Doctor Erdans notes Jul 8th 2033

Patient Darl McBride is a 70 year old paranoid delusional disorder subject that we have been treating since his arrival at the facility.
He is beset by frequent rambling tirades. Most of these episodes are flashbacks to some period in his life where he felt he owned something or was entitled to something that was plainly not his. This behavior has persisted on throughout his life and even today we have had numerous incidents with him claiming ownership of items that are unquestionably not his. To wit, yesterday he removed the batteries from the TV remote in the recreation room and was seen jumping on the chairs with the batteries clenched in his fist as he wildly was yelling that the TV was his and that all the patients owed him money for each hour they were watching it. Nurse Williams assisted by Nurse Walters restrained him and placed him back in his room on an increased Thorazine drip.
He freqeuntly threatens other residents telling them that he is going to examine their things. Most of his tirades center on this theme that other residents have taken things from him and are hiding these items in their rooms.
He is abusive to staff who often try to compromise with him and go with him to see what things he has claimed are "stolen". He never agrees to this and instead just claims items he finds and begins a new tirade waving the newly grabbed item claiming it "matches" something of his.

Unusual behaviour and amusing for what it is to a point but I am concerned for the safety of the residents here. He is prone to these outbursts and I do believe he may become violent.

Recommendation is to maintain the increased Thorazine dose until I see some improvement in his overall comportment.

So what happens when the ShakeDown goes international? I.e. if they start sweeping the IP space for Linux TCP/IP fingerprints, whois'ing them and, if available, a contact, start emailing the contacts (or ISP's) indicating that a 'scofflaw' exists at that IP and a tithe is needed?

They really could get a fantastic revenue stream out of this. Would you pay a shakedown fee or represent yourself to maintain that your kernel was clean? Would you submit to a review of the code on your box at that IP addr? Do you have the time and funds to resist this discovery?

What a royal pain! I don't expect to have to pledge an oath of fealty in this day and age!

Hedley

Today it costs >100k$ for a large Sun machine with 64bit addressing and the ability to load 12Gb of physical ram. Next year, AMD and Intel will be introducing 64 bit server chips. The AMD offering (Sledgehammer, Opteron) will be the least pain in my opinion to get software going on it. Once that time comes, jobs that once used to be the domain of Sun/Solaris machines will become the work of cheaper farms of AMD/Intel based cpu's. The effect of this will be pronounced since companies that depend on simulations (IC companies for example) can afford to have more of what is usually a fairly tight resource. Sun will still enjoy it's large processor #, large memory capable machines but many tasks that once required that large iron will get migrated to these cheaper alternatives.

As the telecom space continues to melt down and as the good engineers at these places go on the dole or find work in other non-telecom fields, who is going to make these switches hubs and routers when, in the limit, those legacy ports start going dark? Technology is momemtum based, left unattended, it will slip back into the primordial ooze and we will be reinventing the vacuum tube. Hmmm an edge router made from vacuum tubes...