Just create an ad-hoc guest account with limited rights. That way they can't really screw up things. Once the guest has left the premises, remove the account. You don't even have to log out yourself if someone just needs the access for five minutes, just switch users.

A step further: Build a virtual machine with a e.g. your basic Linux distro or Windows XP, create a snapshot of it in it's "fresh" state, and set it up to talk only directly to the Internet without any access to your local network. You can achieve this with Virtualbox at least. Let your guest access the virtual machine. When the guest leaves, just revert it to the snapshot state.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not paying the $40-$50 they want for some of the current games that are seriously outdated graphics and the PC versions are ports that don't get any love at all.

I agree. I just shelled out $65 for Tides of Numenera on Kickstarter, and I earlier put in $30 for Star Citizen. And they are not even going to be ready for quite some time! I didn't put any money, but I think I'll probably end up buying Hero-U (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1878147873/hero-u-rogue-to-redemption) once it's completed. Also interested in Richard Garriot's new project (Shroud of Avatar), not sure if I'm going to participate in the crowdfunding or not.

"Indie" does not necessarily mean "cheap" (see Tides and Star Citizen), of course they have smaller budgets than the triple-As even though Star Citizen is approaching $10M, but for me the recent ones have been about a certain renaissance. It's kinda has same overtures as Baldur's Gate series did 13 years ago - renewing the entire RPG genre, but on a industry-wide scale instead.

And gotta say, I love it. For last 5-7 years I've basically played just WoW and very few other games, until things started gaining more momentum about a year ago. The new indies, combined with Steam holiday discounts (where you can pay $5-$10 for a bit older games) has basically given me gaming back as a hobby.

Not based in North Korea, but a fake. Basically they have hijacked couple of IP addresses and set up fake BGP advertisement, and probably generated an artificial delay with some Linux box to emulate a satellite link. Most likely the 'bay is now hosted from Cambodia.

In-depth analysis here:https://rdns.im/the-pirate-bay-north-korean-hosting-no-its-fake

Teredo(IPv6 over UDP) is easy to set up - if your Windows is Vista or later, it works automatically. For Linux it depends on the distro. If you happen to be in a non-NATted environment for once, 6to4 works great too.

So just enjoy the IPv6.

If you have devices at home that don't support IPv6, you can set up a NAT64 within your home network.

I'm not working for Yahoo (or in the US for that matter), but work from home 3 to 4 days a week on average (office is 170 km away). I have the telecommuting detailed in my contract. If you are a remote worker for Yahoo and the contract stipulates that your place of work is not at the office, can you really be fired with a just cause?

What are you smoking?

I have a Canon 5D Mk II, with 35 mm CMOS, and I frequently use the camera with e.g. 50 mm lens and set it to f/1.4 to get plenty of bokeh. There's also a bulb setting. I use that every time I attach my camera to a telescope and do a few minutes of exposure. And of course you can set white balance to whatever you like, or what exactly do you mean by "3 color sliders"?

And plenty of places show that digital has long ago surpassed 35 mm film in quality, and also larger formats (with less margin though).

So do you re-read and burn anew your BDs a few times a year, or annually, or some other method? What's your strategy and experience?

I have two sets of discs, one offsite (stashed in a cabinet at my workplace), one local. I do incremental increases on the local, and occasionally (twice a year or so) swap the sets, and when this happens I do a full backup on the new local set. Upon writing, I do and instant verification on whether it's readable. I don't care if discs fail years from now, as long as the data lasts six months.

I've had two occasions of failed optical disc, ever (both DVD-RW's actually): One was where I received a disc that was marked with a permanent marker, so give a few years and it had basically dissolved those portions of the disc. I could still read most of the sectors though.. The other had been left outside it's jewel case on the desk for too long (so it got exposed to UV steadily). My first ever CD-R from 1992 is still reading out just fine.

50 gigabytes for a rewritable BD-RE, and the media is actually durable. Drop your external HDD from the desk, and it's probably toast. Optical discs you can basically throw around and they are still readable. Only problem is that long exposure to UV radiation might do harm, but I'm not going to leave them lying into the sun anyway.

I have all my data on about 5 BD-REs (most of them photos, some videos, and full e-mail archive. Operating system configs and the like are just a drop in a bucket).

If yes, then today. Several times. With video conferencing as well.

If it has to be POTS, then I'd say...15 years ago. At least. Yeah, 1998 sounds about right.

Same here. Not a developer but a bunch of tools that I have to use regularly use Java. Starting with Cisco's fabulous ASDM.

Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.

Offtopic, but I always thought this meme was just something that happened in the movies. Is (American?) plumbing really that bad that when someone else opens a tap or flushes a toilet, you immediately get boiled in a shower? For real?

It's just that I've never encountered this effect anywhere. Sure, sometimes the hot water would be out due to a malfunctioning heater or something, but never had this effect of scalding hot burns right after someone else touches a tap..

There are several comments here stating that the PhD means that hiring managers are scared of those. They are - but only if it's a "pure" PhD. I've got a lots of friends in academia who haven't spent a day in the industry. They are scared witless on what happens if their grant money expires (and are without tenure), since industry is such a different world and hiring managers know that they'd be like fish out of water.

However, you seem to be in a very much similar situation as me. I completed my PhD last year. I happen to also have industry experience, including 9 years of working for an ISP, and a CCIE certificate. From my experience, it's a *very* attractive combination - to an emplyer, it means that you know what's going on in the real world and understand customers, and yet you can also look at the bleeding edge of research and maybe have some insight on how things at the horizon might affect your business in a few years - and maybe capitalize on those opportunities ahead of the curve. I know several people with similar backgrounds - in big companies they are usually located somewhere near CTOs office or similar positions, if not directly in R&D departments, but a few of them (myself included) deal with customers and their networks on a daily basis.

That pause in your resume doesn't really matter *if* you can demonstrate that you haven't been in the ivory tower of universities but can actually deal with real-world problems.

You could run it off PC-DOS disk on a clone machine - and then get an error message about an unimplemented BIOS call. So no, didn't work, part of the code was in ROM.

As someone who has completed all Ultimas from IV to VIII (including Serpent Isle and Ultima Underworlds), that's just nostalgy filter shining.

I don't count "believeable world" to be one where I have to guess keyword, and talk with "Name?", "Job?".

Granted, since U5 the NPCs started to actually have daily routines, but...well, ten years after U7, you had a RPG renaissance that started with Baldur's Gate. Have you tried it (with all the fan-made upgrades for todays computers)?

For more recent stuff, well, Skyrim actually is pretty damn good. I'll grant you that earlier Elder scrolls games (I played even Daggerfall) suffered exactly from that lack of immersion, but Skyrim finally feels good.

Then theres pretty much everything Bioware has made since Baldur days, Dragon Age I + Awakening (Dragon Age II suffers from sequelitis), Mass Effect being the recent entries.

And that doesn't even count all the stuff available from indie developers (Magicka!).

They can call. I don't need to answer. If I see someone from work calling, it's my discretion if I answer. If I'm just goofing off, I might as well answer. If I'm having a moment with family or especially if I'm on vacation, they can call all they want - I'm not responding.

I get paid extra when I'm booked for on-call duty outside of office hours. When that happens, sure, call away.