The internet was basically built on the GPL, and most of the code that makes it go was built using the GPL.

Exactly which planet are you referring to, because it isn't this one. GPL v1 is from 1989. Depending on exactly what you want to count as "The Internet" you can put the start date as early as 1969 or as late as 1983. Commercialization and ISPs arrived in 1988 in the US. Cisco provided many of the routers used (started 1984). BSD was the main OS used for TCP/IP development and research. BBN had the "reference implementation". Every single one of these things predates the GPL. The BSD TCP/IP stack was ported to many other platforms, including Windows. One thing is categorically certain - the Internet was not built on the GPL. If anything it was built on BSD licensed software.

For one thing, making you pay for all of our code you are secretly using for free.

The GPL is not and has never been about price. It is about freedom to share, modify and use. You can charge whatever you want. You can even charge people a small reasonable fee to get the source code. It also depends on copyright law. Someone "secretly using" anyone's code without permission is violating copyright.

I for one have had enough of the whining about the GPL and how restrictive it is.

The GPL is restrictive because you cannot change the terms under which the code can be redistributed. It also applies to the whole program. For example if you add one line of GPL code to a 20 million line program then the whole program has to become GPL compatible. Note I use the GPL for most of my stuff and consider that the cost if you want to use my code. But it certainly is more restrictive. There is the LGPL which mitigates this but its use is discouraged.

It seems to me, its only restrictions is you can't rip people off.

"Ripping people off" is usually a financial thing. Google have built a multi-billion dollar empire using lots of other people's GPL code (eg Linux kernel) and have not paid them. The GPL allows you to use GPL code within a company and providing you do not distribute outside of the company you can use code as you see fit, so the original author gets "ripped off".

Your view of the GPL is just plain wrong. It is about freedom and the restrictions are largely that you have to provide the same freedoms on the code you receive to others if you pass the code or derivatives on to others.

What you are probably unaware of is that Lenovo provides the Base Software Administrator which lets you define exactly what goes on in a system software recovery. Behind the scenes it merely places a text file in the recovery partition that sets what components are installed during a recovery. You can exclude all of what you consider crapware. They also have software on that page to make your own packages so they can be placed in the recovery partition. Finally they provide the means to run your own software update servers.

Netbooks currently go for $300 and are low power. As a bonus they have a builtin screen and keyboard (obviating the need for a KVM) and also have a builtin UPS (aka battery). Use small bus powered external USB drives for extra storage. You can even make them a router/firewall/access point since they have wired and wireless interfaces.

The UK academic network JANET was originally setup to have domain names in reverse and although it may seem to make logical sense it wasn't human friendly. Also look at how we address snail mail - same order as current DNS. For completion you can make things more intelligent pretty much like how the Firefox address bar works. You'll also find that most DNS servers do not allow zone transfers - for example neither .edu nor wustl.edu allow it.

Are you sure? I was just there last month. I am talking about the many immigration desks that are on the same floor as all the shops in T2 and T3 (and just a few metres away from the shops). Maybe you are thinking of customs?

Not to mention that the immigration desks at Singapore airport never have queues, don't have specific lines for locals/residents vs foreigners and are usually handing out candy!

When I came through SFO last time their computers read my British passport and Green Card and then decided that meant I was American which resulted in ever increasing numbers of supervisors being called over. At some point one of them started arguing with me as I was born in an African country but was only there for one month after my birth. He was insisting I must have a passport from there as well. No amount of pointing out that the US is one of the few countries with a policy of being born there means automatic citizenship appeased him. (They eventually worked out the computer system was being stupid.)

BTW the time limit for outside visits with a Green Card is 6 months. You can go for up to a year if you fill out lots of paper work in advance.

With all the security proposals, is anyone actually getting protected?

Given they can't keep drugs, weapons and other stuff out of prison where they have the right to do almost any kind of search and take their time about it, why would airports and other borders be any better? In answer to your question, they'll have a small chance of catching truly stupid bad guys. Anyone determined will find many ways through the system. And when they do, the people who put up those stupid proposals will be the ones "protected" claiming they did everything they could.

I am a British citizen and legal permanent resident of the US (almost a decade). The last time I came through San Francisco Airport (a month ago) they scanned all ten of my fingerprints and did a retinal scan (I don't remember if it was one or both eyes).

When SSBB came out it was the first dual layer disc. My Wii was one of those having disc reading issues. Nintendo replaced the drive at their expense very quickly and added some more time to the warranty (I was out of warranty by about 3 months). At no point did I feel it was my fault or that Nintendo didn't like me. There was a minor concern over save games etc should the whole unit need replacing (their webpages of the time basically said "bad luck"). You can copy some savegames to SD card, but some prevent you which does make me angry. I only have 3 downloaded titles as I decided I wanted to own not rent them (ie I am only paying for stuff I can move to new systems at my choice.)

Starting with a plug-in is a good idea. There is existing infra-structure for you to fit in with and typically some sort of app store. You can then have some idea as to how popular your concept is and how much people are prepared to pay for it, as well as what the competition looks like. Then you can branch out to being standalone and remove the dependence on the framework vendor.

Wouldn't the drive benefit from a real understanding of the filesystem for this sort of thing?

There is no need as a standard ATA TRIM command exists by which the OS can tell the device when a block is no longer in use. LWN wrote about this almost a year ago.

In non-US countries cellphones have their own area codes. Calls to those area codes cost more than calls to regular area codes. In the US cell phones do not have their own area codes hence the extra cost of cell calls is borne by the recipient. In both cases cell calls cost more.

Any legacy code in X is also very lean. 15 years ago my ~40 person office ran a server on HP/UX (proprietary hardware, not Intel stuff). It was the DNS nameserver (internal and external), mail server (external facing), usenet server and who knows what else. It ran X for the gui with the various programs all being statically linked as a single binary (switching on argv to decide which program to be). All of this was done in 4MB of RAM (yes megabytes). The CPU in my current computer has a 4MB cache!

There is a company dedicated to letting you pay for your codecs on Linux, although they do then bundle free player software. I am guessing more than one person has paid up :-)