So The Pirate Bay has executed the Web 2.0 business plan to perfection: give someone else's stuff away for free - then find a bigger idiot to buy the company.

[...] in the case of Web 2.0, companies go from "pre-revenue" to "post-revenue" without any revenue in between. That's where you need a bigger idiot.

Q: Web 2.0 - are we speaking from hindsight when we try to define it?

A: We are speaking from no sight at all.

"Web 2.0" is a catch word coined by Tim O'Reilly who was trying to sell books for his publishing company. In my opinion, it was the saddest moment of O'Reillys careeer as for the most part, he brings clarity to technology not gummy eyewash and wool.

There is no spec, no standards committee, no list of particular technologies. It's just a vague slide made by O'Reilly that doesn't even include all the latest technologies and implies some are new that are not.
[...]

• Benefits of using sudo: Users don't have to remember an extra password.

  This is cool for Average Joe, but don't tell me that it's an advantage on a serious server: it's actually a downside, see the next point.
  




• Every cracker trying to brute-force their way into your box will know it has an account named root and will try that first. What they don't know is what the usernames of your other users are. Since the root account password is locked, this attack becomes essentially meaningless, since there is no password to crack or guess in the first place.

  
  Sure, the attack on root becomes useless, too bad that SSH brute-force attacks usually try lots of different usernames. If the manage to break a single account of a sudoer, they automatically have control of your machine. If you had to remember a different password to su your way, it would make their life a bit harder.
  




• Allows easy transfer for admin rights, in a short term or long term period, by adding and removing users from groups, while not compromising the root account.

  
  err... what does "not compromising the root account" actually mean? If I get admin rights, I can do whatever I want, including compromising any account. Unless I get authorisation just to run a limited set of commands through sudo, but that's not the point of this post.
  




• The root account password does not need to be shared with everybody who needs to perform some type of administrative task(s) on the system.

  
  ok, but what problem does it solve? (apart from avoiding people shouting the root password when they shouldn't )
  
  If I want to remove a person from the admin group, I need to trust her not to have planted any malicious program (rootkits, backdoors...) or rebuild the system if I'm paranoid, if I really want to be on the safe and paranoid side.
  
  IMHO, it's just the same as changing the root password when one is gone, or even better, periodically.
  

• create S1


• bind S1 to a port (or to a port/address, if you need to)


• set S1 to listen for connections

• create S2


• tell S2 to connect to S1

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.