Excellent! It took me straight to The Black Hole game. Thanks!

Because the world is perfect and none of our code ever had bugs or design flaws? And people never hype their crap, actively mislead and deceive us?

Never?! Get used to it! :)

as someone who saw Carcass and Obituary in Nov, and who is about to see Napalm Death (and Voivod, and Black Crown Initiate, and Ringworm, and ...)... WTF does your post have to do with anything?

OH!

You're saying that these intense, but short, broadcasts are examples of interstellar speed metal; a-la Napalm Death's sub-second song "You Suffer" ... ?

then say so!

don't be a hater; it's a solid "B" effort from the parent-post. You can argue it down to a "C", but that's as far as you'll get. Lulling the reader into submission (your complaint about it taking too long) is an actual STRATEGY. Are you familiar with how certain readers can gloss over typos? That's what our beheaderaswp is using as a trapping action. Now you can also argue that the barb "never going to give" isn't worth burying with the lead-up, but while humor bursts from the unexpected there is also a joy in the familiar. I'm sorry if this attempt isn't up to your standards, but it hits the standard.

Just last week I read an entire book by Allan and Barbara Pease. Even this book (which promises the moon in three easy lessons) says that body language is best interpreted though consistent clusters.

Here, the static eye test amounts to a form of dead reckoning.

Claiming that this equates to the general ability to read people smacks of claiming that someone who can track big game from muddy impressions and broken twigs has the cognitive drop on Charles Darwin on all matters of big game observation.

As with personality indicators, one could in all likelihood devise fifteen other masked channels (not all of which consist of static images) with roughly the same degree of outcome correlation (where the reference outcome is something like success in group settings).

I also think this study's emphasis on freeze-frame campfire empathy is unfair to male performance. If you're in the business of poking sharp sticks at snakes or lions, the perceptual ability required is not to determine the animal's emotional state (angry, aggressive, threatened, lethal) but to determine moment by moment whether the animal will shrink back or strike forward.

The Pease book is clearly aimed at people in a sales environment (in which I also include making presentations in a board room) where the ability to form extremely rapid first impressions / first-reaction impressions is critical to career success (as opposed to short-term blood retention).

Compare the "it's not your fault" scene in Good Will Hunting (pachydermous elephant in the room) with the extended marital quarrel in Before Midnight (mass stampede of the unshackled lambs).

In the later case, neither spouse is seeing anything he and she haven't seen before (they could each write a book), but their proficiency in scorched-earth integration to identify a workable point of repair is severely put to the test.

That sounds a whole like Empathy to me, but dressed up in some fancy new clothes.

How could you know when you identity every person in the entire Empathy clan as just some Jim Bob or Jane Barb from poverty valley?

Empathy was never a precise concept in the first place, and most people are too lazy to clearly distinguish the perceptual side of empathy from the dispositional side (the later of which is heavily conflated with approval seeking and conflict avoidance, and these are further conflated with meekness/aggression, introversion/extroversion, low status/high status).

Dressing empathy up in a recognizable set of clothes (e.g. Marty Mindsight), roughly equates to clearing your throat before attempting to say something civilized.

Tying the antropocene epoch to the first nuclear detonation is a brazen attempt to smuggle the Garden of Eden / fall of man metaphor into this discussion under cover of a blinding fireball.

How about using Madame Curie instead, and picking a nice round date like 1900?

In 1900 Curie became the first woman faculty member at the Ecole Normale Superieure [/.sic] ...

I also noted this passage in the Wikipedia article.

Despite Curie's fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus affair—which also fuelled false speculation that Curie was Jewish. During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right wing press who criticised her for being a foreigner and an atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the public hypocrisy as the French press often portrayed Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honour, but would portray her as a French hero when she received a foreign one such as her Nobel Prizes.

In 1911 it was revealed that in 1910–11 Curie had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre's—a married man who was estranged from his wife. This resulted in a press scandal that was exploited by her academic opponents. Curie (then in her mid-40s) was five years older than Langevin and was misrepresented in the tabloids as a foreign Jewish home-wrecker.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. [/.sic]

Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.

Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remained—however frozen—in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion. "Dead" is really just a shortened version of "dead to the evolutionary fads of populism".

One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.

On the other hand, perhaps Perl isn't quite as "dead" as the idiom suggests. Perhaps Perl is merely catatonic, or just resting.

I have now been told literally dozens of times that "you don't have to install systemd", but no one has yet to back that up with steps for an install without it, or how to remove it from an existing install.

apt-get install OpenBSD

OpenBSD has the best internal documentation, but has relatively weak SMP and narrower hardware support than FreeBSD, neither of which should matter for a vanilla router.

I've heard good things about pfSense, but haven't used it myself.

If you want to dabble with ZFS for a NAS server as well, then I'd just start with FreeBSD which is what I'm presently using for my firewall (the few internet facing services are jailed or priv-sepped), despite having previously used a separate OpenBSD since 1998. For a ZFS box, it's a heck of a lot smarter to have ECC memory, though.

I totally hear you on the current Linux trend to make radical architectural change on the mainline branch with hardly any prior communication or heads up to the existing user base.

Come with me, little kiddie ... this won't hurt a bit.

I should have added: If you are serious about your security, move your samba service inside to another box. Keep this machine as a device to move packets securely.

OpenBSD. Feel free to look at the others, just don't get distracted by shiny bells & whistles and GUIs and the like.
OpenBSD does what you want and does it very well.

In the world of mathematical research, what the NSA knows is by construction a superset of what the academic community knows.

Modulo pub net (aka Brewsky's) and "unpublished communication".

But apparently you subscribe to the the maxim that the "publish or perish" edict is axiomatically tantamount to "no unpublished thought" which I find interesting, because stuffy academic writing hardly strikes me as Truman Burbank's brainstem Twitter feed.

Not that this is a subject matter where we should stray into the kind of pedantry best reserved for slicing and dicing The Recognitions or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, which is how real geeks test their mettle.

I'm sticking with OpenBSD. At least with that OS, features are well thought out and not jammed into every release because "it's teh l337!"

Sounds like I should change my business cards to: "Den Mother of Infantile Cretins."