The public key doesn't matter. Anyone can have your public key and security is not affected. However, if they get your private key, that's another story... (But you can also password-protect your private key as a last measure of security.)

Actually, with ARP poisoning, you can effectively sniff a switched network. Of course, there will be traces left (bad ARP table entries and possibly some stuff in syslog), but most people won't notice.

So... if they're giving sheep wooden legs... does that mean they're creating pirate sheep? Are they also giving them eye patches and pet parrots?

I completely agree about the weight. Anything over 5 pounds starts to be inconvenient. This laptop is just under 4 pounds, which keeps it relatively easy to carry.

Battery life, on the other hand, is rather disappointing on here. I usually get about 3 hours, possibly 4 (partially due to the age of the battery, but it also didn't last that long to begin with). I will definitely be looking for longer battery life in my next laptop purchase. Unfortunately, I really need the power, so netbooks are out of the question.

This one's actually got a 1024x768 screen, too, but there was a higher-resolution option that I didn't buy because I'm a fool.

Isn't the point of netbooks to be small and light? 12" screens start to defeat that; I wouldn't doubt that most netbook purchasers prefer 10" screens (of course, any smaller than that and the keyboard gets pretty cramped). If you're going to get a 12" machine, you might as well make the jump to a full notebook...

I'm actually on a 12" laptop right now, and love it very much.

'find' can be used as grep on Windows. Windows does not come with grep.

DD-WRT already runs DNSMasq, but you could probably get BIND. DNSMasq does have some nice features, though, like fixing bogus NXDOMAIN replies (I use this on my ISP's page, which also has hijacked DNS).

My biggest problem with NFS is share permissions as well as some bad experiences I've had with it previously.

I remember an old FreeBSD installation I had (6.0?) had a mounted NFS share, which was subsequently disconnected (without unmounting, I had forgotten). It stuck the process in some state that made it completely unkillable. I had a zombie NFS client process for about a month before I gave up and rebooted the computer remotely. Never had such a problem with SMB. (Although, that was probably an implementation problem and not a protocol problem.)

NFS also requires a lot of configuration, with SMB I can just open smb.conf and set up another [share] section, usually pretty much just copied from another one. And after setting it up, I can easily access it from anywhere without having to change much.

And, with SMB, I have easy compatability with my Windows machines as well as my Linux/FreeBSD machines, as well as a very stable implementation pretty much everywhere. It's bloated, but it gets the job done for the most part. I just want to share files, after all.

Removing Bash (and the rest of the shells) will break shell scripts. Removing the terminal emulators is a better idea.

I would classify Google as a web service.

A desktop environment is a suite of programs bundled together with a window manager. The three biggest desktop environments are KDE, Gnome, and Xfce. KDE's window manager is Kwin, and Gnome's is Metacity. There are also a bunch of standalone window managers floating around, such as Fluxbox, DWM, and the like.

All the drives I've RMA'd (all internal ones, though) were replaced with recertified drives, which come low-level formatted. Presumably they low-level format anything that comes in the door, unless they want to test to see why it failed. Either way, if you're really afraid of people getting your data, why not encrypt it?