It is likely the case that the VPN providers were involved with some form of SPAM.

Cutting off Visa/Mastercard processing to the spammers clients such as online pharmacies has been a very successful approach:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/05/20/2252225/a-new-approach-to-reducing-spam-go-after-credit-processors

No gain = no SPAM

A well deserved shot, I'd say. If you publish articles up to very dubious journalistic standards, what do you expect? NYT prestige is taking a good hit with this, I'd be mad at the journalist.

Right now I use Haskell, Agda, Coq, Python and C, along dozens of libraries.

Because at the time, would Java had been under a different license, it had an incredible potential and surely would have enjoyed much wider adoption.

We had to stop using Java due to its non-free license.

And what is more important, the language is fragmented. Its non-freeness motivated the development of several runtimes/stacks, which, TTOMExperience, suffer from compatibility issues.

I'm sorry to say that, but Stallman was spot on with regarding his position about Java.

I feel nervous when I develop using a non-free framework. I much favor using a fully open source stack, as a programmer it frees me about a lot of worries.

The exact wording is (translated to English) "Internet connection required for playing", so I guess it is pretty clear. I've desisted purchasing some titles because of this warning.

Well, at least in my country such games prominently display: "Internet connection required" in the minimum requirements box. Given that, returning it because it doesn't work offline is not so easy.

Well it seems some people is not familiar with TrueCrypt. You have an encrypted partition that you can show, and inside it (mixed in the free space) you have a second one. This way if the police forces you to decrypt you partition you can show the fake one, and they have no way of guessing whether you had another one, the most they can do is to destroy it.

Indeed. How can they prove that the "hidden volume" exists? Their best bet would be to install a spy-camera and watch the subject performing some illegal activity, and that may not even work if he is cautious and goes to some public place with a laptop.

Frankly, I can't imagine that even the less prepared script kiddie wouldn't keep all their hacking data inside a TrueCrypt partition allowing him to claim plausible deniability.

That, an open wifi, then claim "it came that way, or I couldn't make my netbook connect, so I had to open it".

Given those basic security measures, what evidence could the police use to incriminate him? Video/screen surveillance? I can't think of any other way.

Aside from what other readers have noted (that getting a 5% return is very optimitics right now), you are not counting long term savings.

That is to say, today we have 1st generation power units which cost 3,500,000$ and save 100,000$ a year. Investing that money in the bank will return you 175,000$, all right, 75,000$ more than buying the machines.

But if you buy the power units, you are investing in power unit technology. So if they get a lot of customers, assume in 5 years time the units will cost 1.000.000$ and save you 300.000$ a year, a 30% ROI, no bank can compete with this. This is what happened with computer hardware, just look 20 years ago!

I guess previous work had the idea right, but actually building a system which can handle millions of links and reply in no time is not a small feature.

This reminds me of the discussion we had previously about the gap from research prototype transistors to having factories actually deliver them.

This is nice in theory, but in practice it has very serious security & management implications. You better don't allow programs to replace its code when called from a normal user, it creates a hell to support.

While I think Microsoft is right with its release cycle, the article is based on the fact the every other browser vendor is releasing snapshots.

For me, the biggest picture is interaction and strategy, not builds. In Webkit, Gecko and Presto, if you are a web developer, you can interact with the engine developer. They have mailing list, good bucktrackers, and a *good attitude* towards fixing bugs.

For Microsoft, if you are using Linux for development (a pretty common case I'd guess) you cannot even try. I doubt Windows users do fare any better. By the way, Windows 7 is not bad, but not usable yet.

We had the same problem, so we went with a different setup. We have two big Debian GNU/Linux servers and a lot of HP thin clients.

Each of these runs at 15Watt, so 10 users consume the same that 3 workstations.