If you need a service to be publicly accessible then you will need to configure the firewall accordingly, in which case it typically provides no protection if the service is exploitable.

If the service doesn't need to be publicly accessible then either turn it off or bind it to the loopback interface. Why add extra software to protect against a vulnerability that you could have avoided creating in the first place? Note that operating systems that take security seriously do not install public-facing network services unless you ask them to.

Firewalls certainly have their uses, but they aren't a necessity on non-Windows machines in the way that they are for Windows.

Yes, but I presume you are talking about Windows machines which run an SMB/CIFS server out of the box. Most GNU/Linux distributions rightly don't do that. Typically if you want to run Samba, or an FTP server, or an HTTP server on the default port then you need to be root to do that. Once you are root then you can also poke a hole in the firewall.

Granted you can run servers on high-numbered ports, but within a LAN all that does is allow two machines that had already been compromised to communicate with each other. For communication with the outside world I prefer to detect and/or block that at the boundary router (otherwise all it takes is a local root exploit to disable the firewall).

The same applies to outbound connections, although in a world where so many programs need network access that is arguably a lost cause for general-purpose workstations. In any event, a firewall isn't the right tool for controlling the capabilities of individual programs: you really need something like SELinux or AppArmor to do that effectively.

For machines which are not routers the comment is just as valid now as it was then. If you use a GNU/Linux distribution that takes security seriously then it will not install any externally-visible network services by default. The attack surface in that condition is small enough that installing a firewall won't help much, and might even make matters worse. If you deliberately install any public-facing network services then you need to add matching firewall rules, so again no benefit.

A firewall does help if you install a private network service and forget to bind it to the loopback interface (unless you have one of those systems which automatically install a firewall rule alongside the network service, which totally defeats the purpose of having a firewall). In any event, this only protects against internal incompetence rather than external malice, so is not a necessary part of running a secure system.

Firewalls are useful on routers, and on servers where you want very specific control of what can be accessed from where (such as a DBMS that is only accessible from a single client machine), but for typical Linux-based hosts they add little.

Already been done as it happens: Family Guy had a clip from an 'edited' version of Cosmos in which the Earth was explained to be 'hundreds and hundreds of years old'.

When they become adults, regular people often move on to zealous advocacy of their preferred political system, nationality, or religious denomination. This often descends into violence, sometimes over seemingly trivial differences between the two parties. Personally I find that very off-putting: give me Debian vs. Ubuntu any day.

This isn't a zero sum exercise: by flattening the peak you are lowering the underlying cost of generating the electricity -- because you can use more efficient methods -- which in a competetive market should reduce the average price.

(Obviously in an uncompetetive market all bets are off.)

That's a matter of perspective: followers of the Roman Imperial cult would have considered them to be gods, followers of most other religions obviously wouldn't. Since their elevation to godhood would have been formalised by the senate, and since we have firm evidence that both individuals existed, you could argue that as deities go their claims are stronger than most.

(Granted I'm not sure which came first, month naming or apotheosis - quite possibly the former.)

My problem is that once you cross the line from a policy of keeping religion out of the calendar system to one of keeping Christianity out, you are entering questionable territory that I for one would be reluctant to endorse in any way. Even if you frame it as polytheism in, monotheism out, I think that destroys any case that CE/BCE should be adopted on the grounds of avoiding religious bias.

Besides, if it is acceptable to retcon the epoch to avoid disruption, surely it would be logical to retcon AD to mean something else so that you don't need to change anything?

Not my god either, but I see two objections to trying to replace AD with CE:

Firstly, it doesn't achieve your stated aim of avoiding reference to Christianity, because it continues to use what was (probably incorrectly) thought to be the year of Christ's birth as its epoch. Any pretence that the one is not derived from the other is frankly ridiculous.

Secondly, I can't comment about yourself, but most CE proponents are quite happy to use a calendar system that is replete with reference to other deities such as Thursday after Thor, January after Janus and so on. Both July and August are named after gods who we know from our history books were not exactly role models for ethical behaviour. In this context it is hard to believe that aversion to the term AD is driven by a purely secular motivation.

They do indeed, but that is not necessarily a good thing because the effects are short-term whereas CO2 accumulates over the long term. This pushes back the day of reckoning, which would be all well and good if we used that respite to do something about emissions, but the reality is that obscuring the short term effects makes it more difficult to convince people that there really is a long-term problem. When we eventually reach the point where the effects are obvious and we are forced to cut back, the consequences are likely to be significantly worse than they would have been otherwise.

1% sounds far too low, because when you average that across all households you have 1% of 4kWh which is only 40Wh. That would be respectable enough if renewables were only supplying 1% of the power, but at 40%+ it isn't very much. (To put this in perspective, the battery in an iPad 3 holds 42.5W.)

On a more positive note, they have at least identified that storage is a problem that needs to be solved if renewable capacity is to expand much more than it has done already in Germany, and are prepared to spend real money to do something about it. I am sceptical as to what can realistically be achieved, but it would be great if they were able to drive down the cost of energy storage even by a modest amount because that would expand the range of circumstances where renewables are viable. If they fail then at least we know what doesn't work, which will help to settle the question of whether or not other sources such as nuclear power are needed. (I'm not greatly bothered what the answer is, we just need to know for sure one way or the other.)

Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.

For information, the Ratner Effect is named after Gerald Ratner, the former CEO of a British jewellery company, and has nothing to do with Brett Ratner.

(Apologies if you knew this and there is some subtle humour that I'm missing.)

Dropping in terms of relative market share, yes, but still very healthy in terms of absolute sales and profitability. That was a long-term problem for Symbian, but not necessarily for Nokia because they were already starting to phase in its replacement (Maemo/Meego).

What Elop succeeded in doing was to turn a long-term problem into a short-term crisis. Specifically, rather than allowing Symbian to continue its slow, market-driven decline he forced it into a nosedive, while at the same time switching its dedicated successor from a product that was ready to ship to one that would not be ready for some time.

It is true that Nokia's development of Maemo/Meego had been proceeding far to slowly and inefficiently, and that at least cannot be blamed on Elop, but it is hard to imagine how Nokia could have done worse by sticking with Symbian and Meego compared to the spectacular decline that resulted from adopting Windows Phone.