Right... there's a quite a mess in the embedded world with a lot of device makers stuck on bug-ridden, horribly hacked-up 2.4 kernels. In particular, the execrably unhelpful Broadcom has never released any open-source drivers for its WiFi chipsets, and no binary drivers for 2.6.x kernels (except recently for x86).

Microsoft just doesn't "get" the way Linux works. It's kind of astonishing that even the developers responsible for writing Linux kernel code there haven't figured out the value of cooperating with the kernel team. Well... maybe they have and the suits overruled them. Hard to say.

Stuff that needs Linux permissions/features explicitly, such as symlinks, I store on ext3 partitions. If I need to back them up, onto non ext3 partitions, such as when wiping the computer drive completely, I generate a tar.gz or tar.bz2 file on the directory, and back up that file onto an external drive accessible from all OS's.

For a while I tried the ext3/ifs windows driver for 2k/xp, and stored everything in Linux file systems, but I think I was hacked or something, because stuff started disappearing. I try not to use windows much on the net anymore, but for some things, mostly legacy stuff, you simply have to use it. My last version of windows that I can comfortably use is win 2k, which still has some leave you alone professional taste to it. XP has way too much bullshit automatically loaded into it, it looks prettier than 2k, but the trade offs in freedom are grave. Vista - no comment.

Citation needed. You are the second person to suggest this - I would be most interested to see a definitive source for this interpretation of his statement.

Nothing in the link you provide backs up your assertion - there is a statement about another person using forged handwriting, but not Richelieu himself. Otherwise, Richelieu's words seem to have a plain meaning on their face which is equally plausible, which is that he prided himself on being able to twist any honest words to amount to a crime under the law at the time.

I would say the national highway system has fared pretty well.... At least in the 48 continental anyway. Sure its aging and it needs some upkeep but it has been there since the days of Eisenhower. I am also pretty partial to the library system. More state and county admittedly, but there is no need or additional benefit to making it a federal system. Perhaps the solution is for states to institute their own governmental health care. Maybe not. Point being, what we have right now doesn't work.

For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why?

Because, until fairly recently, it was, in most parts of the state, a local government granted monopoly, and while the local carriers have changed hands (largely to consolidate regions and create bigger regional monopolies), there are significant barriers to entry in any local market, which means that the monopoly carriers are pretty well entrenched, with the main competition coming from alternatives to cable (satellite, services delivered over internet, though the cable providers themselves are also some of the biggest broadband providers) rather than alternative cable providers per se.

You bring up a very good point, but there are canon related issues when such a huge change to things are made. Playing Spartan-3s would be very appealing and interesting, but when put into context of the rest of the universe it becomes harder and harder to hide that many secret people. I would love to see it done correctly, but I have doubts that it will ever exsist due to market saturation and gameplay balancing. On the whole MMOs are moving to be more PvP based because PvP content creates itself if you give it a framework. It is cheaper and easier to balance PvP and code a place for it to happen than it is to create a never-ending series of quests. And with PvP making such an impact it seems very out of place for one group of Spartans to be fighting another, and if you make a Covenent equal to them you run face first into the canon/continuity wall again. And as a sidenote, I apologize for insinuating that most Halo players are mindless zombies. They are zombies that routinely wipe my bleeding crying ass all over "Pit" and "Guardian". :)