As others have said, quit.
I quit after about 15 years of smoking. I took up running and feel great. I run about 30-40K per week, and have undone most of the damage I caused by smoking. Running shoes and even the technical shorts and shirts are far cheaper than smoking as well :)

Perhaps you should try eating some fruits and vegetables as well.

Lets look at the possible number of passwords (so we're talking about a brute force attempt on the hashed password).

Blizzard's setup is not case sensitive, and they disallow a significant number of special characters. Lets say they have 40 possible values for each. A good password setup should have around 75 (or more).

So lets see how many possible values there are for a 7 character password in each setup:
Blizzard 4.456764032636319e+34
Good: 1.6883055225799413e+64

That's quite a difference. Lets see how many characters it would take in a Blizzard password to get into the same ballpark. Turns out its 37 which gives: 1.9782022283855447e+64

So, I guess a restricted character set is okay, if you go with REALLY long passwords.

(I used the password calculator at http://www.csgnetwork.com/optionspossiblecalc.html with 4 for a minimum length to determine those numbers).

That's all fine and dandy until you realize that Blizzard doesn't differentiate case in passwords. They either covert them all to upper or lower case, not sure which. The forums were alive with this recently. So, all of a sudden brute forcing isn't so tough, especially when they also only allow a reduced set of special characters.

FTA: "In another case, the judges found that movie theatres shouldn't be charged for the music that's part of a soundtrack. The court ruled that a “soundtrack” that accompanies a movie is not the same as the Copyright Board’s definition of a “sound recording” because the soundtrack is meant to be part of the movie and includes preexisting sound recordings. And finally, the court ruled that performance royalties do not need to be collected for music used in downloaded video games." So the industry wanted to charge movie theatres extra because of the music in the movie? Shouldn't that have been deal with long before when the production company (or whoever) got permission to include the song? Same thing for video games. Did they actually expect consumers to buy a game for $x and then later get charged $y for the music in the game?

http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/cooling-without-power.html

I do like living in Saskatchewan... No DST, though there's a significant portion of the population that think we're backwards for not changing our clocks twice a year.

Exactly this.

There are plenty of better certifications out there to judge if a candidate has at least some professional training and experience with IT security.

Can anyone explain a bit about how this drug works? I understand CF is caused be a genetic "error", but is this an exon skipping drug (similar to what they're working on with muscular dystrophy) or is this something different?

I live is SE Saskatchewan. This winter is hardly a fair example (its been very warm here with the exception of the past week). However, even in an average winter, we would rarely see as cold as -25C as a high for more than a few days in a row. So what this says to me, is even though I thought the opposite, the Volt may actually be a reasonable car here. Even if its not the most efficient choice during the extreme cold, we're talking maybe less than a week on average in any give year that it drops below those temperatures. That means, that >98% of the time, this is the most efficient choice of vehicle in these climates.

I've looked at them a bit, and from what I can tell... its more or less a link that does the same thing a torrent file does. It contains the infohash (unique identifier), file name, size of the file, trackers, etc

syslog the application or syslog the protocol? syslog the application? Yes, its past due, and things like rsyslog are much better.

syslog the protocol is fine.

The problem with this proposed replacement is that it does not fix anything. The only advantage it gives is to be able to tell if the logs were altered. That's it. You're far better off with a secondary/centralized logging system. Store your logs in text, compressed, encrypted, in a database, it doesn't matter. Just get them to a different location and then not only can you tell that the originals were altered, you can tell what was removed. All while using existing tools.

Here's the fear I have with "self-taught" people. How much do you really know?

Making a website work or look good, or both, is not enough. How well is it coded? Do you know best practices, not only for performance, but for security? My employer hired a relatively well respected company to build a web based application that would house medical data. It was my job to put a server in place for them (RHEL) and more or less make sure that their code would run on it.

Well, they used PHP, and since I know PHP quite well, I thought I'd check how they did a few things. I was horrified when I reviewed some code and saw basically:

$sql = "INSERT INTO table_name (col1,col2,col3) VALUES(" . $_POST['blah'].....

Now, formal education does not mean you're going to learn these types of things, but what it does tell me is that you can learn in a formal environment, and if need be, I can put you in training and expect you to absorb the material in a meaningful way.

There is no real problem this solves. You are far better off logging remotely. This does not stop an attacker from hiding his tracks, you'll just know the logs were altered, but you won't know what was removed, or likely if/when you can start trusting them again. Log remotely, use encryption, and use TCP. You're central/remote logger is your trusted source for logs. You close everything except incoming logs. Parse and alert on the logs from there. Its simple to do, its real time, and solves a lot more issues than this type of solution ever will.

Regardless of what I'm doing, I've never seen my machine use more than about 4.5GB of RAM. I have 6GB installed. Why would I install more?