Japan has short runs and good quality cables. The US has long runs and bad quality cables. Most "Broadband" DSL rates I have seen quoted (And this is in Metropolitan Seattle; Not a luddite town) are "Up to" 5Mb/s "In Qualified Areas", and when you actually call they try to sell you on a 768/128 line because that's the max they can actually get to you (unless you live right next to their junction box).

It depends. Just like with any issue, this is far from black and white. New homes need to be built: Houses have a half-life, a wear and tear limit. Further, the population is constantly increasing. Just to house everybody, we've got to be constantly building new homes. Certainly, there are plenty of unoccupied residences. But over the 30-100 years that the average new, energy efficient residence will last, it may well pay off it's energy cost as compared to continuing to power and heat the old, leaky houses.

Holy crap. I just gave it the mac of my parent's router, on a private road in the forests ~30 minutes outside Seattle, and it gave back the correct street address. Then again, what use does this have? Maybe a disoriented traveller could use it to find his way, but other than that I see no reason anyone would be able to abuse mapping MAC address to location. It's a new form of phone book; nothing more.

Modern video cards already have TV out hardware; DVI -> HDMI adapters come in the box of nearly ever video card I've seen in the past 2 years. Seeing more computer manufacturers go out of their way to make certain they've also got sound cards with S/PDIF digital out and that such are attached to the video cards for full HDMI awesomeness is the important step

That's why the smart money is based on node-based storage: Multiple boxes that are interchangeable. It's a shameless product plug, but I work for Isilon Systems, and our solution is that the whole system is considered replaceable: We don't sell a configuration that doesn't allow you to yank an entire box transparently. A drive failure is rebuilt and ready for swapping as soon as it comes up: Most of our admins don't know about disk failures until their data is already reprotected.

Granted, our smallest config is 9TB; We're somewhat overkill for a home user. But if you need a company-wide NAS...

Commodity hardware, standard networking (Gig and 10Gig Ethernet frontend, Infiniband backend), and a very smart filesystem (Capable of protecting from up to 4 simultaneous whole-node failures) == a killer combination; It takes some seriously bad luck for data-loss to become a problem.

Fixed that for you :)

In addition to the issues artemis67 pointed out above, the GPL requires that you redistribute not only binaries, but the source to build those binaries.

Generally, that should be obvious based on what it's returning; If it's returning a copy, it should return a static User object, if it's returning a the original it will be a pointer to it. That's also what the documentation is for, in the event that it is returning a reference to a copy it needs to make clear that it's the caller's job to destroy the object. In Java, you refer to that as an "implementation detail"; In C++, you generally realize that /you are the implementer/ and need to pay attention to details.

Those that operate above the normal legal standards also need to be held to a higher moral standard: Being a military serviceman is not something to take lightly. I don't agree with all the policies (Seriously, no porn? Yeah, right, get right on that), but the reduced freedom of speech, the need to verify potential associates, etc, are part of the tradeoffs that come with the position.

Thank you, though, for making them.

Yes, mapping a windows network share would indeed cause autorun.inf to be read.

Isn't everyone?