Server Core is not GUI-less. It still actually *is* a GUI -- just a crippled one. It still requires graphics mode, and a few things even pop up the same GUIs you get on the regular install. (REGEDIT comes to mind.)

Since it's still running in graphics mode, that means no serial console, which means you need significantly more expensive gear for remote console. One shouldn't need the console often, of course, but on the occasions you do need it, you *really* need it. (And no, "serial console" doesn't mean cabling up an old VT-102 to the server. You use external gear to make it available via SSH.)

Moving beyond the question of "GUI or not", Server Core has usability issues. Microsoft's included tools for Server Core administration are quite kludgy, and often incomplete. Try changing the screen resolution, for example. (If you're going to force me to run in graphics mode, I'd like the screen to support a window bigger than 80x25.)

Most of all, too many things don't work without the full GUI install. That includes most of Microsoft's own server products. It's kind of ridiculous for Microsoft to expect others to support Server Core when they can't even do it themselves.

So while Server Core is a step in the right direction, and 2008R2 is improved, there is still a long way to go. This news sounds like further steps in the right direction, which is a Good Thing.

Correction: The weakest area was not the cabin. The weakest area was the people sitting in the cabin. When those people impacted on the much stronger cabin walls, the injuries were often quite severe.

Saying "Let's stop invading random countries and trying to run the world" is not isolationism. It's being a good neighbor. You ever live next to someone who's poking their nose into your business all the time, criticizing everything you do, threatening to call the police because you didn't shovel the snow properly, etc.? Everyone hates those people. Yet somehow, some people seem to think it's good foreign policy.

One of the things I like about Ron Paul (and believe me, there's plenty I don't like) is that he believes we need to get our nose out of other people's business.

Pulling out of the UN seems like a bit much to me, especially since almost all the UN ever does is talk and pass powerless resolutions. Like I said, I don't agree with all of RP's ideas.

Yah, see, that's one of the things RP is against.

Military operations are a horrible way to boost an economy. They siphon a lot of resources away from building useful long-term infrastructure, and the end up sending a lot of resources overseas to where the battle is. Those resources don't come back. It's like a trade deficit, except with more dead people.

It can be argued that we would have been better off letting unhealthy, poorly-run companies which screwed over the entire country die off, yes. Especially since it was largely government meddling which set-up the economic collapse in the first place. The more we prop it up, the harder it will fall.

Printing more money without regard to resources is classic inflation. It devalues the currency. Everyone who does it hurts themselves. Everyone who has done it a lot has ruined their economy. See Hyperinflation for plenty of case studies.

If we don't stop deficit spending, our economy is going to collapse completely, and those shutdowns will look like a bank holiday in comparison.

You cannot keep spending resources you don't have. This is more than just a law of economics, it's a law of thermodynamics. It is probably the single most fundamental concept in the known universe.

Despite the "global" moniker that's been lately added, when first created, the three-letter top-level domains were US-centric by virtue of the fact that the system we now call "the Internet" was a US-centric project. Same reason .mil is US military. Jokes about Al Gore aside, the US created the Internet, and thus there's a US-centric focus in some places -- such as the original top-level domains. If you dislike this, you're welcome to create your own global network project. Good luck with that.

Looks like you get the gold star. Good call. :)

It could also be that some con-artist somewhere is sending out phishing emails, designed to look like Times cancellation notices, and sent to large numbers of harvested email addresses. Since the set of NYT subscribers with an email address is a proper subset of the set of people with an email address, a lot of NYT subscribers would still be hit.

But "New York Times Hacked" makes for a better headline.

Very informative and useful review. Thanks. One addition/question:

Are they really identical? I know when it comes to TVs and disc players embedding network media features, there is quite a bit of variation. Certainly I've discovered that Sony's streaming implementation is subpar on their TVs and disc players. Their Hulu client, in particular, is obnoxiously bad. Each program segment and advertisement is streamed separately, so there's a major pause for buffering at the end of each. You can't fast-forward or rewind across segments. And it doesn't remember where you left off for resuming later. The UI may be polished, but ultimately it's a polished turd.

Every Original Classification decision includes the date at which the information is to be automatically declassified. Every classified document is supposed to be marked with a reference to the document which made the Original Classification decision, and the date at which it becomes declassified. All classified documents are supposed to be physically inventoried twice a year, and that inventory reported upstream. So for classified documents, the situation you describe would be less likely. Not impossible -- people don't always follow the rules, to be sure -- but less likely.

Most people who haven't worked with this stuff don't understand that classification is as much about accountability as it is about confidentiality. There's a huge paper trail associated with classification.

But not everything secret (lower-case "s") is necessarily classified. There could well be stuff that's locked up and long-forgotten precisely *because* it hasn't been formally classified, and thus isn't subject to all the above.

Scientific Inquiry into Santa Claus

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am
pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of
living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only
Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since
Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million
according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of
3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's
at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west
(which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is
to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat
whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8
million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we
know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2
million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made
vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds),
the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison
- - - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short,
they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
dead now.

I don't know if it's something most politicians do consciously, but it's certainly something they benefit from.

Coke and Pepsi aren't in competition with each other. They're in competition with anyone not Coke or Pepsi. As long as the conversation is defined in terms of "Which shall I have, Coke or Pepsi?", they both win, and they like that. The danger (from their POV) is that the question might become, "What shall I drink?"

The original was the one with printing on both sides.

(I'll get my coat.)

So don't let the players and coaches dispute anything. Place the technology under the control of the officials.

Soccer/football is not a non-stop sport. Play stops all the time -- for injuries, throw-ins, corner kicks, etc. It's just the clock doesn't stop. This "play never stops" thing is the biggest dellusion in soccer, and I think it hurts sometimes, such as FIFA's inability to admit it's not 1932 anymore.

Can, but often doesn't. At least, not in the Cup matches I've seen.

That still doesn't explain why technology must be forbidden. I'm not talking about changing game mechanics. Just allowing for things like goal detection or honoring of replay evidence. With modern technology you can replay something in a matter of seconds. If this was under the control of an off-field official they could signal the referee if they saw something. You don't off to stop play unless there's an infraction. Similar to how the linesmen work. Add in two-way hands-free radios to make communication easier.

I'm not talking about US football here.

Yah, the first book was definitely the clear best there. Great concept, but it only got you so far.

Larry Niven is a Favorite Author(TM) of mine. I like his shorter fiction best. Niven's an idea guy, when he works in full-length novels sometimes things drag a bit. He's got several short-story collections. N-Space is good for that.

My employer makes parts for the F-22. (This isn't *that* special. Like most big government programs, the F-22 is carefully designed to spread the work across as many different Congressional funding districts as possible. But I digress.) When the program was cut, the people in that division started to really worry. A year later, it turns out we're actually getting almost as much business as originally planned. Since they didn't buy as many planes, they're having to fly the planes they do have more, which means they're burning through spare parts faster.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

One of the problems is that nobody seems to understand the difference between NRE (non-recurring expenses) and RE (recurring expenses). A lot of the budget disasters we see in government are because the NRE is significant. Designing and testing the F-22 was hugely fscking expensive. There's a ton of new technology on the plane. You pay for that if you build one plane or one hundred planes. Every time Congress cut the planned order count to "save money", all they ended up doing was making each plane cost more. And they were surprised each time.

Morons.