor, and others for 20+ years, says hard drives are NOT suitable for long term storage while switched off. After about six months of being off, they MAY begin losing data. However, if you simply power-on your hard drives every few months for a little while, you can prevent this.

Dude, go back to logic school. "There exist some happy prostitutes" does not equal "All prostitution is victimless." I guess that explains the rest of your "logic."

Your guesses about my own morality were quite amusing, bordering on silly. I loved when you wrote, "YOU are the one helping to enslave them...." Truly inspired. I congratulate you on a fine, industrial-strength troll.

...even though there are no victims for this crime...

Ah. You believe the myth of the happy prostitute.

Picking up runaways off the street, forcing them into prostitution, and getting them indebted and hooked on drugs so they can't leave, is not a victimless crime. Making prostitution legal will not prevent this; there are always girls down on their luck, and always scum ready to prey on them.

Two techniques I particularly remember for increasing my Linux effectiveness were:

1. find piped into xargs (or "find -print0" piped into "xargs -0" for safety) to process a directory tree in a single command

2. Printing commands on stdout and piping them into bash. For example, if you want to rename a bunch of files, and you put the old names into file "oldnames" and the new names into "newnames", one per line, you can do the mass renaming with:

$ paste oldnames newnames | sed 's/^/mv /' | bash

generates a sequence of "mv" commands and executes them.

First time I saw each of these, it was so eye-opening.