(And that has always been a sticking point for me... does the second amendment include an exception for convicted felons? How can any imposed restriction on a convicted felon's right to bear arms be constitutional? Does the same constitutionally guaranteed right to vote include any exception against convicted felons?)

The exception is in the 14th amendment, which allows discrimination against criminals:

(Section 1) ... No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...

(Section 2) ... But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime ...

I think it sucks too, but it will require an amendment to the Constitution to fix.

I've spent the last week trying to get the RC working. I started with fresh install and ext4/encrypted home directory. It appeared to work but locked within an hour. (hard lock sometimes with caps/number lock flashing)

I noticed they had a problem with deletes in ext4 and so reformatted to ext3. Then I got kernel oops with what appeared to be the encrypted home directory stuff. So I turned that off as well and still was getting lockups. After days of reading bugs with the kernel 2.6.28, nvidia 180 drivers, and the intel 4965 wireless, I've still not solved the problem. It's hard to troubleshoot as there are no logs and the system is dead even to sysrq commands. I did see an issue with the hpet having problems, so I tried the other modes such as jiffies. Even used noapic/etc trying to get a stable system. Nothing seems to work. Funny thing is that 8.04 and 8.10 were rock solid on my system.

In many cases, running firefox and trying to watch flash video causes the lockups. Sometimes in less than five minutes.

Just FYI for anyone using similar hardware
Dell m1730
Intel X9000 @ 3.4GHz
4gb RAM
dual SSD 64GB RAID-0 (dual boot with XP)
dual nVidia 8800M GTX (SLI)
30" Dell LCD @ 2560x1600
Intel 4965 Wireless
Ubuntu 9.04 amd64

For most users, no it will not work. One of the major features of ext4 is extents, which basically reserves space for a file to continue writing at a later date. This will decrease file fragmentation and improve performance.

If however, you disable extents, then yes you can mount it as ext3. And as you know, ext3 can be mounted as ext2 without the journaling.

I agree that the win32 ext2 drivers need updating. I would hate to lose access to ext partitions for dual boot systems.

I'm a huge vi user myself, but the biggest difference is wasd is left handed and hjkl is right hand. Most people are used to using the mouse with the right hand. So you'd be jumping on and off the keyboard to click links/etc.

Wait, are you suggesting that Microsoft didn't bribe a dozen counties, at a hundred or more people, and pull off the biggest corporate cover-up in history (aside from the brilliant and astute readers of Slashdot who have worked diligently to uncover this plot) just so they could get their document format adopted as an ISO standard--something which will yield them little to no gain because the market share of Office essentially requires competitive document compatibility?

Actually it gains them a lot. For one thing, as reported here, in at least some of the nations where irregularities have been seen laws were recently passed requiring all government documents to be published using open standards. Since MSOffice does not provide this facility, they'd have to use something else to produce the documents. If they can just say their document format *is* an open standard (ipso facto!) they don't lose their coveted market share and they don't have to make any changes to their software.

It also gains them something in an area of Microsoft's desires that has puzzled me forever. For some reason it just offends their sensibilities to support ANY open format in their software, be it png, OpenDocument, or XML. HOWEVER ever since the Linux revolution around 2000 and the big hoopla over open standards Microsoft has billed themselves as the most open company in the universe out of one side of their mouths while deriding the Free Software people as Communists out of the other. In any case this is one more feather in their cap of features in their Software they can point to and say "See we're the most open company in the world!"

This is, in fact, what started this mess. Microsoft claimed they supported XML, an open standard, in their office suite, people with more than half a brain said "that doesn't look like XML to me" so Microsoft decided to call what they were doing OOXML and get it approved as a standard. When that did not fly, the votes got changed so it passed.

We run some propetary hardware where I work that only currently has driver support for Windows NT. Thus, we have one box that runs NT. When we did a re-install on it, we installed NT, then immediately patched up everything. Before the patches had even finished installing, it had already caught blaster and a variety of other things. It was like leaving a gaping wound open in a cespool. I agree, virus software can only really work well as a reactive measure. In order to protect your machine, your OS needs a strict set of acces and execution permissions so, say, your mp3 player or web browser can't format your hard drive or add bizzare crap to your configuration files. That being said, there are plenty of viruses that infect you without having you run an unknown executable at all. They're called buffer overrun exploits, and if you think Windows 98 is free of them, then you're pretty deluded.