The student should have definitely been sued, and I'm disappointed the ACLU is defending them, because if their defense is successful my kids will be going to school with teachers and principals that are pedophiles, rapist, murders and drug dealers... or at least that's what it says when I do a google search if the ACLU gets their way.

The ACLU is not defending their actions, they are defending them against inappropriate punishment. There is a difference.

Had the school referred the matter to the parents, or the "injured party" filed a civil act against them, the ACLU would not have been involved. Instead, the school instituted an administrative punishment, which affected the student at school, for actions that were not taken within the school's jurisdiction.

For those who do not understand the difference: You leave work (where your boss is a Carrie Nation fan*). You stop for a libation on the way home. You are then docked half a day's pay for that action. If you are not on call (and therefore not on the company's time), should you pay the penalty?

*For those who don't understand the reference, think "Prohibition".

If you need to upgrade all the computers in the department, you can't choose Linux, because it will mean rewiting a bunch of internal VBA / IE6 ActiveX apps

You say that like it's A Bad Thing®!

The fact that it exists, and that name wasn't used, pretty much confirms for me that it's not a legit story at this time.

Ever think about the possibility that what Google is using internally is a custom spin? It would be logical that they would have a standard set of packages (no flame wars please) to support their business.

Since you are looking at 10K or more systems, no business in their right mind would use only the recommended packages from any one vendor. Add to that the support requirements and you are looking at a sophisticated configuration.

They've gone out of their way not to actually mention any figures in their public statements. All the 5k barrels / day numbers come from people like the Coast Guard and NOAA.

Except for the one where they admitted that the pipe they attached was drawing 5K barrels/day into the ship with no visible decrease in the leak rate. That one did come from BP.

Does it provide video of enough quality that it would stand up in court as reliable evidence of the creeps who might break into my house again this summer?

It depends on the jurisdiction. For plain "see judge, this is what I saw" (as a backup to a witness), probably. As standalone evidence, probably not.
The reason for this is that, unlike film cameras, the computer based pictures are discrete pictures that can be edited easily by any of a number of video editors. Commercial grade (Sony, AXIS, Panasonic) IP Video Surveillance products are generally combined with software that includes embedded time stamps and other features that lessen the probability of a faked image.
That said, for home usage such as you suggest, the home variety should do the trick. Of course, you could also plant big signs in your yard that say "Video Surveillance in Progress" and hope they read better than some that I have caught.

as long as you use it _exactly_ as God and Microsoft intended.

Wouldn't that be "Microsoft and God"? You know that Gates and Ballmer hate second billing :-)

Which is why I'll probably get hate for asking this, but it is something I have just never understood about Linux: What is up with the rushing new versions out the door?

As well you should. Even though a new version comes out somewhat regularly, there is no requirement that you upgrade. I know people that are still running FC5&6, because they work for them.

I mean, say what you want about MSFT (And IMHO anybody who bought Vista should have gotten a free upgrade to 7 for being dumped with that turkey) their support cycles are long enough that by Sp2 most of the nasty bugs are gone and you end up with a pretty stable OS.

And how long was it before SP2 came out for XP? And those bugs that are created by installing updates? Oh, and how about IE6.

But I tried running Ubuntu from 6 to 9.04 because of all the buzz, and it seemed like every release would fix one bug and add three.

In the same package? Or was it some new program that you just had to have? Granted, some things (like wireless and cutting edge video cards) can be dicey, but the mainstream distributors of GNU/Linux don't have the same access to hardware/driver information that Microsoft does.

And of course since a new version came out every 6 months the previous versions never did get fixed, they just got tossed to the side. I even tried the LTS but it didn't seem any better as far as being less buggy, it just ran old software.

And you did provide information to the maintainers of the software, didn't you? "Old software" (aka a few rev's behind bleeding edge) is there because it works. Besides, "less buggy" says absolutely nothing with regards to fixing the problem (software and/or PEBCAK).

So I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just honestly curious as to why the strange behavior.

Wanting to try out the "latest and greatest" is not strange, it's natural. What is strange is the expectation that software will always be bug free coupled with the implied opinion that Microsoft's offerings are in some way superior (after they have gone through countless bug fixes).

But windows is a heck of a lot more open than the iPad, and their business model isn't based on data mining.

Windows->open? Who are you kidding? What gets sent when you start a Windows PC? What goes in the registry that is NOT GUID Based?

We shouldn't automatically reject any proposal simply because abuse and mistakes are possible.

No, should automatically reject any proposal simply because abuse and mistakes are PROBABLE.

Three words for you: National Security Letter.

Look at China. It's own purposes overlap the needs of its people. It needs to artificially manipulate the value of its money for many reasons. Some for its own purposes, some for the betterment of some of the citizens.

And therein lies the problem. It should be for the betterment of all of the citizens.

"ask your doctor if [insert drug here] is right for you".

Even better are the ones that say "Tell your doctor if you have [insert disease here]". Last I knew, since my doctor is supposedly monitoring my health, my doctor should be telling me.
Otherwise, this is a blatant invitation for doctor shopping. If your doctor will not prescribe the medicine du jour, find one that will.

This could improve distribution beyond SuSE into other areas. Then Novell could concentrate on their service line, and perhaps let SuSE die, or release all of the SuSE specific bits to the community, for introduction into other distros. Novell could easily go the IBM path and become a systems integration and management company concentrating on Linux, over being a specific software provider.

For enterprise level systems (think SAN storage), the two major distributions that are supported are RHEL and SLES. At least in the IBM Storage Systems arena, those (along with Windows, AIX and z/OS) are the only platforms that are officially supported. Novell would be insane to forgo that market.

Knuth remarked on that situation in his magnum opus TAOCP vol 3 on sorting and searching. In the part about sorting with tape drives, he remarked that he'd never seen a large computer installation where all the tape drives were working. You'd have a computer with ten tape drives, two of them would be down pending repairs, and you'd use the other eight.

I call bullshit. I maintained large IBM sites for 20 years. I never had 20 percent of my drives down at any time (2401, 2420, 3420, 3480). If you are seeing that sort of service level, change service providers.