The GP included a direct link to the paper, and you blindly state that it's not out!? I know it's fashionable to comment fast and defend the almighty Apple, but you might try more reading comprehension first.

The quote from the paper is on page 566 (remember this paper forms part of a greater work, and therefore the page numbers are a little strange) just above Figure 9. (I do note that the quote above is missing a space between "our" and "app", but that's no excuse for not finding it).

Oh sure, that'll be the same build that finally figures out that some organisations have web servers with names that don't end in .com.

It's woefully consistent - type a server name that is a "recognised external" URL (so something ending in .com, .co.uk, .fr, etc) and it'll go straight to the site. Type an internal server name (either a plain server name or an internal DNS name) and it will insist on searching Google, because quite obviously the user DIDN'T want localsite or site.network.internal after all. No if you want an internal server, you'll need to get the users to type in the full URL including protocol (because then the same keystrokes that were obviously wrong are suddenly obviously right).

Couple that with the new "requirement" for Chrome if you want to download the Google Talk [wait no it's Hangouts now] on the desktop (they can pry the desktop Talk client from my cold dead fingers) and the continual forcing of Google+ to view an image in a chat, it's clear Google has already turned into Microsoft V2 and is working on digging in deeper. (Hangouts? Seriously? No, it's not a "hangout" when I send an IM to my son to put the damn garbage out!)

Not sure about your local sort of "overly flexible mental gymnasts" but around here, you won't NEED to have that green power because everyone else will give up something and we'll all use less power overall. You know, greenhouse effect and global warming and save the planet. That kind of thing. Because we'll totally reverse the last two hundred year trend of increasing electricity consumption the moment the power isn't available any more. Note that the bozos won't have to give up anything because they're already using less power, so it's only everyone else who should (has to?) change in order to comply with their world view.

As I post this, minus 4.5 hours. The local (AEST) 6am broadcast was heralding 20 years of the Internet (then clarifying to be the Web, which everyone knows is the same thing ). But I was thinking - I'm sure I was seeing http URLs (not that we as students necessarily recognised them as much as we do now) in early 1993, and they weren't for CERN but for an early online, full-colour comic whose name escapes me.

Yeah yeah I know, feed the troll.

Even when you do - the available information is out of date or just plain wrong. For example - the day I made an offer on a place I knew the current resident had a stable ADSL2 connection, and that the RIM at the end of the street had spare ports. The day the contracts were exchanged there were no ports and a waiting list for Internet access.

Fact is the telcos have an active disincentive to invest in Australian broadband (with the NBN coming, or not, or maybe, or halfway, or God only knows what - frankly I suspect even (s)he has given up trying to work it out). My new place might get it within 3 years if the plan doesn't change. Or I might never get it. When I apply for a connection, I get to join a hidden waiting list with no ETA for service. Oh, and I WORK for the telco who would have to do something about the problem and I still can't get information.

Ah, so that's why I can never figure out where all my money goes!

With 1.5T of horses, .8T of trailer and 2T of tow vehicle, you're talking about making that vehicle a rolling roadblock at ~10mph in a 30 zone or 15mph in a 50 zone. That's possibly one of the stupidest things I've heard. Not that I should expect any less from an AC.

Probably because it really does happen to some people - my own gmail address is signed up with a period, and someone else, presumably in the UK, signed up without. I still get Dell UK newsletters for him (and I'm in AU, so if I used my gmail address with Dell, I expect he would receive some Dell AU newsletters). Just because it's publicly stated that dots are dropped does not mean there wasn't a period where either the rule did not exist, or the code to enforce the rule was broken.

I've also sent mail to the version of my GMail account without the dot, and it neither bounced nor arrived in my inbox. I therefore deduce that it was delivered somewhere else.

Who will it be? Maintenance? Boeing?

OK, so how will you solve the GP's problem then? Or to put it another way, here are two future meeting dates. Which one has been updated to reflect the new timezone, and which one has not:

• Jan 27, 2013 03:00:00 UTC
• Jul 15, 2013 16:00:00 UTC

I'm not saying that the GP's solution is perfect, but you've completely ignored the problem in making your comment. Unfortunately we live in a time where politicians and lobby groups think time is pretty flexible (sorry about the pun). So you probably need to store in UTC with an associated original timezone, original timezone offset, and a last updated time. For some apps that could be overkill. For others, it might be necessary.

You need the timezone information so that you record the creator's intent - I set this to 10 am Thursday in my timezone because I want it to be at 10am. You need the last updated date/time so that you know what the timezone configuration was when it was updated (i.e. "it was created/changed in daylight saving time, so even though we're now NOT in DST, I need to do some extra correcting of the display").

TL:DR; time is harder than it seems.

In this case, the tutorial appears the first time any new user logs in (be that domain or local). Need to find out how to kill it, actually, via GPO, or it'll drive me batty.

In this case, would it not be that Le Monde is going to start charging the newsagent (news stand) based on the number of people who read the headlines, then either buy something different or walk away?

My first thought when I read the article was "just sell it as a novelty product" - green and yellow honey in some sort of twin pack might go down well in sports-mad Australia, for example. But those pictures are much, much more disturbing than I expected, and I'm not sure I could get past the colour after all. Maybe kids would love the idea of funky-coloured honey though (they like tomato sauce to be green FFS - kids are weird).

For me it's not the "hard and catastrophic" failures that are a problem - it's the subtle ones. For example a recent customer environment - DNS lookup for a particular server returned the wrong IP. It worked perfectly, and fast, except that the data was wrong. It took nearly a week of debugging firewalls, routing tables, services and app configuration to figure it out - and the problem was actually caused by OpenDNS and its filtering.

When you look at "64.27.80.4" and compare it to "67.215.2.41" the differences are obvious. Not so when you're trying to compare "6732:87fb:87fa:12a9::54d8" with "6732:87fb:87fa:72a9::54d8" and work out why things are failing.

Darn, I was with you all the way until we got to your last assumption:

Intel? At the TSA? Not going to happen (aka "Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here").