Firing your most skilled employees in a highly specialized and difficult field is beyond stupidity. This will end badly for them. Fortunately for the rest of us this means that there will be some talent freed up. So snatch them up while you can.

You are missing at least 1 third options that is already in practice today. A side channel which propagates errors. PHP's error handler setup does this and stderr in shell programming is akin to this as well.

2000 was at the height of the tech bubble. So any comparison to it is horribly skewed.

Latency has a greater impact than raw throughput when it comes to anything interactive and they don't necessarily correlate. For example Comcast vs. Centurylink here in OR. Comcast is the fastest and Centurylink the slowest. Yet Comcast routinely has ping times of 80-100+ms where Centurylink gets around 20-30ms ping times (using the same google ip as an example for testing). The difference is noticeable.

http://openatrium.com/

For a Republic or Democracy to work the Citizens have to have something invested. It must be limited, something you earn. Traditionally this was through seemingly unfair methods, but it was always there because it was necessary.

I dumped FF because they kept breaking all my plugins. I used it primarily for the plugins, yet they broke half of them ever release (versions 4-6). I keep waiting to hear that they created a stable API for plugins to use but have yet to hear about this. Do you know if they've addressed this.

And using Chrome doesn't necessarily mean using the 'official' binary version from Google with all its spy-settings turned on full. You can use Chromium w/ all that off and not worry about it.

Supermicro has a ATOM based board with 6 SATA ports. I am using one for a NAS box and it works good. Kind of expensive though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182234

That is due to i915_enable_rc6 defaulting to off. In 3.2 they should be changing it to default to on again as they've fixed the lockup bugs that it was causing. See the developers blog for more; http://dodonov.net/blog/

Seems to me that the jury is still out on how liable you would be found as the law is still somewhat murky.

Either way though they will come and confiscate every piece of computing equipment in the place if they decide your IP/residence is of interest. So you will definitely want to keep an offsite backup of your data. That way if they take everything you can get another computer and get back to work right away.

They were waiting as there was no reason to kill him before next years elections. I bet they are pissed they had to move this early, as it will be hard to maintain the popularity boost this will give while the economy still sucks.

I don't do much video editing, but another one I've read is supposed to be decent is openshot.

http://www.openshotvideo.com/

They are at version 1.3 and have nice documentation.

Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry?

Not true. It is easy to find music players that support not only ogg/vorbis but flac as well. The only player I've seen recently that doesn't support them are ipods, which isn't surprising given that it is primarily a vehicle to promote itunes.

Your doubts are misplaced. The #1 reason is access to source code. Not so much to modify or fix bugs, though I've done both at time, but for documentation. The documentation written as such universally sucks and never really matches up with what the software actually does. The only real documentation is the software itself. If you don't have access to the source so you can see what the hell is going on you don't have usable documentation and are just guessing.

IMO it's better to have an easy to find public 'you' online for these people to track. You use that for everything 'safe'. You then use multiple anonymous accounts for anything you don't want tracked.

If you have nothing tracking online I think it might start looking more suspicious than not. Plus having nothing might encourage 'them' to dig in and try to relate you to your anonymous account(s).