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Thanks, I've had work servers run spamassassin and it's generally been pretty good regarding both false positives and negatives.

Thanks.

It's been around for what, 40 years? Working, (relatively) anonymous, and totally insecure mail transfer with tons of inertia. Never thought I'd see the day where there might be a small sliver of opportunity for another protocol to actually happen. Ars has a nice article about it too.

Well, IMAP lacks some of the features you find in Exchange (but picks up a few over POP3), but that's not client side. I remember Pine worked okay with IMAP and I suspect that any clients developed later than that should be able to handle it fine (i.e. anything that's a viable client).

And how much work is keeping your own host updated and spam filtered? I've thought about doing it before on several occasions (the Raspberry Pi seems like a cheap solution), but I've heard that keeping things smooth for a single account is generally more trouble than it's worth. How much time would you say it takes?

Standards can be well set by NGOs as well. Take a look at ANSI or ISO - the key is having a well balanced membership of the participating members. When you've seen failures of ANSI/ISO standards, the failure of that balance is a likely source.

FTFY.

Cant remember who or when, but it was observed that it's the pizza delivery guy.

Same here. And I love the way it interfaces with SharePoint servers. I'm glad we're keeping the product on the DL though - the crowd here can be tough on those like us.

Now we were poor and didn't have a video camera, but I'm pretty sure my parent's photo album still has several shots of me zipping through the alfalfa. Perhaps the following will help your perception of what a five year old kid can do:

5 YO on a 50 cc Yamaha

Another 5 YO on a 50 cc bike

This one has a 3 YO But mine didn't have training wheels.

My parents weren't reckless though; I was at least 6 before my dad removed the speed governor.

It's the parenting and maturity of the kid that counts; environment plays a role too.

Another problem with a statement like this is that "unsupervised" can mean a lot of things. When I was on a farm I had "unsupervised" access to my dirt bike at age five or so - even had chores which required its use about a mile away from the house (although I don't remember when the close in tasks/riding moved up to the further away ones). I bet my parents still kept an ear open and an eye on the clock while I was out on it and it's a sure thing that they spent the time making sure I knew what I was doing and how much trouble I'd be in if I went past the limits.

Other tools are the same way - knives, hand tools, power tools, guns (again environment is important - I was on a farm out in the country where there were active bounties on certain pests as well as other hazards (suspected rabid animals which needed putting down, etc...)), and even the internet. So, either parents these days are being reckless with their children's safety, or they've gotten a reasonable handle on how to teach their kids about limits and safety on the 'net. Personally, I think it's more of the latter than the former - but of course there's no test required to become a parent other than the physical.

Oh, if someone want's to play the "what if a pedophile targets your kid" card, I'll just say that there are tools to deal with that situation too - pretty much the same list as earlier ;)

Falstaff wouldn't happen to be one of your ancestors would he?

I don't think MS is treating this as the trendy electronics game. I think they're trying to build an enterprise case for changing the whole computer interface model. A quality tablet should be able to replace every laptop within a company (and once people get used to it) be a far more natural tool (the laptop's design constraints decided its form factor). With the ability to run native Windows programs, you also don't have to worry about multiple styles of program licensing (i.e. corporate iPads, etc...), can use enterprise ready solutions, and not worry about separate policies or what happens inside of the firewall (other than the regular nightmares).

While I personally think education for the sake of learning is valuable, the real challenge is getting mainstream HR departments to acknowledge the worth of the system. It's not often that you see an entry level job description list qualifications like this:

1. A 3 years technical experience in a related field, or

2. A B.S. within the field, or

3. A self directed series of (possibly free) online courses which requires us to perform a detailed analysis of your coursework and somehow compute its equivalence to a couple of capital letters from a more traditional education background and then rank you accordingly with every other applicant

It may fly for tech start-ups and direct hires which bypass HR screening, but most resumes still go through HR and if they can't figure out which check box to tic... or worse, if they think you're making up some fly by night claims, the application will never make it to the technical people involved with hiring. Until open learning manages to make a substantial dent on the traditional models for education, it will still be seen as third rate to a few capital letters after ones name. I think that's extremely unfortunate, but I suspect that's the way it will be for a while yet. I applaud the efforts of Future Learn and their partners for one more option. But you're certainly right about needing to maintain quality and an image of quality with the associated courses - and not diluting that for mere "market share".

I dream of the day when anyone from the sub Saharan or Alaskan wilds to the neighborhood barista can complete a standardized set of courses (with automated assignments and exams) and simply claim their degree. To offer master levels with the same thing for graduate courses and a thesis stamped with approval by a certain number of others in the field, and a Ph.D. up for grabs to anyone with the master's coursework and a collection of peer reviewed journal articles.