One use I could perhaps see what they'd could use this research for is to justify offering something of either deterrence or rehabilitation through the use of guilds. Give guys who feel a need to belong and a need to whack shit with a weapon and you could *maybe* have something of a replacement with something like WoW. Hey, it's a stretch, but it's all I got. Worth noting: I have a little brother who seems to not mind the juvenile justice system all that much and is a relatively frequent visitor - however, once I got him into gaming and into things like Tribes, Priston Tale, and whatnot where clans/guilds existed his desire to go outside and henceforth get into trouble dropped significantly. Granted, it's just a patch for other socio/economic issues, but it could still have a somewhat positive effect. I'd much rather lazy gamers than violent gang members.

Because the pirates can only demand ransom (which is what they actually want, not the cargo), if the crew is alive, and the ship is undamaged (or minimally so)

I have to give a presentation on a mathematical model today, and I am just now hearing about this; does anyone have a link to a paper they wrote or more information?

I googled it while previewing my comment and found a pdf presentation:
http://carbon.videolectures.net/2009/other/ccss09_zurich/johnson_bnb/ccss09_johnson_bnb_01.pdf

"Dame los lentes"

Memory usage and load times with library linkage. It always amuses me when on certain systems, as a result of downloading KDE, it pulls in libraries which are linked against other libraries, which in turn are compiled with GTK support. I don't use GTK anywhere, and yet I have its code sitting in my memory, needlessly. If you compile it yourself, you don't have these needless dependencies.

That said, the difference in loading times is negligible, and I haven't had an OCD approach to software installation for a while. I also trust the likes of $DISTRO's packagers to have a lot more experience in compiling software than I have, since, er, that's what they do all day.

From reading your post, it looks like you are looking to use a desktop OS (I may be wrong). Also it seems to me that you have tried various distros of linux but are rejecting them because it doesn't hhave ZFS.

Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.

However as another poster said, the best judge is you. therefore install each and try them out and see which works best with your hardware. you may also want to compare desktop responsiveness with Linux, as I believe that recent linux kernels have received further optimizations for desktop performance.

If its a server OS you are looking for then it depends on what you are using it for (LAMP, file server, DB host etc.). If you are looking to run commercial DBs like Oracle on it, a certified OS like RHEL/Solaris may be a better bet if u plan to ask for support. Thats a totally different ball game all together and is something on which one can write pages on.

Good luck on whatever you choose to use.

Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else's system?

Emphasis mine. You are making an unwarranted assumption - that it is the same code. When compiling a port, you can often set flags to change which functionality is compiled into the port. For example, if you are running a server, you can specify that support for X11 should be omitted. Generic binaries can't be as flexible.

Because they are up against more trillions of pounds in the financial sector. Who did you think had the most to profit from a carbon trade scheme in the first place? Or did you actually think that AGW was a grass root effort.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I could even go as far as you say that the Climategate scandal was a deliberate backstab on the financial industry that has been losing influence in the last year. But as I said, that is just conspiracy theory. It would make for a nice story though.

One more important thing to note. There aren't many big single track fossil fuel companies left. The smart ones have already moved towards becoming full fletched energy companies. And such companies have quite a bit to win by restricting fossil fuel trade, as they will be able to take profit from the companies that rely more heavily on fossil fuel.

More like a dirty lie.

I'm in India. "High speed" is a shared 2mbps line.

Under the assumption that the party sending out the letters is doing the due diligence thing, they'd connect to the IP claiming to seed and ask it for a chunk of the torrented bit sequence. If the client doesn't get one, there's no infringement going no.

If they do get one then either they themselves are a "pirate" or they are data they are entitled receive thus there can be no infringement. There's also the issue of how possible it is to reconstruct a file from a random file fragment.

Now, we can discuss whether the due diligence assumption is realistic, of course, but if I were them and I was genuine about preventing piracy (as opposed to going scaremongering), that's what I'd do. (fwiw...)

Really what they'd need to do would be leech the whole file, taking note of where they got each bit from, then have person look at what they had downloaded.

"The claim is "10x more productive""

Yes that is ALSO a claim. And it is ALSO a lie. Although not as easy to refute by simply demonstrating more concise code in just about any other language.

From the runrev.com website:

"Rev is easy to learn and use, requires 90% less code, and can deliver a 10-fold increase in productivity over traditional languages."

http://www.runrev.com/company/about-us/

All said it is probably a fine language for some. Its creator just has a lot of bad karma by marketing it with lies.

Or how China is keeping its currency at an artificially low price by purchasing huge amounts of the currency of its largest customer ;)

AGW deniers: data from their own thermometer is extrapolated into the trend "that it isn't getting any warmer".

it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem ... the idea of fining "people" that don't get insurance is just a slap in the face. The real problem are all those wonderful "service industry" jobs that still won't include options and will just leave the employee to pay the $2500, mooching off spouses and parents with insurance from the "unmodern" manufacturing industries. Companies like large chain department stores and food service don't pay nearly their fair share and changed their industries to eliminate insurance from the "wasteful, local" businesses that could afford to pay insurance... and Wall Street ate those choice up and made their stocks fly high.

At my company (manufacturing with pretty good insurance), we're doing open enrollment and putting up the numbers, insurance costs about $8k -$10k per employee. Of that I'm paying about $2k in premiums (family) and have to set aside another $3k in FSA for "my share" of copays and deductibles. So the wonderful, free, employer-provided insurance is nearly $5k out of MY pocket and $8K+ out of the companies... and going up $500 - $1000 per year (my end) just to keep things the same. i don't see anything in ANY of the discussion that fixes THAT problem for the company, nor anything that makes things better for employees.

What upsets me more is that insurance companies claim "rising costs" but keep taking a larger and larger share of my Doctor's bill. From the various bills, they routinely take 1/3 off the top as "in network" discount, combine with my ever-increasing copay of about 1/3 - 1/4 the bill they're only cashing out a small portion of the "cash price" bill. Even for a hospitalization they took almost half off the top from the hospital's portion. The whole thing is based on the idea that for-profit insurance companies can squeeze "wasteful" non-profit providers to "improve service" without dealing with pharma companies, medical device makers, and most importantly Lawyers to reduce costs... it's the "walmart" strategy.

What upsets me most about this whole debate is that it's been a war on EMPLOYEES of GOOD companies that provide insurance. Rather than working with the PAYING employers they're only asking the insurance companies what will keep THEM profitable.. while basically telling health providers they're "giving away" free care now. I haven't seen anything that addresses the real issue with the system now, and it's not even making a GOOD new system.

Wikipedia's article on Aetna mentions $2 million spent on lobbying.

Honestly, I'm amazed at how much influence so little money can buy. For many years, I thought that lobbyists were spending tens of thousands per member of Congress per issue, but I later found that this is by far the exception, and some very bad laws can go in for as little as a few thousand for each member on the fence. I know it builds up over time and across an entire industry, but the return on investment for an individual company is actually exceptionally good.