What makes you think he'll be gone in 4 years? There is zero opposition to him right now and what there was is currently battling cancer. Harper, whatever you think of his politics, is the best political strategist this country has seen. He will be in power as long as he wants to be in power (or until the party turns on him).

I've been running it on a Mac Mini for a few years. If I did it again, I'd get an Ion machine, but the mini works great in either OSX (with XBMC or the mac fork Plex) or in Linux. Having a real CPU means that I don't have to worry about VDPAU and such to get 1080p working, I just let the thing chug and I've never dropped a frame.

I've been playing with Nexenta (www.nexenta.org) for a while with some success. It calls itself GNU/Solaris in the same way that Debian is GNU/Linux. They put an OpenSolaris kernel under a GNU software stack using recompiled Ubuntu packages. Last time I checked they were using Hardy.
Packaged software support isn't as large as with FreeBSD (not all Ubuntu packages are converted), but larger than OpenSolaris (it includes the OpenSolaris packages through apt).
Its main appeal is in combining the power of Solaris with the ease of apt and adds a cool feature called apt-clone that takes a ZFS snapshot before doing any package maintenance allowing clean, trivial rollbacks for testing and error correction. It also supports switching between GNU and Solaris contexts in case you prefer your tar without a -z option.
It's not completely mature at this point so I wouldn't use it in my datacenter, but it's fine for a home server. I haven't tested it on the desktop yet.

en-GB has the added benefit of knowing how to spell colour...

I tried to do the same thing but found, at least when OEL was first released, that the Oracle software stack (particularly Oracle Applications) was better supported on Red Hat than on Oracle's distro.

Now, they've caught up and I have some of both types lying around. To be honest, it doesn't really matter to me which is which and I don't think I could actually tell you which distro a particular machine is running without checking /etc/redhat-release.

Because anecdotes = evidence:

I bought a high power buffalo router a few years ago when I lived in a small condo with many neighbours who also had wireless. I found that I got the best connection rates when I turned the power way down.

Now that I'm in a substantially larger house with only 1 or 2 other networks in range, I get the best performance and coverage across my house when it's turned all the way up.

Replying to your sig:

On a 500km tip, I can knock an hour off my travel time if I go 120 vs 100.

But I take the subway to work, so take that for what you will....

Dulles fucked me over once too. Going from Frankfurt to Toronto changing planes in Dulles. Had to go through security in Frankfurt, go through more security to enter the US departures wing in Frankfurt, more to get on the plane and then the kicker... had to go through more security and baggage screening AFTER GETTING OFF THE FUCKING PLANE AND BEFORE CUSTOMS. Missed the connection, obviously. Is one of Europe's main hubs really that untrustworthy?

Unfortunately, as you mentioned, many destinations to or from Canada require stops in the US because that's where most of the North American air hubs are (Europe is OK, but try getting to Central or South America from Canada without landing in Texas first)

They've been asking for fingerprints for a while now.