Everyone who made some physics know that electrons are not moving at light speed in wires. Even not at 2/3 of light speed; but only at some centimeters / second. Or all our wires would be quite hot in our computers and phone lines :-)

Only the electric field (aka information) propagate at the light speed.

So this article does not look really serious.
Does slashdot start publishing fake stories ?

(btw, this is my first comment :-)

A: It's very simple :

1. The US army (= the governement) created Internet
2. They authorized universities to connect
3. They authorized people in the world to connect
4. They authorized commerce
5. They delegated THEIR rights to ICANN

That's it. Internet belongs to the US governement that *GAVE* its control to ICANN.

Countries have nothing to say like they have nothing to say about Ford Motors or about International Red Cross.

Now, is that good ? That's ANOTHER question...

I run debian. Slink (stable) on all the production machines, and potato (unstable) on two "testbed" ones.

I like how i can run "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" and have the latest security updates I need automatically downloaded, installed and configured on my system.
Or, if I want to review the changes and decide for each package individually if I want to upgrade them or not, I run the "select" method in dselect first.

I can even get told within minutes of a new critical patch being posted by subscribing to the debian-announce mailing list.

There are a couple things that I really like about it:

1) The advisories sent out to the mailing list contain enough information to know what problem the updates are fixing. The changelog files in the packages (which I *can* read before installing the package, if I unpack it somewhere else) contain a list of all changes. And if this is not enough for me, I can go and get the source package, and diff it to the previous version.

2) Debian potato will contain the apt-zip package, a set of scripts that simplify the process of downloading updates to removable media (e.g. zip drives, though you could probably also write them to a CD-R if you needed or wanted to). I can apply them to as many machines as I want to by inserting the medium, mounting it and typing "dpkg -i /mountpoint/*.deb"

3) dselect, console-apt and gnome-apt as well as kpackage are applications that provide me a list (sorted by anything) of Items I have installed so I can check off the one I want to uninstall.

I think everyone agrees that individual patches would be better since it allows ultimate user control. And the way they are organized in the Debian system is really great.