Their mail tech support is hilarious, I had a similar but different problem, mail from eircom customers never reached my domain. This was due to an extinct domain with my domain name having been hosted on Indigo back in the day.

I rang them to get them to remove their MX record for the domain, their responses were hilarious:

• "Which mail client are you using?" "pine(just for kicks :)"
• "What is the account number of your hosting account?"
• ...

After 3 days of this shit I eventually began each call with "Do you know what an MX record is?" Eventually I got a guy who sounded insulted by the question, half an hour later it was working, but their tech-support guys are beyond ignorant.

I think you missed the point somewhat, all GUI configs suck to a greater or lesser extent, anyone administering a server should know their job and as a result be able to issue the commands required to analyse and resolve problems without the ladybird book picture version of the interface.

A GUI interface is always slower, unless you have a hideous shell with no tab completion and limited editing of your command history and an inability to copy/paste, but that's due to neglect of the shell rather than an intrinsic failing of the paradigm. mind you I've heard nice things about powershell from MSFT using friends, apparently it competes with Unix/OSX shells.

You have hit on the essential point, western agriculture uses 10 calories of fuel energy for each calorie of food energy we produce. Folks we're eating dinosaurs
I also garden and friends have remarked that they never new that lettuce was supposed to taste of anything. My niece and nephews eat carrots and tomatoes from the garden as though they were sweets, the varieties I grow are not viable for the supermarket economy.

We actually produce more food than the world population needs, farming in developing countries is damaged by dumping of western agriculture surpluses in their economies.

I could rant on this one all day but suffice it to say that this study was.... flawed

An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field.

"How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all Scottish sheep are black!"

To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!"

The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

You owe me a new keyboard, or at least first option on the manuscript ;)

Hi pdboddy Try using middle button to open link in new tab ;)

Which has been completely ignored by civilised society and at no cost as Europeans continue to trade according to European law with Cuba, Iran and other countries.

The ability for law enforcement to monitor calls is standard in all telecoms infrastructures. That the legal system in Iran is even dodgier than that in the US is irrelevant, I don't see them suffering a huge PR disaster because two ignorant half-wits decide to mouth off in the hope of garnering some apple-pie flavoured publicity

You are either a troll a fool or an MS marketing droid. While Linux adoption on the desktop may still be limited, in the server room Linux and Solaris are more common than Windows server for many reasons, not least the registry concept. Apache is more secure, no argument available to contradict this. I'm sure others have stated this elsewhere in this thread, but i's one in the morning and I'm back from the pub, yet your drivel is more likely to cause me to puke than the ten pints of Guinness I've enjoyed this evening (Go on Leinster)

One of the downsides of election cycles is that they really only care about what happens in the next 3->5 years (adjust for your local conditions). As a result we see rampant "short-termism". No politician is going to go out of their way to sponsor legislation that isn't going to generate good press by the next election

Who did you think wrote vi. Though in all fairness they don't compare, vi is just an editor

A friend, who subsequently became a Debian maintainer, arrived over to me with probably the same 2 disk distribution I had a kernel, a shell, a compiler and vi. After that it was roll your own. At the time I was an occasional building laborer, a whole new world became available to me, though I had no net access at the time, so we wrote our own tools and games. Since then I've worked as an Apache admin, a mod_perl programmer and currently maintain enterprise Tomcat and C apps on Solaris and RHEL. That first distro gave me the freedom to experiment without the resources of a college or company to pay for the tools. My girlfriend of the time became an ace C++ coder (she remains an intimidatingly smart friend), in fact by introducing us to Linux Al changed all our lives, cheers amck;)

Or as the Jesuits used to say, "Give me the child to 7 and I will give you the man".

Religious institutions have refined their indoctrination techniques over centuries and consequently could be viewed by those of us who view religion as offering a misguided view of the universe we live in as dangerous.

After that the degree of danger offered depends on how absolute their beliefs are, snake handlers being one extreme and Unitarians the other within the Christian churches

Free speech, fair trial, freedom of assembly are fairly nebulous rights mainly exercised by a few radical wingnuts in the view of the "plain people", however the right to sell goods and services "off books" is something the the "plain people" cherish and hold dear.

Not to mention Drugs hookers and blackjack (or whatever that damn meme is :)

check out gimpshop.