Actually the problem isn't with browsers, but rather some Web servers that see a difference between "example.com" and "example.com." IIS is one of them, which makes the "issue" quite visible.

Only because they've been so idiot to run the kiosk as an administrator!

With its default permissions, HKLM cannot be altered by normal users, and I don't see why a kiosk would need any additional privileges.

This is a very generic model; do you have any idea who manufactured the board inside? It appears most other WinCE laptops out here are based on that exact same board - the shell/color differs but the ports are placed exactly at the same place!

If one of them runs Linux that would likely be a good starting point, then you need to figure out a way to write the flash memory.

Yes, actually the CRTC imposed Bell to apply this to its own customer first. The way I understand it:

A. Bell customers:

Customer uses much bandwidth. Bell pays for internet bandwidth and gets paid by customer.

B. Wholesale service:

Customer uses much bandwidth. ISP pays for internet bandwidth AND pays Bell for usage, then ISP gets paid by customer.

Despite the fact that *everyone else* involved in the process were against this, the CRTC agreed mostly because it was claimed there's the same practices in Cable wholesale. The difference, though, is that DSL is dedicated access, and once the infrastructure is paid for (trough the base fee) there is nearly no costs to additional bandwidth besides the Internet bandwidth which is already paid by the ISP. Cable, on the other hand, is a shared medium with limited bandwidth, and the more customers use ut, the more has to be spent on upgrading the infrastructure to prevent congestion on the cable segments.

This scheme will hurt small ISPs which will have to impose limits, while it will allow Bell to make more profits and possibly cut its own prices at the same time.

It doesn't seems like anyone here gets it. This is for wholesale services, not Bell's own customers.

Long story short: Bell has the lines because it had telephone monopoly, so it must loan its lines to other DSL ISPs for a fair price. DSL ISPs can therefore use Bell lines to give customers access, but in the end data goes to the ISP's network and they're the one paying for actual bandwidth costs.

This has led to a few ISPs like Teksavvy and AEI who sell unlimited bandwidth DSL trough cheap upstream networks like Cogent (actually Teksavvy offers both: limited good bandwidth of unlimited cheap one).

Now, what bell is doing is that in addition to the fair infrastructure fees, they added usage costs. Note that the "usage" isn't costing much to bell because data travels only between the subscribers (DSLAMs) and the ISP whish is all within Bell's own network; they don't have to pay any upstream provider. On the other hand, ISPs will pay twice the bandwidth usage: they will have to pay over-usage to Bell, plus the actual upstream costs. For all of us who choose 3rd party ISPs to avoid extra bandwidth costs, we'll end up paying over-usage just like if we used Bell, and this is why people call this unfair usage costs to cut competition.

Making Linux a microkernel wouldn't help much, except maybe you wouldn't have to recompile the kernel to change the feature set. Besides, microkernels tend to be slower. Due to their architecture some things can't be done directly but rather have to be "communicated" to the right component. The communication channel often become a bottleneck.

I somewhat agree with Linus, the kernel is bloated. Many other things are bloated as well in many distributions. For that reason, on servers I manage I use Slackware (Which is a very slim and customizable OS) with hand-selected packages and custom-compiled kernels. It is obviously much harder to get advanced things done in Slackware but I gain a lot in resources usage and stability.

And this is what I like most about Linux and open source in general. If you don't like it you can customize it. Linux makes a particularly good job at it by letting you decide in great details what you want compiled in and what you don't. I can tell by the time it compiles that my server kernels are incredibly smaller than most generic kernels out there. In addition, Slackware is a god trade-off between usability and simplicity (I could use Gentoo to get exactly what I want but I loose on the usability side). It is very lean yet it can do most of the job out of the box, and for the more advanced things I compile my own custom packages or install from source.