I actually found during a recent fresh Jessie install that, while there is still plenty of cruft pulled in, it has been easier to peel away some of the crud (byebye avahi, and pulseaudio, may we never meet again) from GNOME than in the past. FWIW. The biggest problem with it right now is that there are no knobs to tune a lot of really retarded crap to "off" or if their are knobs, you have to hunt for them in obscure tweak tools or buried in a theme or in some pathologically treeified config database or in an "oh-there's-an-app-for-that" style "extension." It was much easier back when you had a chance in heck of finding what you were looking for by grepping /etc for keywords. Ponder that last sentence for a while. Currently the config system is actually harder to use than hail-mary's at the cli used to be.

Why anyone would want disappearing scrollbars is a mystery to me. Why do they spend time on crap like that when they can't even let you move/disable the hot corner (which remains lurking in the top left to ambush you when you overshoot yourself on the way to the back button.) Instead you have to go find some extension off a site where you have to create an account to get anything, written by some guy who may or may not have the time to lockstep it with changes in the core, but probably not, so it's just going to break crap later if you install it and then some day in the future the time vampire will come by and drain another quart of your life essence fixing it again. Oh yeah, and the fact that it can't seem to fathom that you just may have more than one non-touch pointing device and just might want them set up differently.

Plus those stupid "toggle" switches are all over on gnome-shell menus where the tried-and-true checkbox would be nicer and more clear.

But at least the controls let you turn on emacs keybindings now without consulting google to find the gsettings variable. Damned if I will remember where a year from now when I get to reinstall, or that it will matter whether I do because by that time it will either have moved, or disappeared entirely.

Actually Contact came to mind. "A triple, no, quadruple system. Oh, it's beautiful."

"Computer Systems Engineering" covers it pretty well -- it's a mix of EE and CS so you end up with a ground-up understanding from transistor to circuit to chipset to architecture to OS to software. Of course, these days there are so many competing standards/products that all do the same thing but differently and so many layers of bloat, it's not humanly possible to know every detail, and the more actual work you do the further you fall behind in "knowlege" compared to someone who manages to find a way to just read books/code for a living and never has to put shoulder to wheel (not that we don't need those sorts of people, as they can see the forest rather than the trees.)

If I were the author, I'd worry about someone developing a robot that can turn a flimsy premise into a an acedemic paper.

No, you'd better mark that grave prominently. Don't want anyone to unearth it again by accident.

Of course, that was before "Jackass" and similar concurrent epidemics of stupid.

The problem with congestion is mainly due to most of the crap you could buy up until now only haveing a 2.5GHz antenna and even the 5GHz stuff did not support using DFS channels because radar avoidance is tricky stuff to implement. The problem with beacon pollution (too many SSIDs) will be solved by 11u allowing multiple services on the SSID. Eventually you'll be looking at having a single AP in every room, even for living-room setups, but some of them will be built into computers and appliances because they will also have an 11ad node on there for short range (e.g. "wire free" from cable box to TV) uses. The radios will be turned down low so the signal barely leaves the room, and there will be overlap between cells on different channels.

For a while in the middle of all this, the "11ac Wave 2" stuff will come out and ruin everything. Then people will either stop using that, or the FCC will roll over and open more bandwidth so it can be something other than crap.

Mostly fixed on newer installations and newer clients. Right now the industry is more or less in a holding pattern waiting for older devices to age out and for device producers to stop making crap radios, because if you turn on a lot of the voice quality features (e.g. 11k,11r for seamless roaming and CAC), a lot of clients devices cannot deal. It is getting easier and easier for corporations to design their campus WiFi for phone use because they control which devices the users are using, but for networks that serve any old commodity device a customer walks in with, a few pieces have to fall into place before voice SSIDs are anything but experimental. 11ac is one of those big pieces because it mandates a 5GHz antenna.

There's help on the way for that in the form of a standard called 802.11u (and a couple systems implemented on top of that with buzzword-friendly names.) It allows a hotspot provider to advertise multiple authentication mechanisms, so you would just need one account with a central IDP to get on the hotspot. It's already out in enterprise-level gear bought recently enough; the challenge is now for IDPs to take up the mantle and offer a RadSec service, and for those IDPs to work deals with commodity equipment vendors and managed-cloud-service vendors to get their IDs inlcuded in the published beacons.

Oh yes, and also waiting on MS Surface tablets to either get fixed to not choke on long beacons, or die a well deserved darwinian market death.

Well, on the flip side of this coin we pretty much do a horrible job at prosecuting corporate crime and properly regulating markets. There are arguments both ways but GGP is drastic deadbrained perspective on things.

Move to a dystopian tyranny then. False advertising, marketing to the incompetent, meddling with research, concealing known hazards -- these are the things that companies should be liable for. If we charged every producer with murder for the hazards of their product, you would either starve, or have to grow your own food. In a rational society we know that nothing is without risk and the injustice is when we do not insist those risks are divulged to the consumer.

Umm... me? Every time I see a "mood scale" or questionairre used in a study I cringe. These are horribly subjective measures. Stress is a bonafide biological condition and I'm much more convinced by studies that use a biological proxy marker. Not too convinced, given the sample size, but...

Not even wrong. Any machine joined to a domain can be tricked into believing another machine is the server in that domain, and then that other machine installs a new group policy disabling all the protections set up by the legitimate domain admin. No social engineering required, just a way to successfully deliver forged packets or poison DNS.

You vastly overestimate the competency of corporate LAN departments. When the LAN is not properly hardened, and it very often isn't, all you need is one owned box/printer inside the broadcast domain to own all the AD Windows clients in that broadcast domain.

1) Are members of an 'active domain' (i.e. corporate machines). ...Microsoft's bread and butter...
2) Are connecting to an exploited domain server. ...no, they just have to be in a place that a fake domain server can forge packets pretending to be from the real one.

Given the state of ethernet security these days (some vendors even still sell brand spanking new switches without ARP/IP validation features) that is not a hard environment to find.