Hardware floppy drives are indeed obsolete. Welcome to the wonderful era of virtualization where he can have as many windows 98 "boxes" as he likes, all with their very own virtual floppy disks.
I beg to differ. It is a matter of adjusting your expectations and your IDE layout - like we haven't done that before. In my case I have learned to like and prefer the advantages of wide over tall given a single screen limitation. On a 1920 wide screen it is easy to place two or three editor views side by side in eclipse - useful for example when dealing with multiple related classes like manager, entity and DAO classes for a given "object" in a typical enterprise app. (Just drag the document tab for a class sideways and off the main editor panel). It's not ideal - vertical space is still important - especially with the proliferation XML config files and chatty bean setters and getters, but getting used to using code folding and ouline views helps. In the end, enough that I prefer wide over tall.
(Disclaimer: my 'primary' desktop workstation has three widescreens with one oriented sideways for max vertical scrolling power - I never said I did not like vertical space).
Barring the difficulty of proving sincerity in interest, this sounds like a pragmatic solution to the patent trolling problem.
The keyword in the wikipedia article is "simple kind" of jail mechanism. Yes indeed it is. As others above have pointed out, if you do not run the processes as root, and do not have setuid processes in the chroot'ed env, then it is a "simple kind" of jail mechanism. However, do silly things like run daemons as root , by all accounts not something that should be considered part of the "simple" realm in Unix, and due diligence would dictate that you re-examine your simple assumptions.
All over the web, man pages, O'Reilly books, and university courses it is said that root is dangerous and must be treated with the utmost respect and care. I think it is obvious from the very philosophy of root that that warning should supersede any other information you may read on a man page of a program.
Also from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_user
Software defects which allow a user to "gain root" (to execute with superuser privileges code supplied by that user) are a major security issue, and the fixing of such software is a major part of maintaining a secure system. One common way of gaining root is to cause a buffer overflow in a program already running with superuser privileges. This is often subsided in modern operating systems by running critical services, such as httpd, under a unique limited account.
And in the same wikipedia article referenced, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot, ignoring the changes from today in obvious reaction to this slashdot posting, you will read under limitations:
Only the root user can perform a chroot. This is intended to prevent users from putting a setuid program inside a specially-crafted chroot jail (for example, with a fake
/etc/passwd file) that would fool it into giving out privileges. The chroot mechanism itself is not entirely secure on all systems. On some systems, for example, chroot contexts do not stack properly and chrooted programs may perform a second chroot to break out.
This warning or some variant of it, has been part of the article on chroot since July of 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chroot&diff=19562594&oldid=19544086
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"