Counterintuitively, emissions are generally much worse with modern motorcycles vs. modern cars. In most cases, the only green benefit it gives you is roughly double gas mileage, but even that doesn't makes up for the increased harmful emissions. Motorcycles are not the green machine you think they are. There was a whole Mythbusters episode on this awhile back.

Tamrac is great. I've used this one for about 5 years now, fits all my expensive electronics in one carry-on bag for traveling. http://www.amazon.com/Tamrac-3380-Photo-Laptop-Backpack/dp/B000XXBMCY

Nothing. I'd wager parent is just venting because of some strange issue he ran into. Our Ubuntu production servers have proven more reliable than our Fedora servers. No big difference though.

My dog is terrified of beer. I think it's the carbonation. I have had a cockatoo that was addicted to coffee, though. Also pizza. Strange bird.

CrashPlan is pretty great, but the Linux client was too much of a resource hog when I used it. Whether that's bad programming or that fact that it's a Java service, I don't know.

Works for me in Chicago. I'm guessing it's his broadband router that's doing this, intercepting port 53 traffic and forwarding to the DNS servers it got from DHCP.