While it had been done before, and will probably be done better (or worse), the Java software based sandbox security made a whole class of applications feasible, and enabled a new level of fault isolation for non-malicious software. *nix process based security and its predecessors were ground breaking. Java applies that within a shared address space at the ClassLoader level.

Our proprietary accounting software was built from the get go on open source OSes (starting with IBM EDX - obscure, but open source - though not in the GPL sense). Originally written for a green screen environment, it was abandoned for prettier Windows bases systems by a few clients. All the companies that left functional for pretty either went under or came back. We now have a pretty web front end, and a growing number of EDI, Web Service, and Java interfaces to integrate with other software - even Windows software integrates via SOAP (when there is source available for a Windows programmer to customize).

As far as highly functional open source enterprise accounting software goes, have you looked at Adempiere? I have been playing with it, and it is good enough that my long term goal is to migrate our stuff to its framework.

My favorite simple machines were those used by Native Americans. The spring was one of the most important. From saplings bent to snare a rabbit, to wooden fishhooks that snap open when swallowed, to the wooden bow. I always found it odd that it doesn't appear in the classic list.

"PC filtering software" is not very flexible at all. It ties you to a monopoly OS, and doesn't support filtering gateways (HTTP proxies). Ideally, users should be able to customized the approved list by adding/deleting entries. I would suggest publishing the approved list via secure DNS.

would be a positive filter. Instead of trying to filter the entire internet for everyone, create a Government Certified Safe Internet that lists web sites deemed "appropriate for children" by a new bureaucracy, and make it available to anyone's private filter on a voluntary basis. Require all government internet terminals available to children (e.g. libraries) to subscribe to the filter. Yes, there are already private companies that offer this service, but the constituents driving this evidently trust a giant government bureaucracy more than they trust a somewhat smaller corporate bureaucracy.

There will still be a market for private filter companies because they can offer different censoring standards to parents. It could actually be a good thing to have a voluntary censoring standard backed by general consensus. Private filters could start with the government database as a baseline, then add sites that "really should have been approved" or subtract sites that "my kid(s) can't handle". (For instance, my daughter had nightmares about "ducks biting her" after an incident involving a goose. She was not allowed to view "Jurassic Park" until she was much older, even though it was appropriate for the other kids.)

a digital camera with the lens cap on. Especially, if you can get the raw pixels, it contains a large component of true quantum randomness. Just run the bits into PRNGD (which runs the bits through a secure hash and adjusts the input/output bit rates according to the estimated randomness of the sources) with a conservative estimate of the percentage of quantum randomness.

"Some" drugs is right. Here in the eastern US, our streets are lined with mulberry trees (the unripe berries of which are hallucinogenic). And our government does nothing about it!

It's all about the time scale. Cox, for instance, on my $50/mo plan, offers peak bandwidth of 20Mbit/sec (so that picking up an MP3 from Amazon is nearly instantaneous), sustained average bandwidth of 5Mbit/sec (time scale unspecified, but my observations suggest it is 1 minute), and monthly average bandwidth of 40GB/month. They threaten to terminate you if you go over the monthly cap - which is dumb. They should do something like TW and either charge you or lower your peak.

So perhaps the term you are looking for is "average bandwidth" for some time period the average is taken over.

While the pricing seems a little high, I am *glad* that Time Warner is coming clean about the limitations of their service. A little competition will fix the pricing real quick.

Rather than automatically charge you more, some ISPs simply lower your peak bandwidth to ISDN levels - so that you still have (slow) internet access, and then offer to upgrade your monthly average for more dough. The peak bandwidth is restored as soon as the monthly average goes below the cap again.

I also think the "unlimited" advertising is a truth in advertising issue - and any company that advertises "unlimited" and then starts throttling you when you use "too much" should be prosecuted by the government for false advertising.

The only ancient culture I've read about that thought the earth was flat is early Babylon. Any people that either had ships on a large body of water, or were in contact with people that had ships on a large body of water, knew that the earth was round. You can't see a ship disappearing over the horizon and miss the implication.

As to Socrates, the Greeks even calculated the size of the earth pretty accurately.

The legend of people believing in a flat earth came from a work of pseudo-historical fiction by Washington Irving about Christopher Columbus, in which the author takes a lot of creative license.

Us modern types manage to have a Flat Earth Society despite this.

I not only run this at home, but at lots of small business customers. Has 3Ghz Pentium D (dual core, 64-bit). Get 2 large SATA drives (500G or more) and 2G or more ECC memory. Starting price is $400, but by the time you get the memory and disk upgraded, it is about $600, $800 with onsite maintenance. A big benefit for me for home use was it is *quiet*. It has a single large (and therefore quiet) fan with ducting to draw air over the CPU heatsink. Look for it in the "small business section" of Dell.

Drawbacks: only 2 drive bays (upgrade to 840 for 4 bays - not as quiet). No sensors - at least that lm_sensors knows about. I just monitor the disk temperature.

Configuration: run the 2 drives with software RAID1, and LVM on top of that. Create a small (100M) RAID1 boot partition at the beginning of the disk. The RedHat/Fedora installer can create this configuration. (I also save and mirror the Dell diagnostics partition, and add it to the grub boot menu.)

How about the part where he isn't accused of any actual crime, just "possession of a weapon". Sure, NY probably has some left wing "gun control" law, but "possession of a weapon" is a constitutionally protected right, not a crime in my book.

Like with everything else, there is an optimum level of employment that supports open pro bono open source activity. Note that producing open source can itself be a paid job - especially as a freelancer with the right clients. If Stallman had his way, *all* paid programming work would be on GPL software. Two years ago, it looked like my company might go under, and I was doing a lot more pro bono on the side. Now there is tons of work, and it is hard to squeeze in even a simple Fedora packaging project. On the other hand, I wouldn't be contributing much as a homeless person either.

One of my favorite discoveries was that the Chinese Abacus (with 2 top beads and 5 bottom beads per column) is perfect for hex arithmetic. The more stream lined Japanese form has one top (worth 5) and 4 bottom (worth 1 each) beads. The Chinese form uses the extra beads for bookkeeping in long division and multiplication. But two 5s on top and 5 ones on the bottom work perfectly for hexadecimal. For addition and subtraction, like when poring over hex dumps of mysterious low level crashes, the abacus is faster than a calculator (and doing it in your head is even better if you can).

As a citizen, I don't really care whether my gov (US) uses Microsoft, Mac, Solaris, Linux, or AmigaOS. I *do* care when they publish documents I need to work with in an undocumented proprietary format. And no, OOXML doesn't fix that (it only pretends to). Yes, I can get by with Open Office DOC importer for the time being.

Just sprinkle catnip on the input device.