"It was his baby and he owned it." He may have designed it, and he may have built the majority of it by himself, but the city owned it, not him. If I pay a builder to build a house for me, it is mine. Not his, he may win awards for it, but it is mine. As long as I paid him for it is mine and he must had the keys over to me. He can't decide that he wants to keep it.

Actually MS did NOT write the OS for the PC back in the 80's. Bill G. purchased a OS (86-DOS, a.k.a.QDOS) for the PC back then and renamed it. Typically people don't consider hardware open, they consider software open and MS did not own the hardware.

I remember that, was called departmental computing. I had friends that laughed at me when I went into mainframes in the early 80's and the mainframes were going to be gone in a few years. Here it is 20+ years later and I still work with mainframes. I got into the networking side and I still do mainframe networking along with distributed networking.

O.K, a little box with a few CPUs, put as much external connectivity inside the box and say I have saved the world. Blade servers have been around for awhile. Virtualization is old hat. Mainframes have been doing this for a long time. IBM has been doing virtualization at the OS level since the 60's and at the hardware level since at least the early 80's. Depending on workload an IBM z10 can have thousands of virtual OS's running in less than 20 sq of floor space. Just about the same space as 3 standard server racks. I know of company running about about 500 virtual Linux images on a single 10-way z9. The z10 has about twice the capacity of a z9. On average a z9 uses less energy than a single rack of blade servers and the z10 uses less energy than a z9. If you want you can now run Solaris on an IBM mainframe under z/VM. There is another company that has just released a product that allows you to run virtual Windows systems on an IBM mainframe. Yes, Microsoft Windows running on an IBM mainframe. Its like people don't realize that this is OLD technology not new. The idea if a few big computers running everything and sharing resources is all what mainframes have been about and are still about.

Yep, thats the answer. Lets setup VPN's between every computer and every web, ftp, chat, and whatever server. Or use https, ftps, sftp, etc. on every connection. Just who is going to end up paying for all the equipment upgrades to support all that encryption and decryption on the servers or the extra hardware that needs to be purchased to offload the encryption? Who is going to pay for all of those certificates for SSL encryption? You do realize that the reason most sites don't offer SSL is because they have to pay for certificates? If they use self-signed certificates, they you get those annoying pop-up windows because you browser can't verify the certificate. I for one do NOT want to have to import thousands of self-singed certs.