Yes, any infrastructure service, be it power or roads or IT, is intentionally uninteresting. "Interesting" means noticeable or memorable, and it's pretty much only the problems that people notice and remember.

Indeed. There never was glory in IT, in any case, only the illusion of it back in the 90s when everybody was talking about the internet taking off and suddenly being the guy "who knows about computers" made you awe-worthy.

Now everybody sees IT services like they see the plumbing. They expect it to work and they should. You don't see people stopping a plumber to congratulate him because the sinks drain nicely (and if you think comparing you to a plumber is derogatory, you have a too high opinion of yourself and deserve your toilet to back up while you are still sitting on it).

Loial kills Rand al'Thor. But only after Rand flips out and kills Elayne Avhienda and Min in a rather grisly way.

Fearing reprisals, the Ogier declare war on the White Tower and lose. The entire Ogier race goes extinct.

A pack of wolves mistake Perrin's continued brooding for an illness and give him a mercy killing.

Nynaeve breaks her neck in a freak braid-pulling incident.

Mat wakes up and finds Bobby Ewing in his shower and realizes it was all a dream.

Not saying that Jordan is shitty, but quality is not a prerequisite for post-mortem whoring.

Ever read V.C. Andrews?

More so because some package managers (such as CentOS) tend to replace customized init.d files with the stock ones (renaming the ones you had). This is not really a big deal, but it sometimes breaks some services.

Because we all saw how "Super Size Me" managed to kill McDonalds and every other unhealthy fast food outlet and franchise.

And yet as a user that's what attract me the most to the blackberry platform. I wouldn't mind using an iphone, but where I live they require you to tether yourself to a specific provider. Blackberry, on the other hand, is supported by all of the local carriers in all or most of it's flavors (bis, bes, etc).

As it happens, my current provider (one I'm very happy with) is not the one that supports iphone, so I guess it's not for me.

The attack was uncalled for, but do we know for a fact that they were agent of a foreign goverment?

"Appeared to be Iranian or Lebanese". Unless they showed him their passports, physical appearance will not really tell you where they are from.

Think about the implications. If they are really agents of a foreign goverment, would it be an act of war?

>Seriously, once you notice the resemblance it's impossible to see it as anything else.

I was about to call you out on this, and then I clicked the link. Now, all I'm saying is: "screw you guys, I'm going home"

I'll stick with pfSense, thanks.

I'll second that emotion.

For a while, I whished for a layer 7 filter for pfsense but in the end, using squid + squiguard eliminated almost all unauthorized net access (p2p, im, sending of zombie generated spam).

I still believe the best policy is to have a talk with the users about proper net usage and the consequences of not following guidelines, but there will always be someone who thinks he can get away with it and get everyone (mostly me) in trouble.

They also didn't include Untangle, http://www.untangle.com/ which is available free, and is a direct competitor to the things tested.

Free with an asterisk on it. It seems if your needs go beyond the very basic, you have to pay for the professional version.

According to their website, creating different policies for specific groups of users or time-based is not available in the free version. Nor is wan failover.

I'm not against paying for the product, it seems quite capable and the $250 a year subscription is not unreasonable. But the free version doesn't seem to do much to compare to other offerings.

Dictators can be elected, altho I can't think of any modern example of this happening. A dictator is an abosolute ruler (and considered above the law). Sulla (or Cilla) was elected dictator and so was Caesar (how fair were those elections is a matter of debate).

Today's dictators don't style themselves as such. They usually have a legislative body even if it's full of puppet legislators.

So long as it's pump is primed backwards...

I guess the fall of the Soviet Union left Ryan without a clear cut enemy to go after. Aimlessly, Ryan/Clancy went after the Japanese first, then the Chinese and finally the Islamic terrorists (in that awful Ryan Jr. novel)

Regardless of political ideologies, he did write some pretty cool spy novels. The Cardinal of the Kremlin and The Hunt for Red October were my favorites. It kind of went downhill from there.

Can anyone recommend a good political intrigue novel (espionage is always a plus)?

In the olden days, sometimes it was a loose SATA cable

SATA? Olden days? Come on, it's only been what, like 5 years?

For instance, The Wheel of Time dragged on so long that the author died before he finished it.

On a more positive note, maybe Sanderson will manage to tie everything in the last book. The Mistborn books as a trilogy worked quite well. No loose threads in the end.

I'm hoping Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles does the same.

Another one is GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire, he's not a young man keeps pushing dates back

I'll say... according to Amazon, now it's scheduled for september 29. And it's not even a sequel, but parts he left out in Feast of Crows.