I was a Sys Admin for a day trading company in Chicago.

We had a 100mb serial line direct to all of the major markets that we traded in. We also traded the European markets. Trades were taking upwards of 300ms to complete. So, we spent $25mil USD to build a data center in Germany. We could then use Citrix to remote into this data center and trade, We still had traders that would scream for us when a trade took >100ms on the local markets. And we came running and scoured network logs trying to find the bottleneck.

We replicated all traffic to certain ports on the Cisco and had Wireshark running constantly, even after hours. Every millisecond counted. And seeing that the owner of the company personally made $3mil profit every quarter, it seemed to be working.

TPB is just linking to material. They don't host it. Yes, they 'make it easier to infringe', but the line between what TPB is doing and what e.g. the roads are doing (helping bank robbers get away, the horror!) is one of degree

I've never agreed with this. This is a horrible argument, and I'm appalled at the people that fool themselves into believing it.

I support drug reform, so I setup a service. All of the local drug dealers have GPS trackers on them so I know where they are and how to contact them. Someone comes to me and asks me where to get weed. I look up the GPS location of the weed dealer, hand the customer the phone number and location. Next guy asks for cocaine. I lookup the coke location, hand the customer the number and location.

This is EXACTLY what TPB are doing. In the above scenario, do you honestly think I wouldn't get any jail time for my service? I mean, I'm not making any money. Some of my clients are medicinal users, so they can legal have the drugs. I'm not offering any drugs myself.

Depends. The Mayans did this centuries ago. We seem to think that when their clock runs out in 2012, the universe ends. Some of the more sane among us doubt the apocalypse, but still theorize some cosmically significant event that can change the world. What will the civilization after us think about OUR clock? I can only hope they are sane enough to take it as it is, a random and arbitrary cutoff number.

For storage server, I don't think I'd agree with 6x drives in RAID1+0. That many drives on a nice controller, I'd strongly advise RAID5. The only downfall of RAID5 is that you need a minimum of 3 disks. We already have 6 disks here.

The free version of Xenserver does not include HA, which is crucial in our environment. Also, no load balancing servers on Xenserver. We need the ability to move a VM to a new server for load balancing purposes. Considering these 2 factors, We will not be leaving ESX anytime soon.

I hear this arguement a lot. And while I agree with it, I also disagree with it.

Let's say I know several drug dealers. In order for them to not be caught, they all hop in cars and drive around mobile. Someone comes to me and says they are looking for pot. I check my GPS tracker and tell them where to find the drug dealer. Next guy asks for coke, so I check the GPS tracker on the coke dealer, and arrange another meeting.

While I am not selling anything, I highly doubt someone who participated in this type of racket would not be charged with anything. The current geek mentality is very much all or nothing. I.E. "If this is illegal, then so is selling maps to the star's homes". People need to realize that lines are drawn and there are limits. Life, and the law, are not all or nothing propositions.

Just as the police can "accidentally" serve a warrant to the wrong person and find evidence to charge this person with a crime. Since the warrant was issued "in good faith", it can then be upheld in court.

Under this new legislation, I can already see the number of "we thought we destroyed the DNA, but evidentially we forgot." Since it is in "good faith" that the police destroy DNA, I assume that old DNA will be able to be used as evidence?

Yep. I started with Slackware. Used it for a good 6 years solid. Got a new PC, and I figured I earned the right to use an easy, "just works" distro. Back then, dependency hell was a daily occurrence. With Ubuntu, I've only once ran into dependency issues. I must say, I do occasionally miss the random error resulting from running make, and then spending an hour trying to figure out wtf is going on. Plus, my wife and my 4 year old can both easily use my computer.