MIS != CS

they eat each other.

If I give $10 they will spend that same money trying to solicit me for more. It's impossible to get them to stop. They can't spend my time.

Funny you should mention billboards. I was visiting friends in SoCal a few months ago and as we were driving to LA from OC traffic suddenly got really thick, from a steady 70mph to around 40. I looked all over for accidents and on-ramps and anything else that might give a reason for the slowdown. Baffled, I asked my friend, "WTF??!" His answer: "It's the digital billboards, everyone slows down to read them. Just watch, the traffic will clear as soon as we get past them."

I went to Linux World in San Jose in 1999. All the distros were there giving away their CDs for free. Some BSD flavor had a booth (which doesn't make a lot of sense at Linux World to begin with) and they wanted $50 for their CDs. That was enough for me.

Because of this reminder-story I managed to downgrade my account to 1-dvd-only before the super-fantastic-screw-the-customer plan got billed to my account. Made the cutoff by 3 days. Have to agree, the streaming selection is pitiful at best. None of the past 10 things I've searched for were streamable and some are 10-year-old TV shows. Really? Can't stream Freaks And Geeks? Bah.

My biggest problem with PP presentations at my company is that the vast majority of people put all of the relevant information directly in the PP and then read it word for word at the audience. If they're going to do that they should just write it up as a document and publish/email it instead. If they're just going to read the screen to you (while you're allegedly reading along with them) and not add any information that's not already displayed then people completely lose interest quite fast and when someone does finally wise up to this fault and tries to change the status-quo nobody will be listening anyway.

On the other hand it has enhanced my skills at reading the slide quickly so I can do other work while they read it slowly aloud. Hopefully this will make me better at Jeopardy! if I can manage to get on the show.

In addition to Fail2ban I also make liberal use of iptables to permanent block large swaths of IP-space covering countries that I know I will never be doing business with nor plan to visit in this lifetime. For me these are mostly in eastern Europe, the middle east, and Asia. There are many web pages that provide IP lists of common offending countries.

On top of that I have an iptables rule that logs every non-http (ports 80 and 443, since those are already well logged by apache) connection attempt to the host so I can tally up the big offenders every week or two and add them to my every-growing block list. I always keep a terminal in a screen session that runs a script which tails and formats a number of my system logs including this one (with pretty colors too!) so I can see what kind of activity is going on. I usually keep it running off to the side, half-hidden and when a brute-force attack comes in it catches my eye so I can squash the fucker immediately.

I'm a hacker that needs games and porn, you insensitive clod!

I'd say the problem lies more in the insurance companies than anyone else. They don't want to pay a claim unless you can prove that you're suffering from some condition. Pro-active health care just isn't in their lexicon.

Years ago I had a keyboard that had a trackball mouse built into it just below the space bar. It was fantastic because I could put it on my lap and do all the modern computing I needed. In this day and age of mediacenter PCs and the like I'm shocked that there aren't more keyboard/mouse combos out there. Trying to work an optical mouse on the arm of the sofa just isn't natural. Would it really be so hard to tack a trackpad onto a wireless keyboard?

nc: connect to otherhost port 1999 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

You opened the port on host and then told otherhost to connect back to itself. Douche.

I would absolutely LOVE to become a cop. The problem is that completely disagree with far too many of the laws I would be sworn to uphold. If I could pick and choose which ones I needed to worry about I'd be first in line at the academy.