One easy tip to not get a hangover? Tell me it was discovered by a single mom and I'm in.

The funny thing is we already have something like this in the UK with the TV license, used to fund the BBC.

We have a similar thing in AU, with the ABC.

This is because there is a government mandate that guarantees the ABC\BBC its funding as well as other sources such as DVD sales that contribute the to the ABC\BBC. The Broadcasting Corporation (this is what the BC stands for) has a mandate that does not require it to make a profit what so ever so ever, just to maintain that it's under budget so they can fund things like "original productions", "actual comedy" and "unbiased news services" without fear of shareholder reprisal.

A government funded, independent corporations that works, I think I've just made a libertarians head explode.

"1. Terrorists will find another way around it anyway."

This is a silly argument that one often sees nowadays. Of course no measure we take will be perfect, and the terrorists will exploit whatever gaps we leave in the protection, but the point is not to create a perfect system, but to make it more difficult for the terrorists so that there will be fewer attacks.

One might as well argue against equipping cars with door locks, since thieves can and do find ways around them. The point is to make it more difficult for them, so a large number of potential evil-doers will give up before they start.

I moved to France last year and was pleasantly surprised at the ISPs attitudes towards sharing wifi.

My provider, Free.fr, by default enables guest access on my router. However, it's not completely open.
In order to access the connect, you must enter your account details (login and password), and then you are given access to a limited connection.
Should you not want to share your connection with other people, you can easily disable this feature; but doing so also disables your account from being able to access roaming wifi.

I really love that the community sharing feature is enabled by default.
As long as I'm willing to share my connection with other subscribers, then I get access to their bandwidth when I'm away from home. And, as one of the larger providers in the area, this means I have access from just about anywhere I go.

It's amazing how cheaply a university can get this for its students that qualify to have it shoved down their throats throughout their studies. At McGill anyways, only electrical (not absolutely sure, haven't asked one), computer, and software engineers as well as CS students have access. Still, it only costs the school a few hundred bucks a year for all of us and there's a lot more than copies of all windows xp-7 pro-extreme+ danger edition available for download.

As one who hasn't had windows as a primary OS (and consequently hasn't legally owned a version) since windows 98, I was a a bit skeptical when my university dropped a license (through MSDNAA) on my lap. It wasn't until reading this post that I was convinced (either way) that it was the RTM build, though it didn't make much difference to me as, in the worst case, they would provide the final for free when it was released.

Anyways, I had to try it out in vmware, if nothing else to make use of my newfound legal copy of an operating system a few days ago and was pleasantly surprised. As I only gave it 1GB of RAM, 1 of my not-so-blindingly-fast cores, and no graphics acceleration, I could feel it lagging a bit but *not that badly*. It was an overall pleasant experience, though productivity was hardly a factor in this call. Windows-only FPGA and DSP/embedded development software installed and working, I'm not sure what else I'd want to do on it. I'm sorry to those who feel more passionately about wanting to use Windows 7 and care to use it regularly.

Even when disallowed, my school of similar size would run into this problem every few weeks because some of the more inept users wanting a wireless connection in their room. Tech staff was pretty wuss so it could be a day or two before they actually knocked on the culprit's door.

Wasn't it only fairly recent that dynamic ticks (CONFIG_NO_HZ) became available in x86_64?

Does this mean that when ff goes out of control that it will instead of using up 99% of one cpu, use up 99% of each one?! I guess it's only on one machine that I currently have that problem, but it seems that it's stability on a single cpu ought to be a higher priority.

$16k for the old sparcstation 2's I found to buy some IBM crap?

Need iiiiiinput...
Ahhhhhhh... Input...

The other sense of 'free' is important too.

In Montreal, we are bound to either Bell (or someone who wholesales from Bell) or Videotron. I've taken all three routes at some point or another and have yet to have a stable connection.
Videotron would sell 10Mb and give you 3-4 max. Support sucked.
Bell was the worst. It didn't work for the first month because they had been ripping up wires in our area and they just never got around to our case. After that it was only out any time it rained or snowed. 30GB cap and their 15Mb really meant 5.
Electronic Box resells from Bell and has generally been good. It's more expensive ($45 for 5Mb, unlimited and without dealing directly with Bell). At least support is good, though all of our requests get forwarded to Bell because they have frequent outages. I'm otherwise just contented to not be dealing directly with Bell and their outrageous prices for exceeding their traffic limit.
Anyone got anything better around here?

Agreed. Our clients are predominantly real estate companies. They and their clients are effectively bricks when it comes to using a computer and most have never even heard of this firesomething or considered using an alternate browser. IE6 is still standard among most of them and a lot of pain goes into making sure that a site renders nicely in IE6/7 and FF when working on otherwise trivial aesthetics issues.

That said, I wouldn't call it the standard on the internet that most /.ers look at, but there are a majority of internet users that see a computer as just a black box and expect everything in it to "just work". If it doesn't, they just won't use it.