Yes, you seem to be missing most of the entire story. RTFA. And not just the most recent one. Go back into the archive of Venezia's blog and read his earlier reports about what happened. Pay particular attention to the comments posted to these pieces, some from Child's former manager who quit several months before this incident. He vouches for Terry's skills and integrity and confirms that the SF IT management team is incompetent and deserves to be in jail.

The City of San Francisco's IT Security Policy has been posted on this thread at least three times now, so you have no excuse not to have already read it. Please do so before posting any further uninformed comments.

Childs is a contractor, not a civil servant, so the union has no role in having him re-instated. But once he is a free man, you can bet there will be many job offers from all over the place. If I had any power to hire IT staff, I'd be calling him the day after he is acquitted.

Did you even read the IT Security Policy he was following? It has been posted now at least three times on this discussion thread. It proves he was doing his job, and proves he was doing it better than any of his managers, their supervisors and the still wet-behind-the-ears and woefully underqualified Information Security Officer who blew the entire affair out of proportion (who was also the girlfriend of one of the upper managers who got her that job).

Childs did not hold anyone or anything hostage. He was just following the information security policy. The network never went down and no damage was done because he tuned the system to operate flawlessly even when he was unavailable to manage it.

But, the prosecutor who slapped five million dollars bail on Terry Childs needs to be taken down, have his political career ended over this.

Grammar Nazi here. ".. have her political career ended over this." The lovely, but air-headed Kamala Harris is the duly elected San Francisco District Attrorney.

The password restrictions were not a provision of his contract, but written directly into the information security policy of the City of San Francisco. This is one of the documents that showed up on a publicly-accessible city website after Childs was arrested. Venezia even included the URL to this site in one of his earlier blog postings. After that was published, I believe the PDF document was removed, but I'm sure Google has cached it.

All Childs was doing was following the information security policy of the City, the policy that his superiors were trying to violate. This only further proved the incompetence of the city's IT management as well as the incompetence of the District Attorney's office, who submitted to the public record as evidence against Childs a list they discovered of all the VPN user accounts and passwords for the city's employees powerful enough to have been granted such access. Such acts of stupidity would be astonishing anywhere but San Francisco.

Boxee works fine for me, though only on my x86 Ubuntu partition. There is no 64-bit package for Boxee, though the forums are filled with inquiries about it. I asked Dave Matthews of Boxee about this issue, and he said their limited resources are all focused on developing for the widest range of systems, and while he welcomes and encourages people to work on a 64-bit version, most of the efforts I've seen have been chroot hacks to get the 32-bit version to play well (or even at all) on 64-bit installations. I'm a sysadmin, not a coder, but if I had the necessary skyllz, I'd love to be able to do this.

In the open source world, you are encouraged to get up off your butt and do something when you see a problem that is not being properly addressed. Blogging tools are easily available all over the place. If you don't like the Linux bloggers you have been reading, start your own blog and promote it.

You might also want to subscribe to any one of the hundreds of open source podcasts out there. I listen to FLOSS Weekly (Randal Schwarz + Leo LaPorte and sometimes Jono Bacon), Fresh Ubuntu (Peter Nicholitis and Harlem Kianu), the Ubuntu UK Podcast and some others. I'm less impressed by the Linux Action Show, but I still check it out every now and then.
You can find these and many others at http://www.thelinuxlink.net/

The first reflecting telescope I had as a young high school student included a sun filter that screwed into the either of the two lenses that came with it, so I could look directly at the sun and observe all kinds of things like giant flares and sunspots. The green glass of the sun filter was probably similar to the material used in welding masks, as you could not see anything at all through it except the sun.

I saved my lawn mowing money for months to be able to afford that $58 K-mart blue light special, but it was definitely a worthwhile investment.