We did some work involving statistics to correctly report results, see http://www.itkovian.net/base/statistically-rigorous-java-performance-evaluation (OOPSLA 2007) and http://www.itkovian.net/base/java-performance-through-rigorous-replay-compilation (OOPSLA 2008).

Maybe they could use a decent spam filter, such as mollom (http://mollom.com), which is pretty adept at classifying content.

You should certainly add both Steven Erikson and George RR Martin to your fantasy list, as they describe complex worlds, detailed plots, and epic stories, where there is no real sense of good guys vs bad guys, where 'facts' depend on the POV of the character, just as they do in the real world. The books also basically make you think about various issues that are relevant in our society.

How is this really comparing OSses? From the article, I gather that the first benchmark, Imagemagick compilation, compares two GCC versions plus the OS that performs the I/O on behalf of GCC:

"Starting off with the timed ImageMagick compilation process, FreeBSD 8.0 was able to build this open-source application noticeably faster than on FreeBSD 7.2 (even though both are using GCC 4.2.1), but Ubuntu 9.10 with GCC 4.4.1 took much less time to build ImageMagick."

Duh.

*cough* http://www.b-virtual.org/display/WWWBVIRT/Distributed+Storage+System *cough*

Seems like an adequate solution to the problem, at least according to the talk I heard last week. BTW, I am not associated with B-virtual.