Anonymous with good reason, a reader would like to bring this important question to your collective attention: "Our (technically savvy) lawyer has advised my company that 'incidental resources' do not a work derive. For example: If I have a student's version of a development environment whose license does not allow me to distribute code compiled with it for commercial use, I am legally allowed to use the environment to create my ANSI C++ code, which, when I compile it with GCC, I am free to use to whatever commercial end I like. This seems fairly intuitive. (After all, you could have written the same thing in a text editor, and the debugging, etc, that you need the IDE for doesn't actually 'show up' in the final code). Here's the kicker: My company wants to translate this to an abuse of the GPL and has been advised 'full speed ahead!'"

stealth_zipper asks: "I just got off the phone with a rep from Soyo Computer Inc trying to get the ability to change IRQs for the onboard hardware. It turns out that because of a deal to get WindowsXP certification, the Dragon-series motherboard ended up having the ability of Enabling/Disabling ACPI in the BIOS disabled. Now FreeBSD has complications with multiple devices on the same IRQs (especially sound, video, and nic all off the same one). Is there a way to get around this for new hardware? Has anyone else encountered this?" Why in the world does XP need this feature disabled, and are there workarounds to get OSes like FreeBSD working properly with motherboards of this sort?

newell98 asks: "Given the rise in popularity of water cooling systems for home computers, I was wondering how many slashdotters have played with the idea of cooling their system with liquid nitrogen? Lots of super-comps use them (or used to at least), and I'm curious about who's played with the idea of taking home computing to the same level?" The thing to remember about Liquid Nitrogen is that this stuff is generally not safe for home use. It must be stored and used with care or serious injury can result. I think this is why not-too-many people use such in overclocking. Water is by far more easier to obtain and is harmless to boot. Now, after saying all that, have any of you tried using liquid nitrogen in cooling a home or garage-built computer rig? What kind of safety precautions did you take, and how well did your cooling system work?

ocasek asks: "I have been looking into buying a laptop again and one of the requirements I have is that it will be able to run Linux with all features turned on (i.e. suspend, APM, etc.). I used to own a Dell Inspiron 8000 that I had Mandrake 8.0 configured and running on, and aside from the wonderful BIOS hooks for PCMCIA that never worked completely, it was a good laptop. My question to the /. Community is, in your opinion, what is the best laptop out there to run Linux? I would be interested to hear what OS's you are running on what brand of laptop."

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I was browsing on the web and came across a reference to Coastal Web Online's claim of a modem accelerator Apparently it is a service which is supposed to make your modem 3x faster. Is this possible? I've already got a v.92 modem and I thought it already did compression. It is possible it is a proxy doing some compression on white space in HTML or something, but I don't think so, since it apparently only works with Windows 9x and Internet Exploder. For $8.00 a month ontop a the dialup access sounds kinda snake oilish. Does anybody on Slashdot use the service? Would they recommend it? This sounds remarkably similar to the old idea of 'waxing your modem'. Am I missing out on something here?"

Robb Timlin asks: "Ok, so I'm checking over the DOJ's response to the public comments, and I notice they reference mine, among others, in Paragraph 149 (footnote 162): '149. Section III.B is limited to the twenty OEMs with the highest worldwide volume of licenses of Windows Operating System Products. Some commentors criticize this limitation, arguing that it leaves Microsoft free to retaliate against smaller OEMs, including regional "white box" OEMs.(162)' Problem is, I never said anything like that in my comment! Now it could be a simple error, or it could be deliberate misrepresentation of what I had to say (my criticism of Section III.B of the RPFJ centered on allowing MS to provide rewards to OEMs who toe the line, in lieu of retaliating against those that don't). A friend of mine urged me to bring this to the attention of somebody official, but who?"

OctaneZ asks: "While this topic has been brought up Twice Before, once in May 1999 and again in October 2000, yet another year has gone by with very little discusion, at least that I have seen in the field of UNIX and biometric scurity. There are now projects like the BioAPI Consortium. But very little has actually come of it. Is anyone out there using biometrics for UNIX security? Or security period? Any advice on implementations? Anyone with experience, give us the heads up: What works and what doesn't?"

woogie asks: "I have finally broken down and ripped all my CDs, and I have a mod_mp3 server with a bunch of different streams based on genres that can deliver those mp3s to anywhere in my house. Anywhere, that is, except my stereo system. Anyone know of decent audio hardware that will read a Shoutcast stream? Sure, I can plug my laptop line out into my tuner's inputs, but I'd really like a device I can just stack on top of my tuner that will accept Shoutcast streams. The only device I've seen that allows this is the Audiotron which appears to want to read your mp3s from an SMB share, but can be configured to read Shoutcast streams if you use special Windows based software to configure it. It would work, but seems a bit pricey given that it targets my needs as an afterthought. There is some promising hacking going on with the Rio Receiver here and here, but getting one to read a Shoutcast stream might be beyond my abilities. Am I missing anything else out there? A simple device that I could just cycle through different preconfigured streams with a remote would suffice."

Foo Shackelford asks: "At my University I have noticed a disturbing trend and was wondering if there are any other students, faculty, or staff who have concerns about the web based anti-plagiarism service called Turnitin.com? Turtnitin.com is supposed to be is a placebo for plagiarism where students submit papers for analysis. While plagiarism is by all accounts bad and should not be tolerated, the implementation of Turnitin.com on University campuses leaves many questions unanswered. If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter. Where are the rights of the student? Also, there appears to be no warrantee to the accuracy of the service. Where does this leave the student who is accused of plagiarism? It would be nice for those who decide to implement the usage of services like these within their institutions to look beyond the placebo and consider issues of privacy, intellectual property, and most of all trust relationship that they hold with their students. Any thoughts on this?" We last touched on a related issue in this article on students GPLing their work. Might such a solution work here in terms of protecting a student's right to use any work that they submit to other sites/services that have implicit contracts like the one described here for Turnitin.Com?

clearcache asks: "I'm a new telecommuter. My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January. I remain employed with the same NYC company that I worked for when we lived in Jersey. Aside from the normal moving hassles, I experienced some connectivity issues due to the complete incompetence of my telephone company. These issues repeated themselves, and, due to the lack of a good problem escalation policy on their end, it took quite some time to get them resolved (some are not yet resolved!). These problems resulted in a serious loss of time on the job. When I approached the phone company to discuss compensation for downtime, they responded that, since it is a residential line, they do not compensate for downtime. With more and more people telecommuting, it's only a matter of time before the blurred distinction between 'residential' and 'business' telephone lines becomes an issue. Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do? Does anyone have any general advice about telecommuting and pitfalls that I should avoid in the future? How do the companies that you work for deal with your downtime?" When my connections to the 'net fail and I can't find someplace in the area where I can leech some bandwidth, I am forced into taking the day off. Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare. How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work?

chachi8 asks: "I work as a lab administrator in a university, and I currently look after about 500 Windows-based PCs spread out over 20 locations. The IT administration at my school has recently (and quite suddenly) decided that thin clients are a direction we should be pursuing, and I've been doing some research over the past few weeks. We've recently been visited by representatives of Citrix who basically showed us some really impressive software that is far from cheap. Because we're a university facing budget cuts, cost is a major issue for us, so what I'm interested in knowing is whether anyone has implemented a thin-client solution in a computer lab environment, and whether it turned out to be cost effective over a 3-5 year timeframe. Clearly, the idea of being able to add an extra few years to the lives of our lab PCs is very attractive, as is the thought of being able to centrally administer the software in all of our labs, but I'm as yet unclear as to whether the costs of servers and licensing (and everything else) will really result in a long-term savings in money."

mmaddox asks: "As a software developer, I've consulted on many projects - projects conceived in the twisted mind of management and marketing and cursed with bizarre, often hysterically funny names. Of course, these names lead to the adoption of the dreaded acronym. Most recently, I've discouraged the name selections of a few clients, in particular, the Private Inline Security System (a silly "personal firewall" - the client didn't even THINK of using an acronym) and Cross-section Heads-Up Digitizer (an engineering bit for roadway construction - anyone remember the movie?). There must be millions of these things out there. What is the worst acronym you've ever had the *ahem* pleasure of dealing with?" And in typical Slashdot fashion, it just wouldn't be the same without taking a dig at Microsoft. If you click here and look at the #2 result (of 44), then you may see one of funniest acronyms I've ever seen come out of the corporate culture. Of course, if you click on that particular link it looks like someone at the Borg have recognized their error and is trying to rewrite history, changing the "tool" into a "utility". God bless the Google cache! If you think you've seen acronyms to beat this one, please share!

Computer-quincyME asks: "I am very interested in forensic computing (using computers to help forensics, like in blood spatter analysis, geographic profiling etc.) but despite some extensive Googling, I'm not able to find any decent site that contains information on current forensic problems that don't have yet an acceptable computing implementation (I'd like to try my hand at writing some forensic software in my spare time, and I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel, but to create something useful). Any forensics experts in the Slashdot crowd that could give me a hand? Do you know of any tasks you have to routinely do these days by hand that you would kill to have more automated? Also, how did you end up in your current job?"

irregular_hero asks: "I'm in the process of constructing a navigation and vehicle-management system based on Linux for a car. The trouble I'm having is finding a suitable screen to be mounted in the dash of the car. It seems that traditional SVGA/XGA LCD screens have a really bad tendency to totally wash out in bright sunlight -- in fact, nearly every screen that I've tried turns jet black in sunlight. Are there any SVGA/XGA LCD screens out there that one can get that are sunlight-readable? Or is there a way to make an existing screen not respond so badly to sunlight?"

Christopher Blood asks: "Over at the register, they talk about the EU adopting IPv6. So what about the USA? When do we get it? IPv6 would solve some and DOS problems and we will need the extra address space. What's the holdup?" While IPv6 may be the cure for all of our IPv4 ills, upgrading the whole internet to the new technology isn't going to happen over night. What has been done to prepare for the jump, and what still needs to happen before it can become a reality?

JPawloski asks: "When I bought this computer, it came with 6 months of AOL for free. Being notoriously frugal, I have used AOL and will continue to until my free time expires; however, the one disadvantage is it does not have a NNTP server. I find using Deja by Google cumbersome and have a number of problems (updating every 9 or so hours is one of them). I started a search of public NNTP servers on the Internet, and tried literally 50 of them, but none of them work. I even looked a directories of public news servers and fared no better. Are public news servers a thing of the past now that most ISPs offer it standard? Does anyone else out there still use a public news server, and, if so, how does it work compared to the alternatives (deja.com, etc.). Any other recommendations?"

skagin asks: "Yahoo has instituted a new set of anti-spam policies which are causing havoc for our customers (we're a small ISP). List mail with non-existant, over-quota, or recently cancelled recipients is being bounced whole, and much of the one-to-one mail we send is bouncing. Yahoo tells us that our mailserver is being treated as suspicious because of the number of bad recipients being sent to, but most of those are bounces from yahoo spam sent to non-existant addresses on our network. Our customers are going nuts. Is anyone else out there having this problem with Yahoo?"

michael_cain asks: "Due to a large corporate merger, we're in the process of combining two technical organizations with radically different structures. One has lots of very specific job titles ('Senior Assistant Software Engineer for Icons and Buttons'), each with a specific description and a very narrow compensation range. The other has essentially one non-management title ('Member of Technical Staff') with a wide range of compensation. I admit to a bias due to more than twenty years in a single-title structure, but believe that said structure makes it easier to compensate people and teams based on their contribution, to encourage staff to learn new skills and grow, and to shift resources to meet changing business needs. The merged human resources group tends to favor the rigid title-driven structure. Which would you prefer?" I'm a firm believer in the old addage: less complicated something is, the better. I think this would apply to organizational structures just as well as it does for code. Thoughts?

msaes asks: "I've got 4 machines now that I'm running RAID5 on. 3 are Dell's with the PERC (Adaptec) SCSI RAID controller, and one is a software (Win2k Pro) RAID. In all 4 cases, the MS defrag program, and the Norton Speedisk program said that the logical drives are horribly fragged. And from disk I/O performance, I'd tend to agree. Running the MS defrag on any of them is futile. It just cranks away for a while and then cheerfully says that it's done, with little or no improvement. I've run Speedisk on the software RAID machine and it's run for about 3 days solid now and performance on the drive is only getting worse. My question is: Does de-fragmentation software get confused by RAID volumes and actually fragment the drive worse?" Which brings yet another question. What tools are out there for the effective management of RAID volumes? Other partition types have a wide variety of maintenance tools, aside from the defrag utility, like a partition editor, an undelete tool, analyzers, and so on. What about RAID? What tools do you use to make sure your RAID volumes are happy and healthy?

ServiusCensus asks: "I have been asked to provide a written rather than the more normal verbal reference for a someone I used to work with. Verbal references seem to be the norm, they work well because people are more willing to tell the truth informally than they are to write it down. I want to know what problems I might get into if I recommend someone but they turn out to be a bad match for the company? I don't want some lawyer to come looking for me one dark night."