+1 to #11. I strongly suggest that the ParanoidLinux maintainers get deeply, intimately familiar with how traffic analysis works. This presentation from last year's Black Hat Briefings is a good start -- the panel included Jon Callas of PGP and Nick Mathewson from Tor, and they know what the hell they're talking about. George Danezis' "Introducing Traffic Analysis", mentioned in the presentation, should be required reading for everyone on the Paranoid Linux project.

#3: Have you never heard of a little notion called 'the commons'? Let's just say it's not just for intellectual property anymore.

I'm right up there with #7 and #34. I own a 12-gauge pump-action and a .40 Sig Sauer P226, and while I don't get to the range as often as I'd like, I find target shooting to be relaxing and meditative. Good stance, place the sights, breathe evenly, squeeze; it's almost like a form of yoga.

@JFLawton: What's my dog in this race? I'm a programmer who works on both open- and closed-source software; I founded a tech startup about two years ago. I'm also a science fiction writer, albeit not a terribly active one any more. Copyright law affects every aspect of how I earn my living (as do patent and trademark law, though those are very different animals), so I make it a point to keep tabs on what's going on in the intellectual property world.

"Prevent people from thinking"? Au contraire, I made it a point to link directly to original sources precisely so that readers could have a look and evaluate the position of the Copyright Office, the text of former failed legislation, the Library of Congress's online index of current legislative actions, and the state of current national and international copyright law for themselves. Simon, by contrast, falsely claims that orphaned-works legislation is currently before Congress (there isn't any), and links to ... his company's website. And a special-interest group he's part of. Oh, and his company's website again. He makes a lot of bold claims, and backs up exactly none of them. I find that pretty insulting, and I'm annoyed that Simon has whipped so many people into a frenzy over a made-up issue.

Do I have an agenda? Of course I do: getting people to do their homework and think clearly about important issues rather than running in circles, screaming and shouting. If just a handful of people actually learn something about how copyright law works -- hell, even how the legislative process in the United States works -- and use that knowledge to become active in areas of copyright policy where there are actually bills on the table (such as S. 1353, the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007; or H.R. 1689, the Curb Illegal Downloading on Campuses Act of 2007; or S. 1957/H.R. 2033, the Design Piracy Prohibition Act), then I've done something meaningful.

@fantasticpoison: Thanks for the correction -- edited the duration braino and added an IANAL note on the publication issue.

What blows my mind is employees who, upon discovering that someone who has complained about their company's product or service, take it upon themselves to harass the dissatisfied customer. After a lousy experience with Hotwire.com last year, in which they claimed they hadn't charged my credit card but still placed a hold for over $800 for hotel rooms which of course were never booked, I blogged about their deceptive trade practices and the rude customer service drones who refused to help me.

Months later, I'm still getting trolled by individuals purporting to be Hotwire employees, who take it upon themselves to insult everything from my appearance to my sexual practices. What the hell kind of company considers this appropriate behaviour from its employees?

I take some solace, though, in that they're digging their own graves. I rather doubt that potential customers who stumble across the blog post in question will want to do business with a company that gives bad, deceptive service and attacks burned customers for speaking out about it.

I am perpetually infuriated by Western medicine's persistent belief in the myth of the "ideal patient", with its insistence that a single diet, a single course of treatment for a given disease, a single way of addressing any thing having to do with human biochemistry is necessarily right for all people.

Some people cannot process meat protein. Other people cannot derive enough nutrition from plant protein, or even from dairy. I happen to be one of them; no matter how much spinach or other high-iron vegetables I eat, or how many supplements I take, I'm anemic unless I eat plenty of red meat. Without enough meat in my diet, I end up lethargic and unable to think clearly. If I tried to follow blanket claims about what I should and shouldn't eat, I would be unable to function.

Pay attention to how your body responds to food, and eat what leaves you feeling best. It's really not that difficult.

@2: haha, you had the exact same insight I did (which doesn't surprise me -- hi, btw!)

To put it another way: an encryption algorithm is considered cryptographically secure when it is equally hard to figure out the plaintext when you know how the algorithm works or when you don't. Applying this notion to search, this would mean that it's equally hard for an attacker to inject irrelevant data (pages) into the search results whether the attacker knows how the ranking algorithm works or not.

These are two very, very different problems that can naively be described as the inverse of one another. Encryption is about turning a meaningful signal into a signal that's indistinguishable from noise; search is about filtering the most meaningful signals out of a universe of noise. We've been rather successful at systematically turning signal into noise for the last few decades now; extracting signal from noise is a much harder problem. Spammy search results are another type of noise, but they're noise that's carefully crafted to look like signal. So it turns into an arms race: signal-extractors develop methods to find signals in noise, fake-signal-injectors develop methods to make their noise look like signal, signal-extractors develop ways to identify fake signals as noise, goto step 2.

And it really doesn't help the situation that extracting semantic content from text is a problem that's almost definitely well past the Turing boundary; AI-hard problems are, well, hard. Mechanical Turks are useful for this kind of thing, but do they scale? I guess we'll see.

@ifireball -- umm, according to CNET it speaks HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, SMB and AFP in addition to CIFS (well, and FTP/FTPS, but I can't see those being terribly useful for video streaming).

This looks like the bigger, tougher brother of the Linksys NSLU2, which is about the size of two packs of cards laid side-by-side, and has an Ethernet adapter and two USB2 connectors (expandable to 4 with some hardware hacking, IIRC) for attaching external hard drives or whatever external USB devices you want to attach. (I plugged a tiny unpowered USB hub into mine and gave it 2GB of storage, a Bluetooth dongle and an 802.11b dongle.)

The NSLU2, aka "slug", has become a favourite of tiny-Linux fans because its 133MHz ARM CPU (overclockable to 266 by removing a resistor) supports Linux just fine. Check out unslung.org to see what kinds of tricks you can do with one.

So my biggest question is "could you use the NAS as a MythTV box and cut out the middleman?"

The Netgear's CPU is an Infrant IT310X, which is a RISC processor running at up to 280MHz, according to the manufacturer. You'll probably need a USB video adapter for the MythTV side of things, and I'm not sure if anyone has yet cross-compiled Linux for the IT310X, but one of the Unslung guys can probably give you some tips there.

Good luck! If I had the money to blow on one of these things, I'd be figuring out a cross-compilation environment already...