n/t

Count me in for avahi, our office network uses .local, if avahi is running nothing in LAN works.
While I realize mDNS isn't his fault there should definitely be a user friendly option to disable it (on install time or like that "Proprietary drivers available" popup on Ubuntu).
Still, have to wonder how much wasted time has this guy's creations imposed on the world.

Soon at the heart of every computer there's a metal fan.

D'oh.. had http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/12/1348243/The-Fanless-Spinning-Heatsink open in second tab, meant to comment that.

Soon at the heart of every computer there's a metal fan.

Speaking of stats here's some demographic, pron.com are themselves one of the biggest source of users, also proportionally large indian presence.

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS="[@ ]"} /@/{print $2}' pronz.txt |sort -f|uniq -ci|sort -n|tail -n20
          66 comcast.net
          81 126.com
          96 mail.ru
        109 pron.com
        118 qq.com
        145 msn.com
        148 yahoo.co.uk
        168 163.com
        172 rocketmail.com
        180 hotmail.co.uk
        250 yahoo.co.id
        288 yahoo.in
        408 live.com
        438 yahoo.co.in
        470 rediffmail.com
        517 ymail.com
        614 aol.com
      3631 hotmail.com
      4113 gmail.com
      9481 yahoo.com
(more of a tail man myself - *ba dum tsh*)

He did much more than that, apparently he also brought down PSN and told someone how to reset COD stats
http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Hate-George-Hotz-For-Hacking-PS3-Fuing-Prk/102828309796766

That's what happens when these ignorant illiterate dummies learn to associate a name to a thing, doesn't matter what he actually did, PS3+hack=? "George did it! Tar and feathers!"
And that was his downfall, to promote a name and provide a target (at least a better one than a faceless corporation).
Had he cured cancer it'd still all come down to "I heard he did something, then Sony did something and something bad happened to my PS3, what an asshole".

Or actually, if you quote the command line (by single quotes naturally) before echo'ing, which I guess you do, then I suppose it's ok.. that just caught my eye as it's not something I usually do. :)

Really, echo? That means the command can't include any shell expandable parts, no pipes, subshells etc (5 insightful??)
Why not just ^xe (or the relevant counterpart in non-bash shells) and save the commandline from the editor?

I hope the book also includes some basic readline instructions and reasons for the need of proper quoting, it's been too many times that I've seen people with supposedly years of linux experience use cursor keys and backspace to work with long commands, "oops there's a typo in this 500 char URL wait a minute while I get to it.." and "what do you mean it's wrong, find * -name bla*bla seems to work most of the time", that really grinds my gears.

No it's not ok to invade privacy but it happens, so what was the big deal with this "information gathering" to begin with?
I'm always assuming there's at least one neighbour or car on the street listening to my wifi, that's why it's encrypted, not bridged to lan etc. Anyway here's some of those reductions..
1) While simply driving by most of what you get is beacon frames
2) They mostly drove around during week days when most people are at school or at work (where which I at least hope they have encrypted wifi)
3) They're google, they already have all the data they could ever want and a lot more personal stuff than what you get in half a minute from the street

They say they were collecting SSIDs for mapping purposes (which has been done by many projects for years as already mentioned), didn't mean to get other data and are not using it for anything. Not that I'd trust them more than any other multinational corporation, but can't see why they'd be lying about that.
It's a lot easier to place inexpensive kismet_drones in busy areas or with big antennas on hill tops overlooking residential areas than it is to drive around catching glimpses of some lone unemployed bozo surfing porn.

Also, wouldn't mind seeing more wifi hacking being punished by law, but in the actual cases where there's crimes being committed (theft, damage, defacing) and not just for the public spectacle.

It was -> http://lwn.net/2002/0207/a/radio-free-linux.php3

Actually it was surprising that on the dozen or so times I saw linux.fm mentioned on IRC for the past week no one seemed to be aware of it being "old news".
Is this the span of our cultural memory?

There was an article about this movement four years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/29/136259
And in that October_30th (531777) made a good point which I'll quote:

I think eventually after majority of the population has excluded themselves out of religious issues, we'll just get the increased number of islamic immigrants and right wing crazies fighting amongst themselves, collecting news headlines and escalating the issue.

Nice business then, he can probably sustain himself just by helping people resign from church.

I thought that this "brain reverse-engineering" idea that singularity theorists have been throwing around actually referred to being able to digitize a living brain into a sort of neural net and then run it on a computer. Rather than simulating a biological brain which is of course much more complex endeavour, and what everyone seems to be assuming here..
Frankly I don't see the point of even thinking about it this early in the game, you'd have to simulate the whole physical reality to have a virtual human experience.

There's many well thought out ideas floating around at TED, why not just pick one of those?
Like this one http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html for example, real lasting results with practical amount of money.