A mechanical lock that wears out the tumblers due to age or use is acceptable: you use it, it wears, you replace it after x years.

A lock that randomly decides not to work because of unexpected component failure (read: shoddy quality) is unacceptable. What is also unacceptable is the ludicrous price of electronic lock/key replacement, and the reluctance of manufacturers to provide at least one (preferably) two spare keys with the new car, and their apparent inability to provide replacement keys (on their own) at all.

Cars need to have a mechanical-only standby door lock/key, if only to let you into the shelter of the interior in emergencies, whether or not you can then start the engine. If manufacturers move to keyless operation, it will probably take many deaths before they provide a mechanical fallback.

Looks scarily like the passenger facilities in the spaceliner in WALL-E to me...

Canonical is doing what Nokia did, and will pay the same penalty.

I wrote some years ago about how Nokia was missing the point, having developed a pocket computer before knowing what they had done. Their blinkers said "phone" on them, so they never saw the giant road sign that said "computer". As one veteran of a firm then free-falling out of the Fortune 500 put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."

Now Canonical have developed another Maemo/Meego: a life-size OS that runs on a pocket device. And Mark Shuttleworth seems to have inherited Nokia's set of blinkers that say "phone", and Lo! and behold! he too cannot see the sign that says "computer". As I said in that article, 'the current pox of "partnerships" is a particularly Good Clue, because it means management is spending more time schmoozing on the golf course than down on the shop floor making or selling.'

I truly hope this doesn't apply (mutatis mutandis) to Mark Shuttleworth, but if you have invested your money, time, or life in Canonical, you need to consider if your forecast of the future concides with theirs.

One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.

Twilight certainly. In 1983 I was working for United Information Services, a data-processing bureau service in London, subsidiary of United Telecom of Kansas. We did have a few machines that still ran punched cards, but my dev work was interactive database front-ends for engineering and finance applications, coded in Fortran on an A-J VDU attached to a DEC-10. We also had private network access to a couple of Crays and some IBMs in Kansas, and a basement full of DEC-10s somewhere in PA. We would occasionally get customers come in with a deck of cards, but the last time I had had to deal with them (the cards) in anger was when I dropped a box of them in college years earlier. However, I can well see that government computing would then have been a considerable way behind the curve.

It is still missing LDAP support for list *owners*. AFAICS if you use LDAP for authentication, that means all list *members* must validate through LDAP, which is exactly the wrong way round. What I need is to enforce list *owners* to be members of my university (ie they appear in AD and can only login with their campus credentials), whereas list *members* (subscribers) can be from anywhere. Or have I missed something?

BS. 50k isn't even peanuts.

I don't know what the fuck your teachers do during the "vacations" but in my country they do stuff like accompanying educational visits with their pupils, marking exams, preparing the next year's syllabus, getting up to date on their subject, doing all the paperwork they didn't have time to do in term-time, and — if they can afford it — actually having a vacation of their own.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.