I still have the HP. Guess where I'm typing this from?... Yep, the HP running Lubuntu 13.04, and it works *surprisingly* well.

What?! How'd you upgrade from HPUX 10? (Half serious - I actually own a HP A9000/715 in working condition. It's just a bit difficult to find software for it.)

It's not only that they last longer (supposed they do, which I can't confirm). The main reason to buy a new machine has always been mostly speed. First we had the GHz explosion of the late 1990s when CPU clockspeeds went through the roof (my first Wintel box was a 200MHz PII, my next one ran at 1700MHz), then memory greedy 64bit machines and now... nothing for a while. Everything concentrates at the mobile market. Fine. These thingies still leave a lot to improve, liberate, hack while the good, old PC mostly does what it is supposed to. (Even if you're gamer, because your machine's not really supposed to be complete ever, is it?)

I have been using RSSowl for years and will keep doing so as I never found a better reader. Runs almost everywhere, displays RSS, manages feeds and is quite configureable.

uh... and it's free and open source, of course.

I guess, they rather broadcast the noise from the rotating contact brushes that connect the rotor to the mains. They tend to be very noisy, if unshielded. Great idea in a region where such installations are common (not so much in cities or generally wherever regulations on electromagnetic interference apply). I just wondered if they really use a 30m pole? I assume, the details about this one got lost in translation....

WTF might

be? The water-lifting dynamo is obvious, but "30-meter copper pole"? Some sort of bipolar antenna?

10 years? Well, prepare to be surprised. I still remember the -horrific- 1.x GUI. Can't believe that I really used it for everyday's work back then.

What else do you know, then? As just another "pro", I don't feel ashamed to say that I was unable to get anything out of Cinema 4D without the manual when I tried for the first time. Not even to talk about AutoCAD in 3D mode. I dare to claim that practically nobody will get anything three-dimensional done using AutoCAD without the help of a manual (still hard enough) or some training. Maybe newer versions are better, but anything I've seen between 1992 and 2009 was just terrible.

This applies even to 3D software said to be user-friendly, like p.e. VectorWorks. I've seen three freshman classes start with VW and C4D at the university - but I've never seen anyone successfully design even 2D objects without training. I don't say that Blender's interface or documentation are very good (especially the documentation is plain awful, IMO.) But I don't think other tools of similar complexity are that much easier to handle.

"Some ideas make you dumber the moment you learn of them". This is pretty much the precise definition of an ignorant's views on knowledge.

Agreed. (and implemented years ago). I'd nevertheless run fail2ban, too. Just to reduce traffic and system load. No need to block whole countries, really. It's completely sufficient to block the bad guys.

He's completely right. As a gov monitor the guy did not have to hack into anything. Everything was already there. Technically, he did not even have to use equipment in a different way as he was expected to - and blackmail hardly qualifies as "social engineering".

No hack found here. Just a cheap and nasty case of corruption - but what else would you expect from a professional denouncer?

Looks very much like a MetaWatch SDK to me. Anyone with some programming skills can slap together something like that -or something that actually works in some way- for $200.

FYI: The East German revolutiuon in the 1950s was crushed by the Soviet army. In the 1980s East Germany still was holding on to "Socialism" and one-party-system when the SU already had thrown the old regime overboard.

If you want a cluster act as one machine then you'll have to load balance it anyway. Either by appliance or software, so what's the deal?

WTF? OK, I got used to silly things like 100 being 222 in America because of "Farenheit" and all that Imperial weirdness. But what the heck is CEGEP again, that twenty-year-olds are "between 16 and 18" in Canada?! Can't you be reasonable -using real worlds metrics- at all?