> That's...kind of important? Even water can be deadly, if you drink too much of it in too short a period of time

There's an important subtlety lost here. Water doesn't cause cancer, and water has no deleterious side effects until a certain threshold has been reached, and thankfully that threshold is large.

For Aspartame, that threshold is zero. Any consumption of Aspartame starts accruing deleterious effects, namely that it is carcinogenic.

Drinking a small amount of water contributes x = 0 chance of developing cancer, consuming aspartame contributes x > 0 chance of developing cancer.

People who say "the dose makes the poison" are both right and wrong, because they're forgetting that some substances have a critical threshold before they start having any deleterious side effects.

What mechanisms does Linux use to enforce those type of read-only data, though?

If the value is set at compile time, then presumably that value is part of the executable image and is thus enforced by making the executable code in ram read-only.

What about the other types? Do they use the page table to make the pages containing the values read-only?

> Linux has had this (fairly obvious) protection for at least 15 years, though on Linux it's much more thorough. In Linux by default *all* executable code in the kernel is read-only.

To be clear, the change that Microsoft is implementing here is specifically about making data structures read-only, not just executable code. Their example of policy data structures illustrates this.

I don't know Linux well enough - does Linux enforce read-only sections of data, not just code? Or does a rogue kernel module have free reign to overwrite whatever kernel memory it wants?

You'll need a spectrum analyzer and an 2.4 GHz antenna. First, I'd confirm that it's interference just observing high noise at that time, then I'd start taking measurements around the area. A high gain directional antenna would be helpful, but you can triangulate just by observing the strength of the noise from several spots around your neighborhood, though, you might have trouble with the signal strength varying too much as you move the cable and connectors around. You might be able to do all the same with just the wireless adapter and some software like kismet.

If you're interested in Linux, you might just want to try FreeBSD.

I highly recommend FreeBSD for several reasons: ease of maintenance, ports, and stability/reliability/security.

First let me explain the ports tree. The ports tree is a very large collection of makefiles for all the programs which freebsd directly supports.

Say you wanted to install emacs 20. To do this, you would execute 'cd /usr/ports/editors/emacs20/; make install clean'

Ports does all the work for you. It determines and installs the dependencies first, downloads the source, unzips it, patches it for FreeBSD, configures the build, builds it, and installs it. Also, each step can be done manually if you prefer.

Say you wanted a list of every port installed: 'pkg_info'
Say you wanted to update your ports tree so that newer versions would be reflected (assuming you have the sup files correctly configured, and cvsup installed):
cvsupg -g -L 2 /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h cvsup3.freebsd.org

Now say you wanted to upgrade every last port installed. 'portupgrade -a' (assuming you have portupgrade installed)

Doing the kernel is just as easy. Edit the kernel config file, then 'cd /usr/src; make kernel KERNCONF='
That would check the config file, rebuilds the kernel and install it. All you have to do is reboot.

'make world' updates world in one fell swoop. (should be used with mergemaster in order to merge config files which may have changed between releases.)

Also, FreeBSD's idea of stabile is quite different than Linux's. The stuff that is in Linux's stable tree is FreeBSD's development tree. They are way more cautious about adding stuff, which makes for a very stable system.
If you look at the top 50 longest running webservers, all of them are running FreeBSD and apache.

FreeBSD makes it easy to install ports, upgrade ports, update your kernel, install a new world, and its much more reliable/stable than any linux.

Be sure to read the freebsd handbook at www.freebsd.org/handbook