This causes so many more problems though. The nature of cable/air broadcast is the broadcast part. The signal is sent one to many. More people watching does not create any extra load on the system.

With a network-based solution though, the more people the more load, and I highly doubt most internet providers would be able to keep up. They are already complaining about Netflix, and that still has a small share of the home media viewing market.

looks like they tried to use video conference software over a dialup modem with a webcam from 2001.

companies are starting to get smart and letting their employees work from home.

What do you foresee happening to GNU in the next 20, 50, and 100 years?

I bet they run in Wine!

He could be creating a deb that could be installed that installs and configures various services to make a debian-based system look like the old FreeNAS. I've used FreeNAS and there is really no reason to have a dedicated system for services that it provides. Many of the people that already use it either use FreeBSD or Linux on another system. If those systems could also run the easy configuration of FreeNAS, they could consolidate systems in their environment.

That's all guessing though. I really hope it ends up being an apt-get package in a repository some where. I like FreeNAS, but I would rather dedicate hardware resources to something else that is more utilitarian, even if that means I have to configure every service myself.

I don't think the goal was CPU processing.

Also, the article says "supercomputer" not server.

I ran ZFS/FUSE on Ubuntu 64-bit for about 3 months. Aside from some performance issues, it worked great up until about 20-30 reading and writing threads, when it crashed. It was easy enough to restart the file system, but I also had to restart the 15 VMs I had running on it. It would crash predictably though, so that's something.

ZFS under FreeBSD or Solaris is so much nicer. The performance even on the same hardware is many times better in straight reading and writing throughput.

Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!

The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese...

I'd take that to mean that he's guessing that they were Iranian or Lebanese. There's no common element in those two ethnicities that distinguishes them from Jordanians, Syrians or what have you. You might recognize an Iranian by face, dress or (obviously) language but not "either Iranian or Lebanese".

truthfully, once you pass the barrier where you are swapping, the benefits of additional ram diminish significantly.

A "blue moon" is a second full moon in a calendar month.