Um. He sold it to Sun. It wasn't until Sun got sold to Oracle -- a move which he fought against -- that the fork happened.

Maybe not at border crossings but at airports they sure as hell do; even if you're Canadian, like me. They even photograph your eyeballs.

The entire point of the HAL is to abstract hardware, any hardware, away from the OS. There's nothing that says it can't encompass more of the hardware than just the IO bus, CPU and MMU, like WinNT does. On an embedded device there's very little in terms of a standard IO bus that the OS can communicate through cleanly with peripherals, so might as well abstract the whole lot.

Perhaps by keeping the machine that hosts the seed secured? Like using a protocol between the publicly facing machine and the seed machine that doesn't allow for remote shell access? Really basic stuff, actually.

The unethical part, as far as I understand, is that smaller ISPs rent the "last mile" piece from Bell, which they're allowed to since the infrastructure is wholly, or partially, tax-payer funded. However, they don't buy big-pipe bandwidth from Bell, but instead peer with someone like Cogent. The cost of the bandwidth over the last mile is zero, since additional bytes don't degrade the infrastructure and therefore don't add to maintenance costs. However Bell wants to charge the ISP, for this zero-cost bandwidth, at the same scale as they charge their end-users, who, unlike the ISPs, *are* using their peering connection to talk to the rest of the internet.