Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/202/

Has been done some time ago (so no 15k/min), see: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-harddrive,8279.html

Google to the rescue: http://www.fromtheinside.us/thinking/Groundspeed_Check.htm Don't know if it's authentic, but fun to read.

Even if SELinux/AA are able to confine the actions of a pwned firefox or it is running as a different user, firefox can get access to keyboard and mouse actions and possible more via X (try xev).

If the virtualization is good, the attacker still cannot break out of the VM. In practice there will be exploits allowing to break out, but at least now there are many barriers: the attacker has to exploit firefox, then possibly break out of SELinux/Apparmor and get root, after that it has to modify the kernel and break out of the VM. And depending on the VM and the exploit the attacker may then still only have access to a userspace part of the virtualization environment, running as a normal user on the host. So this is much better than just a single defense.

And while most users don't have to be this paranoid, the good thing about virtualization is that it's easy: you can get all this security with very little effort - the "cost" is much lower than e.g. configuring Apparmor, and the protection is much better.

Have a look at the Linux extensions like SELinux or AppArmor. At least the latter one can be set up comparatively easy, and is useful to protect a few selected processes such as FF from doing harm. Certainly not perfect, but it should be able to stop an exploit from taking over the whole account.

However, the weak link will then probably be X and your window environment (KDE/gnome), so full virtualization is still much better. Of course, even that doesn't offer perfect protection.

Routers will only exchange BGP messages if both are configured to do this. Each "neighbor" must be added using its IP and AS-number.

Hm, I just can't find it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113080143/http://www.kde.org/
And the release announcement only mentions "major improvements", "major new capabilities", "improvements" etc..
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
Am I missing something?
The announcement for 4.1 on the other hand has been quite clear about this.

It's not only an argument from authority. I wouldn't care if Obama switched from KDE to Gnome, but Linus is a very technical minded person (aka a geek), and he's switching for a reason. And many other people with a similar mindest share this view.

I just ran across this nice example for a damaged packet - packet drops outside of the IP world can end pretty bad:

http://userweb.kernel.org/~warthog9/damaged_server/

According to the frontpage, this is git.kernel.org