what the internet has done to intellectual property is pit the little guys against entrenched dying large corporate machines. usually all the little guy can do is run and hide. but when its corporate machine versus corporate machine cast in the role usually occupied by the little guy, this is good because google can throw clout into a fight where the little guy can only hope to be popped like a zit. so precedents can fly out of this that can protect the little guy

Better slow downloads than meeting your new Swedish boyfriend in jail.

Even better, how about paying for your movies, games, and music? That way you can download them as fast as you like, and the government won't try to put you in jail even if they spy on you doing it!

I realise this is Slashdot, where "not getting busted for copyright infringement" is apparently categorised as a "right", so I'm probably about to be modded into oblivion -- but hey, that's life, isn't it?

I mean, where are the true believers now? Does anyone seriously think that western governments have any kind of moral credibility?

We wag our fingers at China for their actions in Tibet, but by any measure what they have done there is far more humane than what we have done in Iraq. We lecture Russia about corruption and they simply retort with examples of western corruption.

Who actually believes that our governments have any reason to exist anymore beyond their existence itself?

Wall Street has always been home to some of Sun's and IBM's largest corporate accounts. I don't doubt Linux and/or BSD can do the job that Solaris can in some cases (with caveats), but it will take years for that to happen. A "Linux stronghold" is misleading at best, TFA doesn't even support the claim.

And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.

At the risk of being modded troll, OO Calc will probably never replace Excel - other than Suns and big iron, corporate america runs on Microsoft Excel (not necessarily a good thing, but still).

OTOH, I know companies that are still running their websites and outward-facing interface systems on hardware and software that could be easily replaced by off-the shelf open source stuff, which will probably save them a lot of money.

The reason Eve can't just generate a new pad is because there are two methods of generating a photon and two methods of measuring a photon. Each method of generating a photon has a matched way of measuring it. If you use the matched measurement method you correctly get the bit Alice sent. If you use the incorrect method you get a random 0 or 1 no matter what bit Alice sent. Eve (and Bob too) has no way of telling which method Alice used. In quantum key distribution, after sending the photons, Alice would contact Bob over a different channel. They would tell which method they used, and if they used matching methods keep that bit. If they used different methods they would throw out the bit. If Eve regenerated the bits, she could not have used the same methods as Alice since she doesnt know which methods were used. So Alice and Bob's keys won't match up which will result in any information passed between them to be undecodable and they will know someone eavesdropped.

Quantum Key Distribution is, in its most naive form, still vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. It makes it a little more difficult because you must be able to intercept information on two different channels (the quantum channel and the classical electronic channel), but it is still doable. (There are, however, cryptographic methods of detecting man in the middle attacks, but thats a subject for another time).

Hiring folks who used to work at IBM or Google is not the same thing as "large companies control[ling] how Twitter works." Some day, you'll have a job and you'll understand that. [Sorry to be an asshole about this, but your comment just shouts "teenage kid who's never had a serious job."] People with experience with large-scale applications may already know solutions to some of the problems Twitter is seeing. Those solutions aren't always in the text books; and if they were trivial and obvious, then such applications would be much more common.

And if you have a blackberry enterprise server, you can:

- force your users to have a password
- force the device to lock after a specified period of inactivity
- force the user to enter the password every x minutes regardless of activity
- prevent users from having a trivial password
- give users a duress password
- set the blackberries to store everything in encrypted from
- if a blackberry is lost, you can remotely lock the blackberry
- if a blackberry is lost, you can remotely wipe it

Blackberries are the best mobile platform, period.

more genetic variation means more resistance to the weakness of monoculture

I live in Brazil where there are many types of bananas available. Any supermarket has at least three different types. Just off my head, I can name at least six types of Brazilian bananas: Ouro ("gold"), Prata ("silver"), d'Agua ("water"), Maçã ("apple"), Nanica ("dwarf"), da Terra ("earth").