As I've said elsewhere, I fly regularly, and until this weekend, the TSA, while generally surly, has not been as much of a hassle as most people here that swear off flying think it is. Yes, I'm a white Canadian, so it colours my experience, but I don't think that makes it worth dismissing.

I flew the day the airports reopened after 9-11, through the shoe bomber incident, the liquid bomber crap, and now this fire cracker asshat. I do think the TSA needs to change it's policy on responding to terrorist threats, and avoid these panic-stricken restrictions, like the ones this weekend, or 2006's liquid/gel restriction. They are pure theatre.

But usually, after the initial slow down, things get quite manageable and efficient at security checkpoints. For every anecdotal horror story, there are dozens of regular travellers that continue to travel this way, and it's gotten much more efficient than back in 2001-2002. The TSA needs to improve, absolutely, but I think many people that swore off flying years ago have imagined a beast far worse than the reality.

One can stop flying because they don't like being patted down and searched, and that's fine. It's a tradeoff.

But I also believe that it is politically impossible for the U.S. to drastically change their philosophy of airport checkpoint security, in spite of your best efforts to contact your congressman about this matter. The political climate is way too polarized. Minor adjustments will probably be achievable though. And I really hope this weekend's restrictions are lifted, the current news seems to indicate it will after Tuesday.

If you got patted down as missed your flight, you certainly didn't show up to the airport early enough. It adds maybe 10 minutes to the security process at most airports. I'd also note that missing a flight is a fairly minor inconvenience.

I think heightened inspection is generally a good thing, and a minor inconvenience. There are aspects I disagree with (liquids/gel restrictions, and this weekend's nothing-on-your-lap fiasco). But random inspections and pat downs, to me, make a lot of sense for this mode of travel.

Sure. And there are lots of Russian, Indian, and Arab colleagues are also Canadian and U.S. citizens, and really don't have problems with the TSA. I do know some dual citizens of countries such as Canada + Lebanon that have problems with CBP, but that's a different agency.

My point is that there are a number of people that refuse to fly because of TSA fears. And I think that's been overblown, generally. Until this past weekend, when they basically crippled inbound U.S. travel (some family members are still stuck in Toronto).

I fly regularly. It's really not that bad. I've never had a problem at the checkpoints, even when I'm randomly selected for a detailed search. Even U.S. CBP has been courteous when I cross the border.

This last hour sitting bullshit is rather fresh, of course.... but the TSA's measures aren't much of a hassle to date.

FWIW, Oracle takes about 30 minutes to install to vanilla state & create a basic database.

The big problem with VMs is image proliferation. Package-level management, like RPMs, etc. still is essential to understand versioning dependencies; virtualization does not fix that problem.

Srsly. I'd like to know.

I've tried Conan, LOTR, Warhammer, and Eve. Eve was cool but different playstyle. Warhammer was also cool but the social aspects were botched IMO and it's too PVP focused (though I still have an account). LOTR is pretty close, admittedly. Conan didn't click with me.

The only MMO that looks like it might really give Blizz a run for their money is Bioware and the Old Republic.

Between Malygos & The Nexus, Obsidian Sanctum, and the fact that Ulduar is , er, quite huge, I think there's some sour grapes there.

The new Colesium 10/25 raid has some quite fun encounters; Faction Champions in 25 is a fun grawl, and Twin Val'kyrs has a unique twist. Of course, this is all to get people to gear up for Icecrown, so there's not another Sunwell debacle where most people don't get to see that content.

I don't get the bitterness about grinding, it's inevitable that something new will always be added - you never will "win" the game. The only reason there is to go hardcore or to grind it out is to be "first". And with the achievements / title system, you get to brag about it afterwards, if that's your thing.

While in principle, I agree, it's unclear what level of "free" involvement one expects from a standards organization.

"Pay to play" standards organizations have for long been the norm - including the W3C. The IETF, while not pay-to-play, is certainly funded by large organizations.

So, in their cases, while you don't need to pay to implement the standard, you do need to contribute to the standards organization costs (not trivial) to participate in forming the standard.

In short, organizing teams of people costs money, and someone has to foot the bill. That's either a background benefactor, or its a published process for participants.

Back in those days, "open systems" was coined by UNIX vendors for the same reason - you didn't need to buy IBM hardware to run software, you could run software, and it was arguably portable. BillG took the same term and applied it to Windows in a different sort of way - if you ran Windows, you could still fire your hardware vendor and swap in a new one.

It was a bigger deal than one might imagine in today's world of virtual machines. People couldn't switch off of IBM despite tens of millions of $$ going to them for mainframes. The same argument applied to "software platform" was why Java took off in the 90's - that way you could use Linux, Windows, or UNIX and it wouldn't matter (for server software, anyway, for the most part - GUI was more of a failure).

So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.

That's completely, utterly false. 'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's. The OMG had open standards in the early 90's for distributed objects. The ANSI, ISO, and IEEE go much further back (POSIX dates back to 1988).

Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things, with two different outcomes. Open source without an open (potentially standard) interoperability architecture is unlikely to generate interoperable & competing implementations. Sure, you can always fork, but that leads to a cacaphony of slightly differing and incompatible options that geeks might love but most customers despise.

On the other hand, open standards without an open source reference implementation may cause problems with the standard's proper adoption, as there's no example for implementors to use. But going too far on the open source side is also a risk to standards adoption -- if an open source RI is copylefted, that dissuades adoption in its own way. Whereas a more permissive license, say MIT, Apache, CC-Attribution, etc. would better incentivize adoption.

Trash SQL in favour of coding all your data access needs. Welcome back to 1973, guys.

It's not like we could do parallel SQL in the 1980's. Or that you can't do parallel SQL in a compute cloud today.

No, It basically seems like they don't want to pay software vendors any money for database technology. That's mostly what the arguments boil down to. Oracle RAC is very scalable, arguably easier to do at massive scale than MySQL - but you have to pay Oracle money. For an Internet startup, I can understand why you'd take your chances with "roll your own". For an enterprise... I think not.

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

SAN FRANCISCO--Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. ... (click link to read the rest)

A lot of people disagree with your view. This isn't a cut & dry case like OJ. The man had a serious Peter Pan complex, yes. Was a he a pedophile? I don't think so, and apparently neither did a jury.

As for his career decisions, etc., I think you are extremely wrong on this. Even a cursory look into the making of his records, videos, etc., shows the man had brains. There are numerous artists that have worked with him that will attest to this, unless you're going to write all of them off too.

Don't forget Skinny Puppy. There wouldn't have been a Pretty Hate Machine without them, and I'm pretty sure "Down In It" was Trent's Ode to "Dig It" ;-)

Also, for metal fans, there were..
Faith No More
Metallica
Slayer
Iron Maiden (w/ Dickinson)
Celtic Frost
Bathory
Voivod

All hugely influential...

It uses the Phone's SN#, I believe.

How do I know this? Well, I don't, but I've verified that Find my iPhone "works" with just WiFi if your phone is otherwise SIMless.

Unfortunately, "Works" is a relative term -- it will guess the location of the IP address based on the WHOIS information, which won't help much other than identify the ISP's location.

On the other hand, it will still display remote messages. And will do a remote wipe.