If you don't want to use B.C. because it stands for "Before Christ", and as an atheist that offends you, fine, you have the right to make whatever calendar you want. But be more original that simply removing the periods and adding the letter E, and calling your result "Before the Common Era". You are still saying the Common Era starts with the birth of Jesus, and your calendar starts with (or near) that event. You are agreeing to tie yourself to the church, while acting like you won't stand for it.

Except our best thought at the moment is that Jesus Christ was born in ~4 BC due to a cockup by Dionysius in 525 AD when he invented the whole BC/AD thing - the accepted range is 2 BC to 7 BC.

'Common Era' uses the same dates as the Gregorian Calendar because it was already in common use as a standard. We have two whole months added by the Romans, the whole calendar has been messed with something chronic repeatedly, and the days of the week are largely named after pagan Gods, yet that doesn't stop the Christians using them, nor does the fact that Jesus was already a small boy when Christ was 'born'. Our calendar is absolutely a mongrel of many different cultures and civilizations, and the Christians don't get to claim it as solely their own.

Some people just don't like putting 'in the year of our Lord, Jesus Christ' at the end of the date, given they may well not be Christians and Christ isn't actually their Lord. Thus Common Era - usage of which incidentally dates back to 1615 at least. Complaining about that seems about as worthwhile as complaining that people dare to use the Gregorian calendar without also personally celebrating Easter, given that's what the whole purpose of the many christian revisions of that calendar was for in the first place.

I am a Node webapp dev as a sideline with experience in a few languages over the years, and maybe it's because I'm not an 'ace' developer, but I don't think it's that incredibly revolutionary.

The main advantage of node - and mongodb - is that they're asynchronous through and through with a universal callback/event driven loop available. Which is obviously nice to work with if you're comfy with javascript already (mongodb uses javascript-style as its native syntax) and with the first class support of socket.io ala websockets means that you can largely treat the front-end browser land and server side as one large async program with a usual UI/backend split. Plus there's generally a npm module library to do whatever, though it's often wise to avoid ones that aren't maintained given the pace of change.

To be honest, I don't think there's anything really that couldn't be done with say, python twisted, or even rails. I think the universal async (and almost entirely non-blocking unless you cock it up) model is nice to work with once you grok using event handlers and/or a flow control lib like async to avoid nested callback hell, and it's obviously a good fit for web apps. But it's like any other language/toolset - pick your tools according to your needs.

Personally I've switched from mongo to couchdb as I find it easier and faster to work with, and mostly actually write code in coffeescript to get rid of the bracket cruft, but can switch back and forth to javascript as needed. It is FAR nicer to work with than PHP by any standard, but then I'm a linux/windows/esx sysadmin with an Apple-fan boss for my day job, so what do I know.

Or, you know, host his git repo inside his firewall so it's only accessible to company developers on-site or with vpn access unless the NSA are particularly interested, in which case he needs... some hosting software. Presumably his code is not currently under an open source licence as its in a private repo; for all we know, he's developing code for someone else.

The NSA general dragnet supposedly has a lot more tech companies in it than have currently been revealed. We also know the NSA wants to know about software holes early that it could exploit, presumably for spying purposes. There's also a lot of data leakage between the NSA and private contractors - what's the odds that the NSA has accidentially (or on purpose) given commercially sensitive information about software to a 'helpful' US company that gives them an advantage over their competitors?

So it's not all unreasonable to assume that the NSA may have secured access to github private repos which they can't tell us about, to run fuzzing tools on popular projects to look for exploitable holes, if nothing else - you don't have to think they're after you personally to be caught up in their mass dragnets. It's the same with all US-based hosting now - you have to assume the NSA has access to it at all times, and shares it with whoever they want - even if they don't, currently, they could do. Anything else is sticking your head in the sand. This is particularly relevant to the 95% of the world that is not american - like me - as the NSA has pretty much carte blanche to dragnet us en mass, and we're all 'the foreign enemy' to them. Obviously there's little we can do if they go after us directly, but we can withdraw as much of our private data as we can from US hosting as a precaution.

To answer the original question, i.e. what's a good hosting solution inside the firewall:

Gitorius is pretty good as a local clone of github with web-based code browsing etc; it's under the GPL. You can either install it yourself from source, or they do a commercial setup solution where you run a vm they provide with external support which I suspect would be too risky for you. Gitlab is also very good, and very much a github clone in UI. It's pretty much which one you prefer the look of, really, though gitlab is much more popular.

CLI wise, ssh + key-based access for each developer + a folder per repo + git on a linux server is plenty sufficient to act as a shared git repo setup, especially if you don't have that many in-house devs. Otherwise, gitolite uses pretty much the same setup with more advanced user and repo control - basically you setup a management repo, and then change files on that to add additional repos and access control so it's pretty simple to manage.

While I generally agree with you on windows vs linux for desktop use about the strong advantage of the halo effect - i.e. the software that runs on it and 3rd parties that support their stuff on it, rather than a straight comparison of the OS - I find it hilarious that you used VISTA as the point to demonstrate it. The driver model changed completely, so so many vendors were hugely delayed bringing out vista drivers, and a lot took the opportunity to obsolete hardware that was only a year or two old. The scanner and printer makers in particular had a field day in 'gotta buy a new one' because of vista.

Also 'Strange IE-only sites not being a issue' is an issue I haven't seen in years now, I think they largely remain in Korean banking and some corporate intranets, but in the EU/western europe, it's transformed into 'webkit-only tested' websites. Long as it looks good on the ipad, who cares about the rest, seems to be the thinking sometimes.

Finally while security essentials doesn't entirely suck from a nagware side of things, it does suck pretty hard as an actual anti-virus

I run windows where I must (gaming, vmware console, active directory management) now and switched to OSX on the desktop and linux on the server as a direct result of metro. It really does suck as a desktop OS without hacking in a start menu replacement (simple example - no folders in metro, so you're forever scrolling if you don't want to have keep going to all apps all the time which is a bugger to get to quickly) and I really can't be bothered any more.

Microsoft have clearly bet the farm on touch-based tablets, they're desperately afraid of the ipad. And just like google betting the farm on social networking with google+, they kinda suck at it as it's not what they grew wealthy doing. They're both juggernauts with a lot of inertia behind them, but then, so was Big Blue.

With the bonus that he'd never need be able to rewrite it again. Six months later:
"WTF does this do? Did I write this in Klingon?"

The "benefit" can't be something that exists separately from the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. I've had it suggested to me that without the Fifth Amendment, the police would just beat people into confessing. But of course the right not to be beaten by the police is separate from the right to remain silent.

I call fail on this argument. Of course the right to not be beaten by the police exists as a separate right. Now how do you enforce it?

"Your honour, I was told I would be beaten until I testified against myself."
"Those are serious allegations. And yet, these 5 fine police officers all testify that you banged your own head against the wall repeatedly in an attempt to make it look like you were mistreated. Please continue with your testimony. And remember, you can be imprisoned for contempt if you fail to answer the questions of this court to its satisfaction."

The right to not be forced to testify against yourself helps protects the innocent from police looking for a quick conviction rather than the correct one, and using any means to get it. The power of the court to compel testimony is very powerful, and needs counterweights to help prevent its abuse.

It also protects society from having guilty men go free because an innocent person was convicted in their place. If you cannot be forced to testify against yourself in court, then it removes a lot of the incentive to compel false testimony against someone's will. They go to court, refuse to confess, and instead of going back to jail for contempt, they walk free as there is no other evidence against them - and are no longer at risk of torture, as they are no longer in custody.

If an inference of guilt can be drawn from silence, then the right to remain silent is pointless - refuse to confess to these trumped up charges? Then go to jail anyway because we've decided your silence makes you guilty. The state is a powerful actor, with many resources. Requiring them to provide evidence - literally, that which is seen - of guilt prevents the state from simply offering innocent people this choice:
a) confess to this crime and go to prison
b) refuse to confess to this crime and go to prison for refusing to confess.

The right to not be considered guilty merely because you stay silent is only part of the counterweight against the state imprisoning the innocent, but it's an important one. This is not a theoretical - there have been abuses in the absence of it.

Lilburne was arrested upon information by an informer acting for The Stationers' Company and brought before the Court of Star Chamber. Instead of being charged with an offence he was asked how he pleaded. In his examinations he refused to take the oath known as the 'ex-officio' oath (on the ground that he was not bound to incriminate himself), and thus called in question the court's usual procedure. As he persisted in his contumacy, he was sentenced (13 February 1638) to be fined £500, whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned till he obeyed.

On 18 April 1638 Lilburne was flogged with a three-thonged whip on his bare back, as he was dragged by his hands tied to the rear of an ox cart from Fleet Prison to the pillory at Westminster. He was then forced to stoop in the pillory where he still managed to campaign against his censors, while distributing more unlicensed literature to the crowds. He was then gagged. Finally he was thrown in prison. He was taken back to the court and again imprisoned. During his imprisonment in Fleet he was cruelly treated. While in prison he however managed to write and to get printed in 1638 an account of his own punishment styled The Work of the Beast and in 1639 an apology for separation from the church of England, entitled Come out of her, my people.

That was the first in a long series of trials that lasted throughout his life for what John Lilburne called his "freeborn rights". As a result of these trials a growing number of supporters began to call him "Freeborn John" and they even struck a medal in his honour to that effect. It is this trial that has been cited by constitutional jurists and scholars in the United States of America as being one of the historical foundations of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is also cited within the 1966 majority opinion of Miranda v. Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There are a number of other examples of the Star Chamber being used to convict and punish men who protested against the Church and State power of failing to confess to trumped up charges. It was a handy way to punish the inconvenient.

It's not hard to find current examples of innocent people imprisoned because of a browbeaten or tricked confession, then later freed by DNA evidence proving their innocence. Without the right to remain silent and not have it taken as evidence of guilt, that number would be far higher.

Here's another example. A case is based on circumstantial evidence against a wealthy man. He pays someone to testify that they committed the crime. If they can be convicted for staying silent, then once before the court, they either confess and go to jail, or stay silent and go to jail. They can testify that they were bribed, but may well not be believed and sent to jail anyway. If the guilty man is wealthy enough, he can buy a dozen people to testify of their guilt, and create doubt and confusion.

With the right to remain silent, the paid self-incriminator goes on the stand, stays silent, and goes home as there's no evidence against them, and keeps the money!

Now, we don't have to care about whether someone desperate or stupid enough to commit false testimony goes to jail - the important point is that with the right to remain silent, then it makes it impractical for the wealthy to buy their way out of jailtime as anyone they pay to testify of their guilt can keep their mouth shut and walk away with the money. So there goes the incentive for the wealthy to try and buy testimony.

It's nothing to do with kids getting age-appropriate material (this time). Their contention is that adult pedophiles first see pictures of children being abused (or anime versions, which are no different according to them) which then encourages them to go out, abduct, rape and murder children.

The obvious solution for the censor brigade is the same setup that mobile phone networks have largely switched to - heavy filtering by default (in this particular example, they want maximum google safe search as default on for everyone) so adult men can't find pictures or anime of naked children, and thus, will never go on to rape and murder real children. Tada! In order to see any sites that are otherwise filtered - such as legal porn, medical sites, art sites, any site to do with the town of scunthorpe - you have to register yourself as a dirty porn watching perv, which list presumably the police will be watching closely in case you start desiring to go on a child abduction and murdering rampage, and will explicitly discourage people from doing, thus keeping their minds clear of unpure thoughts in good Christian fashion.

That it achieves one of their other goals, the appearance of a kiddy-friendly internet with no adult-only activity ever, is just a happy co-incidence.

In a separate but parallel move, the Home Secretary is trying to revive the Snooper's charter - i.e. ISPs, webhosts, service providers such as google and facebook would have to keep extensive logs of what emails and websites UK users visit, which the police and security services can troll through at their leisure, looking for Islamic terrorists planning on chopping down passersby in the street with machetes. And probably now porn-viewing adults, in case they turn out to be child murdering pedo's.

It is the usual 'ban this filth, won't someone think of the children' attempts to whitelist the internet, but this time it's to protect the children from the men who murder them because they saw porn on the internet and decided to get the real thing. That child porn is ALREADY blacklisted by the list run by the IWF, and subscribed to by most ISPs, and he was getting stuff that wasn't on the blacklist, and thus filtering wasn't actually even doing the job they wanted it to when running as intended is being conveniently ignored.

That they and the home secretary don't have a damn clue about how the tech, ISPs or the internet work is a given. They see it as one giant branch of WH Smiths, and it's just like banning the sale of dirty magazines, and will obviously solve the problem once and for all, and anyone that tries to point out the flaws is in league with the terrorists and the pedo child murderers, and heaven forbid anyone express concerns about the Big Brother or Free Speech aspects.

Because it's a full linux computer about the size of a credit card for $35 that runs on a couple of watts? That can do far more than say, an arduino (though arduino still rules for hardware interfacing).

For your average dev who can plop down the cash for a macbook pro or the like, it's terribly underpowered. For someone on a tight budget of money and/or power, such as for maker builds or students, it's pretty awesome. I have one running as a headless personal web server/gitbox because I can and it beats the hell out of the electricity cost of running a full blown x86 server for that job.

Getting a much snappier hw-accelerated GUI is no small thing either.

While this would be an issue eventually, the big problem with fossil fuels is not the direct energy liberated (eventually ending up as heat) but the CO2 acting as a multiplier for that sodding great fusion reaction 1AU away. Compared to the amount of energy that the earth gets coming off the burning day star, even near free personal fusion reactions would be a big improvement over the gigatonnes of CO2 we're chucking blithely into the atmosphere.

And plastics. And probably jet fuel (fusion reactors probably won't be very light or energy dense, and of course you still need to store your generated electricity in a dense form somehow). Natural gas will still be very important, as we use a lot of that to make fertilizer - and we tend to get that out alongside of oil.

While it's true transport costs are more fuel than anything else, fusion reactors are not an automatic fix. What would we do with an effectively safe and unlimited heat source? Use it to heat water to steam, turn turbines, and generate electricity, just like we do with coal stations and fission reactors. Or use the turbines directly, if you go back to early coal. Still, that's going to be heavy, and probably maintenance intensive - it certainly is with any other form of getting useful work out of a heat engine. So big ships, yup, probably. Cars and planes? Not so much. We'd still need to solve the energy storage problem. Otherwise we'd just switch everything to super-capacitor powered systems charged by electricity from a giant network of fission reactors already.

We do have nuclear batteries already, of course. They're still not really small enough to be DeLorean suitable. Though with ENOUGH power, we could just synthesize hydrocarbons from air and water, and then reburn them like we do now I guess.

More water, fertilizer and politics. Almost free energy to transport it would help, but it wouldn't stop the iowa agribusiness influence, or stop the warlords stealing food shipments, or make food crops grow in dustbowls or exhausted soil - you'd still need long term planning and massive infrastructure changes to really improve things, which we've already demonstrated aren't really our strengths as a species...

In 1994 a friend and I assembled a .22 from hardware store pipe, a hacksaw, a drill, some nails, and springs. It had a hammer and a trigger. We followed no plans...we just knew you needed a barrel, and something to smack the rim of the bullets we had...and we improvised

Ah, but you forgot something something Libertarian something something Internet something something Freedom!

Leaving it running for at least 2 weeks is not exactly promptly in my book. Even putting it in the release code disabled, without notification, is shady as hell. The forums are apparently riddled with complaints about gpu problems, including dead graphics cards on machines running the bitcoin software. While it's entirely possible it's pure co-incidence, it's also entirely possible they damaged thousands of dollars worth of high end graphics cards - which given they can easily cost $500 a pop, wouldn't take many. Consumer grade GPUs aren't designed to run full throttle for weeks at a time. Especially if, for example, a gamer has a manual fan control so they can shut up the half dozen case fans when idling, and ramp them up when they start a gaming session (I use this exact setup). A couple of generations back, I fitted after market copper heatsinks and fans to my GPUs to improve cooling at lower fan speeds, but the downside was they had to be manually controlled via a rheostat, so if something like this had been running without my knowledge it could easily have literally cooked my gpus without me being any the wiser as I ramped them down when to cut noise I was just browsing slashdot et al. Those cards are still trucking in a friend's machine several years later, incidentially.

Criminal damage in the course of trespass for profit? Seriously bad judgement, and really not funny. Worth jail time? No. Worth some real consequences? Yes.

The problem is also the heat sink. Without convection and conduction, you're left with heat radiation, which is pretty damn slow. Worse, any such heat sink would actually pick up more heat due to being in direct sunlight - the existing solar shield on it to protect the instruments was at 400k! Would depend on the design, but I imagine it would be tricky to even break even against solar heating - that's a lot of energy headed your way all the time (and solar panels only convert a small part of it). So if you packed some kind of big folding heatsink to get it in the launch vehicle, you'd also need a folding shield to protect that too. Complex and heavy, and that's before you even start on the active heat pump system, which is a nightmare engineering job in space in and of itself - you really can't afford it to fail.

Frankly carrying your own dump tank of coolant (which eventually gets effectively depleted) seems like it probably was the sensible option. We got 4 years of unique data gathering, and it will take a lot longer before we finish processing it. Space is a really harsh environment, even for machines.

Christians don't believe in many Gods - Odin, Zeus, Mars, Allah, His Noodliness, Cthulu, to name a few. I just believe in one less. By the way, the clue is in the name - atheist. As in not a theist, i.e. not a believer. I don't think about, or worry about, Gods or their absence, except when theists turn up, usually to tell them politely I'm an atheist, so thank you, but not interested, and now would you kindly stop ringing my doorbell every weekend and posting wasted flyers through my door.

To borrow phrasing from a subsequent reply - "atheists are also making a decision based on a belief of their own: that there is not a God."

This is not correct. I simply don't factor belief in Gods into my decisions at all. As a Christian, do you classify yourself as a non-Odinist? Do you factor your non belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster into your every day life and decisions? Are you an active, dues paid member of the 'Thor is not a real God' club, meetings on Thor'sday, except every second week, on Woden'sday? (Seriously, look up how many old Gods have days of the week named after them - romance languages like French use the Roman gods instead)

So unless you can tell me with a straight face that on Saturdays you actively excercise your non-belief in Saturn, aka Chronos, father of Zeus, and use it affect your decisions and thought process, then please give atheists the same courtesy and accept that we simply don't believe the same things as you, and that does make our non belief in Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or Mary Mother Of God (forgive me, not sure which sect you are) any more a religous belief than your non belief in Saturn, Woden etc makes you an active non Wodenist or non Saturnist.

The whole thing about proof is our response to getting bugged by evangelical theists of all stripes. 'MY God is the one true God, and my faith is the one true faith, and you should believe it too!' - to which we say, 'Fine. Prove it.'. We certainly don't spend our days thinking about it, or incorporating it in our decisions. Well, maybe Dawkins does. But he's a sexist blowhard, and is not a representative of all atheists, any more than Abu Hamza represents all Muslims, or Koran burning Terry Jones represents all Christians. Most of us are normal, quiet people who simply don't have a particular belief that some others do, and there's plenty to go around. Not being religious does not make us weird, strange, scary or sinful. We just don't want the State to dictate what beliefs we should be forced to live by.

TLDR; if atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is the most popular hobby in the world. I have some 'What Would Cthulu do? Devour all!' bumper stickers so you can factor your not-Cthuluist religion into your daily life.