Well, be careful and you can score some good deals with Ryanair. Sometimes they really offer flights "all fees included" for only a few bucks.

I flew from Germany to Dublin for only 10 EUR total some while ago, and from Germany to Poland for 5 EUR.

What a BS comment. Many of the legitimate users won't be able to use regular spots because they need to increased width of the handicapped spots. Ever seen a wheelchair user get out of his car?

But these reckless abusers of handicapped parking spots are never short on explanations and justifications for their sad behavior.

This sounds like nonsense. There are VPN providers on non-standard ports. If you have your own server and a spare IP, you can even use some netfilter rewrite magic to allow connection on ANY port of that IP which is helpful in a lot of situations.

I'm a happy customer of overplay.net. For US$ 9.95 you get access to VPN servers in 48 countries, with multiple servers in many cases.

I can't say how secure my data is with them but it works reasonably well with OpenVPN and mostly fast as well.

HTML is there for DISPLAYING WEB PAGES, it's not meant for PROGRAMMING A GUI

You should probably take a step out of the cave you spent the last ten years in and have a look around at reality.

HTML5+JavaScript+etc. are absolutely great for programming a GUI. You might be confusing the GUI with the backend behind.

In my opinion neither the title nor the article are overly sensational as claimed by you. While it is technically true that the device vendor does the lock out, this is nothing more than a smoke grenade tampering with the truth.

The fact is that Microsoft will require the manufacturers to support this technology if they want to sell devices on which windows will run. Even more the fact is, that this means that they will have to include keys by Microsoft which will prevent the device from running unsigned code like Linux.

And while it is still a rumor it can probably be taken as a fact that disabling this feature (if made possible by the manufacturers) will likely cause Windows to not start because this is what malicious software would do as well and allowing this would circumvent the security improvement.

So cut the crap. Yes, it will be the device manufacturers who will effectively bring this restriction into life. But it will be Microsoft who forces them to do so.

Same goes for me. Still reading but not much commenting. But whenever I see some discussion where posting with a low UID would be fun, I (have to) do it :-)

Seeing Rob leaving really brings nostalgic feelings. I can't say when I exactly started reading slashdot (of course before the UIDs were introduced) but it's a very long time and when I think what all happened in my life in this time and how the internet has changes so drastically... Only slashdot was kind of constant through these years.

I always find it funny when people with six (or even seven) digit UID's make claims about how slashdot used to be.

Also this is only a momentary statistic. The article says that many power plants are down for maintenance currently and will add their capacity in the near future again.

The article also says that Germany currently imports electricity but it is told that this is only due to pricing.

No. According to the article: The total capacity of all plants is 160,200 MW. The "assured" capacity (which deducts plants down for maintenance etc. and also two nuclear plants which are down for years) is 93,100 MW. Without the "security margin" the capacity is 86,100 MW. The actual use is 40,000 to - absolute worst case - 80,000 MW. The capacity without the old nuclear plants is 79,800 MW.

The airport doesnâ(TM)t have separate boarding arrangements for private-jet users, Uno said.

You can train nearly everything, but training does not make you good.

Errr... yes it does. Or were you always a good driver / writer / programmer? Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!

All the training will not help if basic ability is lacking. If you can't sing a bit, it's very unlikely you will get good even if you practice all your life.

And if you lack ability in analyzing, you will have a hard time in CS or IT. Some people just don't get it, that is simply a fact.

I honestly believe that much of what I said applies to CS as well, only with different topics and terms.

No, it's not absolutely necessary to have those years of experience before attempting CS/IT. It helps however.

But it is absolutely necessary to be capable of learning new stuff in a very short time period AND be able to do something good with that knowledge. As others pointed out IT more than many professions requires life-long learning.

If you are not willing or able to absorb new technology in next to no time, you will never be a good or competent IT person. Thats the simple truth and therefore it is good when such people are sorted out at university entry level already so that they can choose are more appropriate profession for them instead of some how making it through and then suck at work life.

I can speak only for Germany but during my studies I noticed quite a number of students which had no background (beside having played computer games all day in earlier days), had absolutely no talent (everyone can learn how to program, but most people won't become good at it), no clue and struggled a lot. Yet most of them made it through the finals, have now a B.Sc. and compete with people who really know the shit on the job market, negatively influencing hourly rates and reputation of IT. In my professional life so far I had to work with many many idiots who nethertheless had a degree.

So I believe I disagree with this professor. Yes, not everyone might be willing to achieve the results in that time frame. But I honestly believe that most people who don't deserve to be there in the first place. Either you have what it takes or you don't. As said: You can train nearly everything, but training does not make you good. Programming is very often a task which included creativity (figuring out how to solve a problem in the best way) and if you don't have that ability, you will produce bad results. It's as simple as that.

Don't make IT/CS easier. Make it harder, please.