And why do these receptionists still have jobs after repeatedly and willfully violating the security policy?

I'm not joking. Once, twice, three times is grounds for education and maybe a written reprimand, but if they even get close to double digits, either they should be looking for a new job, or you aren't serious about security and should stop pretending.

"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, nothing more, nothing less."

I have to think that this is because so many people insist on using dark text on a light background, which means that you effectively end up staring into a lightbulb all day long -- of course you miss things!

I see people talking about studies which show that dark-on-light is easier on the eyes, but every one I've actually seen data for was for _non_-backlit surfaces.

(Other possibilities include the fact that the spacing between lines -- leading -- needs to be proportional to the length of the lines, which it's not on any computer I've ever seen).

Um... yes?

Many things have been used for thousands of years. Many of those things have no positive effect. Many of *those* things are actively harmful.

You sound like a woman my wife had an argument with a decade or so ago, who insisted it was perfectly safe to give her children belladonna (and, yes, I *do* mean 'deadly nightshade') "because it's natural".

'Usability'? As far as I can tell, Ubuntu doesn't give a damn about usability, or they wouldn't have broken wireless on *both* the last two releases (10.04, anyone using a rt2870 based card on a WPA2 network was out of luck, 9.10, anyone using a WPA2 network period (or was that WPA at all? I can't remember) was out of luck, because the version of NetworkManager forcibly installed (never mind that the copy of wicd I had installed worked fine, Ubuntu knew what I needed better than I did, so it helpfully uninstalled it) couldn't handle it).

I've run Debian *unstable* on my server for the last decade or so, and I've never had this kind of problem.

You're absolutely right; that's why people attempting to make perpetual motion machines are respected members of the scientific community.

Oh, wait....

Really....

Seems to me that as soon as the next copy of Madden 09 is sold, EA has committed fraud, then.

It's doing no such thing. People may be using it as an excuse to build an empire or do stupid things, but that's not the fault of SOX. I worked for a *VERY* large financial company (the overall IT budget, across all branches, businesses, etc, was measured in the *billions* of dollars), and not once were we stopped from doing anything because of SOX. Not once was it even an issue, either.

Put the blame where it belongs, on stupid people. Then fire them.

Opposing DRM is most definitely a moral position, on any number of grounds, starting with the ones you don't want to acknowledge down to the less obvious ones, such as opposing anything that makes life more difficult without providing any benefit or opposing the conflation of 'buy' with 'rent', as you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.

Feel free to pretend you aren't doing anything wrong when you say there's nothing wrong with DRM. Just be aware that that's exactly what you're doing -- pretending.

No, that's the maximum you can get over the period you paid for -- one month. You don't pay for your service in 15-minute chunks.

Except that you *cannot* get X. The best you could possibly get is 100% for 15 minutes plus 50% for fifteen minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.

Unless I've screwed up the math (entirely possible, it's late and I just spent an hour stuck in traffic), the maximum you can possibly get is (100+50)/2, or 75%.

No, actually, that's not the case. The phone companies are theoretically in competition. I have exactly one choice, AT&T. At my previous address, I had exactly one choice, Verizon.

And if there was *ANYWHERE* that Verizon could compete with AT&T, it's here. I can stand in my daughter's bedroom, look out the window, and *see* Keller -- where Verizon rolled out the very first pilot of FIOS.

But you will not find them competing *anywhere*.

Well, based on what I saw in Guild Wars, they're doing just this -- to ensure they rarely give you anything you can use. The chance of getting a good item for your class seemed to be a third or less of what it would have been if the loot was actually random.

I wanted to tell NetworkManager to do something specific (IIRC, use a specific DNS server rather than the one handed out by the DHCP server on my DSL gateway, but it's been a year or so) and couldn't. When I opened a ticket about it, it was closed WONTFIX with the notation that the idea behind it was zero-configuration and adding the ability to configure it to do this was therefore unacceptable.

I want gnome-terminal not to eat my right-clicks. People have been asking for that for *years* and are constantly told that the Gnome developers know better than they do about what they need.