The better analogy is letting the USPS read our postcards and use information from that to create better advertisements to help pay for the service. You have a legitimate right to privacy with a sealed envelope (according to the law) and you have that same right to privacy if you seal your packets (i.e. encrypt them). In fact, your ability to protect your private packets is much stronger than your ability to protect your private mail.

Now, my personal opinion on the matter is that a decent company shouldn't use DPI in such ways, but it is my responsibility to protect information I want to keep private and to educate others to do the same.

I spent way too much time after I tried the most natural command line program `look`. Yeah, there is a tiny game in there too. Also, you still don't want to `sudo rm -rf /` cause then you'll have to restart the page.

My guess is that the attendance is taken to given them factual numbers to point to when the student fails out of a class. When a kid's parent calls the department to complain that little Timmy is too smart to be failing out of algebra and Professor Tweed should be fired, he can say that Timmy never showed up to class.

I agree that it is ridiculous that professors take attendance, but I don't think that is the problem. It's the parents who can't let their kid deal with consequences (and to be fair, more often than not I think the parent's $30,000 is paying the tuition bill).

My users have complained about that before. Especially with respect to SVN over SSH, because SVN has a nasty habit of creating a few connections and if they are quickly browsing the repository with `svn ls` of looking at log messages with different ranges the connections add up very quickly. This led to frustrated users yelling at me. I dialed back the numbers a bit to minimize the impact, but the invalid attempts started scaling back up.

But a million cars haven't driven past. Only ~1200 --- in the past year. This is no big deal. Hell, I start thinking something is wrong when I DON'T see many failed SSH attempts in the daily log reports.

I think the major complaint here is that there are so many updating systems for a Windows machine. On Linux, yeah I update every day, but it is all done through the same interface. I'm not saying this is perfect. But, it beats running the Windows Update, then the Office Update, then the Adobe Update, then the Apple Update, then the * Update, ad nauseum.

I'm not often a Windows user, but I had just the opposite experience recently and it *really* pissed me off. Windows was doing its auto-updates in the background and I had already gone through a patch-reboot cycle, then it pops up a message saying that it will automatically restart in 10 minutes.

The first time I saw the message, I clicked remind me again in 10 minutes (the other options were 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours). 20 minutes later all my programs close and I'm looking at an "Installing Updates" screen. I didn't even get a chance to save my work. The "restarting in 10 minutes" window popped up behind the active window, so I didn't see it.

This was Windows 7 and there was no "I'll restart the computer myself" option on the interface. I did a bit of searching and the fix involved going through a *.msi file and toggling some setting.

I assume I must have done something wrong somewhere, because if that is the way Microsoft designed this functionality by default I am glad I don't have to deal with that.

Ah yes, posting pre-coffee always leads to trouble. Sorry about that.

All four were convicted of two crimes: failure to comply with the Italian privacy code and criminal defamation. Three of the four were convicted on the first one, failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. None were found guilty on the second, criminal defamation.

The Flash update is actually 7 vulnerabilities.

That actually reminded me of a short study I did in my English class a number of years ago. I wanted to know if you could get a quick feeling for the quality of a magazine based only on the number of advertisements/glossiness of the publication. Given the limited time and amount of money I was willing to spend I chose "Popular Science" and "Scientific American." PopSci had many more adverts than SciAm and, IMO, this means that SciAm is the better magazine. Yeah, it was a little subjective, but it was only a 5 page paper for an English class.

It's nice to see that the same thinking still applies to websites.

Honest question: Do RPM files have a way of distinguishing between system- and user-level software? It seems like a fairly obvious thing to have/check, then users could install safe applications (i.e. those that don't have programs in /sbin or /usr/sbin), for their own uses.

Moreover, why can't RPMs just let users install in a private fakeroot directory (like there home directory). That way they don't have to touch the root file system and can easily install packages without needing a password. (Like if I wanted Eclipse, I could just find the RPM and double click to install it, no password, no fuss.)

I think Fedora could make this right if they wanted to.