Use the PTFE plumbing tape to secure screw threads. $0.10 for a few meters, works flawlessly even against very strong vibration.

The issue is the one of encryption vs. authentication vs. both at the same time, and the fact that SSL/TLS was designed to provide both at the same time only, without any sane way to provide just one of those things at a time, as opposed to, e.g., PGP.

I'm no cryptographer, just a part-time server administrator (and other things too, but this is irrelevant), but my experience, together with plain, old common sense tells me that things would be much easier for both administrators and security guys (is there a proper name for them?) if the concepts of data encryption on the wire and authentication of the other party were separated both in protocol and implementation. Besides the obvious benefit of being able to encrypt the connection without those silly, cartel-provided certificates (even without indicating anything at all to the user, so they don't get a false sense of having more security in place than there is, default encryption of the most popular protocols would do much to thwart all but the most determined wiretapping and eavesdropping attempts), such a separation into two distinct technologies should make it a lot harder to break both things at the same time, and a lot easier to fix any single one of them that someone managed to break without affecting the other.

Of course I could be wrong, and even if I'm not, there's too much inertia in technology and too much money in the SLL certificate cartels for anything to change in this direction, but at least I still have my right to rant a little bit.

Maybe the same people who claimed to believe in the Jedi religion on the national census (Google it if you don't believe) will vote for them?

Do you suggest that we withhold every single news item on the basis that someone, somewhere might not care?

Dont care? Don't read.

Maybe use virtual machines, with pre-packaged disk images specially prepared for those websites (like, IE pre-configured to only connect with their servers, only accept their SSL certificates and completely locked down to any configuration changes), and a policy of returning the VM to the initial state (requires a VM with snapshotting) after each use? Most decent VM engines support RDP too, so the actual hypervisor with its VM images doesn't even need to exist on the workstations, you can put it on a secured server somewhere in the company and make some scripting that would start and present to the user a new, clean VM instance each time they connect. Should be easily hackable using VirtualBox OSE. Alternatively, VMware might offer something like this sytem out of the box, should you decide to pay someone to do this for you.

AFAIK (and I might be wrong, I'm no biologist, but I remember reading this in more than one book), mammals have this interesting property in that the ratios of their metabolic rate, cell division rate and lifespan are roughly equal across species.

Ah, OK. I thought you meant that when a student wants to use his own laptop on the school grounds, they want to install some crap on it, as well as installing it on the school hardware.

As a side note, I wish Slashdot swapped the "Submit" and "Continue Editing" buttons. It's too easy to click the former much too quickly by accident, as can be seen in the above post.

1. Install VirtualBox.
2. Install Windows as a guest (preferably the same version as host if it is Windows, or some believable version if the host is a *nix or whatever).
3. Start the virtual machine in full-screen mode, with automatic USB and CD pass-through.
4. Let them install all the crap they want, smiling and thanking them for it.
5. Save the sate of the virtual machine just in case it's suddenly needed sometime in the future.
6. ???
7. Prifot, and a crap-free computer with a good VM system installed for other uses.

As far as I know, the contact pads are still being heated because the processes involved in reflow and hot air soldering generate much "excess" (actually, not) heat around the solder paste itself and heat those pads, as well as the rest of the whole board, to a uniform temperature.

Besides, I can recall a technology that involved microwaving a board with a water-based solder paste on it and AFAIR it was said to be highly unreliable oexcept in strictly controlled conditions because of the pads not getting hot enough from just the heat of the paste - as the water evaporated, thethermal capacity of a paste glob decreses and soon there's not enough heat in it to maintain the temperature increase in the pad.

It is.

Either it's a bad case of lousy, pseudo-scientific journalism, or the people who invented this were not as bright as it seems. The invention itself is interesting and undoubtedly will be found useful for some very specific uses (molding microscopic parts, maybe?), but soldering electronics is not going to be one of them.

You just can't put hot solder on a cold contact or PCB pad and expect it to work. It will not. Soldering requires heating the surfaces being joined as well as the solder, to the same or even higher temperature (achieved by only directly heating those surfaces and letting the solder melt in contact with them). Period.

Even though it's just a short report, it's going to be very valuable for anyone doing similar work, be it for a conference or for a more permanent setup. No textbook is going to protect against those "oh crap, why didn't I think of it before?" moments like some actual experience would, and this posting is the next best thing after actually having someone with experience on site. And this works for any field of applied technology, not just wireless networking.

So, thanks and be back with some more soon!

Unless I'm reading wrong, this *is* PCI-Express all right, just a different physical interface with an additional (most likely optional) lane and some new, fancy I/O lines.

But why USB 2.0? That would be a perfect place to include 3.0, wouldn't it?

Ever heard of polycarbonate? They use it to produce composite bulletproof window panes, safety shields for industrial machinery, impact-resistant safety glasses, underwater portholes, etc. It does degrade somewhat under UV light, but then, you can just put an UV filter on top of it, it's not going to be a problem for the panel itself. And there are other transparent plastics with very good properities for this application.

I believe this is about coffe shops and universities, where the network accessible through those APs is completely separate from the "work" network and absolutely intended to be open, for the convinience of the customers and students. Thus, it's got nothing to do with what you said at all.