Never has the term "Anonymous Coward" been more appropriate.

Yes! Simply give me your IP range, open up your firewall to the following /24, and I'll get started on that immediately.


Off topic, but is the UI of /. becoming more slow and unresponsive all the time, or is it me?

Over my dead body. If another sysadmin or an engineer asks me to poke a single pinhole to a single IP, we have a discussion about the implications. More often than not, we can avoid that whole mentality and pull rather than push from the server in question. If I got such a request from an outside source, you can bet the scrutiny over the issue would be 10x more intense. In a situation where somebody was to fall for something like this hook, line and sinker, I'd argue such a person shouldn't have administrative access to things like corporate firewalls in the first place.

On the other hand, in my younger days I was a network engineer. I ran into more than a few networks of huge multinationals that were designed about as poorly as you could imagine. Oh they had expensive hardware, and plenty of engineers who loved to sign their correspondence with the usual alphabet soup following their name and title. But you can only explain how a static route works to a corporate network admin so many times before you start becoming cynical about the whole thing. I can easily imagine one of those guys opening up an IP range willy-nilly on a firewall, and not realizing it until long after the damage was done. You might be surprised how often this kind of thing happens.

In point of fact, I'm not in favor of the "bailout" either. Wallstreet got us into this mess, I say let them sink. Same goes for GM. They bought up and dismantled a lot of public transportation after WWII, it'd be poetic justice to nationalize them (at the expense of the shareholders) and use their workers and facilities to build public transportation.

On the topic of public works however, I see that as a totally different topic. You may not use parks, libraries, schools or museums either, but others do. Their impact on society is a constructive one. Open source is along that vein. And if you don't think you use open source, think twice. The webserver you're on is powered perhaps entirely by open source and the open standards built around it. The routers you use to connect to this server are almost all either running open source directly, or are based on some descendant of FreeBSD which is open source. Without OSS, the internet as you know it would simply not exist.

So when they throw money at banks and big industry, it's good. When they throw money at something that can potentially benefit everyone, it's bad? I don't get it.

To me, open source is a resource. The more of it we have, the more competitive we can be. Not just in the IT sector, but everybody who uses computers as part of their business process. It's like building a park or a library. Sure a few people make their living off of the implementation and upkeep of those resources, but the important part is the resource itself. It contributes in a much larger way than the salaries of those commissioned to work on them.

Yeah, I have the same experience on 3.0.4pre. Did they even bother to test it before shipping? I know Linux has a smaller desktop share and everything, but this is some pretty basic QA we're talking about. If Adobe's trying to improve PR with the OSS crowd, this certainly isn't the way.