hackwrench asks: "There is lots of talk about writing portable programs, but this pursuit has resulted in a lot of processor features going unused. One example is being able to write a program that purposely uses a combination of 16-bit and 32 bit. I know there are arguments that writing solely in one or the other is a performance advantage, but what are the factors involved? Is the slowness of such a combination inherent in its design or is it a result of current hardware. We are beginning to replace systems and programs designed primarily to run in pure 32-bit mode with systems designed to run in pure 64-bit mode, so I ask: Is such purity really worth it?"

mcrbids writes "Well, the details are a bit scant, but it seems that the content of Google searches were used to help establish intent in a murder trial. Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about? While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns? Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime, and what effect would this have on the health of society?"

-1-Lone_Eagle writes "With the free availability of literally thousands of MIDI files on the Internet, and increasingly powerful home desktop systems and software, virtually anyone can take a MIDI file and using a program such as GarageBand or Reason create a near-studio-quality rendition of their favorite song. This opens up an interesting discussion, is a remixed MIDI file an original creation? Or is it simply a copied work with the rights belonging to the original author? Is it piracy? What do you think?"

marat asks: "This Thursday our HMV store had (what I thought was) some kind of sale of well-know DVD titles starting from $5 a piece, however after I brought about $200 of them home I discovered that Kaffeine (xine frontend) refuses to play them. Closer inspection revealed small 'Please use with DVD video player' notice on each cover. More elaborate piece of paper enclosed -inside- stated that I have to download and install something called 'InterActual Player' if I want to watch this disk on the PC or Mac. The disks have the 'DVD video' symbol on them, and I don't have any other DVD player nor TV set at home, nor place to put it. Besides, I prefer my 19" monitor anyways. I didn't find the solution myself, that's why I'm asking the Slashdot crowd two questions: How can I play this stuff under Linux? What should I do if they refuse to accept opened cases back? (for semi-legal advice, please take into account that I'm in Tokyo)."

aztektum asks: "Like a lot of Slashdot readers, I have setup my own home network. It isn't tricked out with all the fanciest hardware, but I do have a switch, BSD based firewall, I have configured e-mail (again on BSD), NFS and Samba, as well as remote access services like SSH and FTP. Now my line of work isn't networking or computer related at all. This is a personal hobby and a fairly new one for me (relatively speaking compared to others). I'm looking to learn more about managing problems with networks, but have no idea where to start. With such a small setup and only supporting two users (myself and a roommate) this isn't exactly enterprise level with enterprise level ups and downs. What are some ways I can screw up my network to troubleshoot problems and gain some insight? Also, what are some reference materials that you have found to be educational with relation to network administration?"

a_greer2005 wonders: "In the past 5 years, we have seen plenty of virus writers in the United States brought to justice both criminally and when possible financially. In the past couple of weeks it has been discovered that Sony has shipped a rootkit, which is worse than the common spyware or virus, so I ask you, where are the law suits? Is anyone planning criminal/civil action at all? Does Sony frighten the entire legal industry? If nothing is done about this, will we have ANY right to tell a company 'NO' in the future when it comes to DRM worms -- Is this but a sample of things to come?" Update: 11/12 10:20 PM EDT by C :Whoops! Missed the fact that we've already reported on the fact that California has already started a class action suit against Sony (thanks to the posters that caught this). New York may soon follow. However that is only 2 states out of 50. Is there a possibility of more to follow?

Waiting for the Axe to Fall asks: "I work for a larger webhosting company that has plans to consolidate one of its west coast data centers with an east coast location which they already have in place. Forget that this is a bad idea in terms of geographical redundancy--it is going to happen. The company did inform all west coast employees about the move, roughly a year in advance. This was done Im sure to ease the shock and fear of loosing ones job. This affects a small group (8-9) of employees, all of whom are tied up in operations and the data center specifically. If you were in this situation (as one of the employees), what would you require/want/wish for in this retention plan? The benefits of staying with the company, until the end, must out weight the risk of being jobless; or is this not the path you would choose? Would you leave as soon as the announcement was made?"

An anonymous reader asks: "Ok, so here is the scenario: my company has some software that is used internally and it is written in Perl. We now need to put this code on a server that has 'public' access (it's a university machine). We provide root access to the system for the purpose of learning, but we need to keep the code from being viewed or edited. Is there anything to do besides the 'perl2exe' and the ActiveState compiler? How effective are those really at protecting code?"

brainburger asks: "In the UK, Tony Blair has recently lost a parliametary vote to allow the police to hold terrorist suspects for 90 days without trial. One of the justifications the police gave for the extension from 14 days to 90 days was that they need the extra 76 days to decrypt the computer hard-drives of suspects. This has been seen by some as the only compelling reason to allow 90 days. The time-limit has been extended to 28 days instead, but Tony Blair insists 90 days is required. Are there really any encryption systems that cannot be cracked in 28 days, but which can be cracked in 90? Aside from the not-much-discussed issue that the police can no longer interrogate a suspect after they are charged, I suspect the police meant unencrypted machines. What do you think?"

vwjeff asks: "Extensions are perhaps the greatest feature of Firefox. On my Firefox install, I use Foxy Tunes, AdBlock, IE View, Mouse Gestures, and Forecast Fox. What extensions do you use on your Firefox install? (assuming you use Firefox, of course)"

sunBoy asks: "A number of OpenSolaris-based Operating Systems are popping up on the map. BeleniX (screenshots), SchilliX and Nexenta (screenshots) are a few OSes which have hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks. Some say OpenSolaris has a leg up on Linux - 'For Linux, we're trying to push many distributions through to compress them into a standard. With OpenSolaris, we are already at the small end of standardization. What will follow is more OpenSolaris distributions spreading out from that core.' Is OpenSolaris really a threat to Linux?" Less of a threat and more of an alternative. Would more Unix-based alternatives on the market really be a bad thing?

rahuja asks: "Buying and using digital music is a far from easy decision today - there are various competing and incompatible formats, stores and players out there in the market, primarily Apple (AAC + iTunes + iPod), Windows (WMA + various stores + WMA-compatible players), and Sony (Atrac3 + Connect.com + Walkman). How do you then ensure that the music and player you buy today will not be incompatible with your player, online store or the OS?"

rumint asks: "I am working on a software utility that I want to distribute freely. Unfortunately, there is a wide variety of nearly unintelligible software licenses (unless you are a lawyer). Of course there is the GPL, but I'm not sure it fits everyone's needs. Is there a Creative Commons equivalent for software licenses? If not, does some newly minted law school graduate want to put one together and contribute to humanity?"

Petey_Alchemist asks: "In the wake of the Pope John XIII student weblogging ban, the online lives of students are once again being examined by their academic institutions. News outlets are covering a series of recent events--most notably the expulsion of a Fisher College sophomore (who also happened to be President of the Student Government) after he posted in a 'controversial' Facebook group. Facebook, for those of you who don't know, is an incredibly popular social networking site for American college students. The fact that you must have a college email account to join provides some modicum (re: illusion) of privacy, but doesn't keep faculty or administrative members from joining and patrolling the website. Bottom line: Facebook, Pope John XIII, and other online student speech cases are popping up all over the place yet no case defining the amount of control a school has over a student based on that student's web speech has come before the Supreme Court. When will this happen? Moreover, what will be the result when it finally does?"

meroo asks: "I am building a new home that is completely solar/wind powered. I need to conserve power wherever I can, but I don't want to leave all my tech toys behind. I need advice about building a low power, Linux based, file and print server. It should be scalable to more than a terabyte of storage (we are video artists) with at least four HDD bays for flexibility and data redundancy. I would like advice on processor/mainboard combos, low power HDDs and a distro with the best power management to bring this thing down to idle when we are not using it. The server will be accessed via our laptops (Mac OSX and Ubuntu), a future home theatre PC and visitors assorted laptops. I've been looking at using laptop components, miniITX and professional server solutions, but now I'm thoroughly confused. Has anyone on Slashdot been faced with this problem before?"

zerojoker writes "The discussion is not new but was heated up by a blog entry from Greg Kroah-Hartman: Three OSDL Japan members, namely Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi are pushing for a stable Kernel driver layer/API, so that driver developers wouldn't need to put their drivers into the main kernel tree. GKH has several points against such an idea." What do you think?

$random_var asks: "I am an undergraduate student currently studying Bioengineering. However, I am growing more and more interested in programming and linguistics, which leads me to think that I should define my own major, Computational Linguistics [mit.edu], which google defines as 'a field concerned with the processing of natural language by computers.' When I present my proposal for this degree to the school's advising staff, I would like to have a complete list of all of the topics this major should cover. Having only little experience with computer science and engineering, I'm not sure what parts of that field I should include. Beyond the basic lower-division courses, what specific fields of computer science do you think should be emphasized in a practical undergraduate study of Computational Linguistics?"

Donimo asks: "I have seen many tiny ethernet loopback jacks and keyfobs, and I'm looking for the smallest IP equivalent for my toolkit. It just needs to plug into an RJ45 ethernet port and respond to ping. If the IP address is configurable, so much the better. I have looked at small IP print servers, and I could probably knock one up from a Gumstix but these are comparatively expensive solutions. Any ideas?"

Brushfireb asks: "This has been hit on before, but given the cheap cost of hard drives, larger capacities and speed increases in possible storage (USB2, FIOS, etc) we though that an update would be really helpful. Here's the scenario: We are a small tech company and we have an assortment of workstations (Macs, Linux and Windows desktops), and servers (Web, Database, File, e-Mail, DNS, etc) that run on different Linux distributions. What advice or recommendations do Slashdot readers have for our needs that: won't break the bank; won't force us to take our servers down for an extended period of time (our servers must run 24/7); are reliable; and are easily to maintain. What are some typical mistakes that small tech companies make when it comes to backing up? What software and hardware do Slashdot readers use to accomplish these tasks in similar situations?"

drummerboy195 writes to tell us that he recently read a 1999 interview with Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Novell, and wondered how applicable the information was today. How much have things changed since the dot com bust in terms of management? What other good and bad techniques have Slashdotters seen evolve from both supervisory and supervised positions?