Interesting, I never really dug too deep into it, aside from making a couple of changes and standard entitlement stuff for applications. application.sb looks like a complete nightmare to maintain.
True, learning how to build things from source yourself is definitely useful, I probably wouldn't be using Homebrew if I wasn't comfortable with that first. It's definitely advantageous to be able to organise/upgrade everything via it though.
Best/most secure option for tunnelling traffic through to your VPS? SSH is definitely secure enough for that, provided you have a strong password or even better key-based authentication.
To make something like that more user friendly though you could just install VPN software like OpenVPN on your VPS. This also ensures things like DNS queries are sent over the VPN so they can't be intercepted on their way to the server.
Of course this assumes you trust your VPS provider, at least more than your ISP.
They are as noted prototype devices – with no announced release date – so it's completely in the realm of possibility that the camera simply isn't ready yet. Of course that doesn't excuse the misleading video and pictures Nokia used to advertise it.
I'm sure this is about trying to improve site performance, and charging for it would inevitably cause everyone to continue scraping the HTML, thus defeating the point.
A baseline comparison of the same tests running in Boot Camp might give a nice understanding of what kind of general performance loss you're going to get by virtualising at all.
You can tell Parallels to never cross-associate OS X or Windows programs with each other via the configuration preferences (http://goput.it/s5h.png). I can't speak for Fusion but I would be surprised if they didn't have a similar setting.
