The problem comes when the school administrators micromanage said specifications in a political way that interferes with education.

Or teaching them Physics! They may -gasp- figure out that rocks can be thrown!

I was under the impression that fork() was still broken outside Cygwin.

It's like Twitter, only backward, in the same sense that BASIC string variables are like shell, Perl, or PHP variables, only backward.

So which hosting company do you recommend that offers SSH over VPN? Shared hosts that I've seen offer only a web-based administration panel and a shell account. With VPS or dedicated, you'd have to rent two servers: one to act as the "hardened node in a heavily firewalled DMZ" and one to actually be the server administered through SSH. And even then, how would you administer the "hardened node in a heavily firewalled DMZ"?

Say I need to administer a server from home, from the home of a relative that I visit every other weekend, occasionally from public Wi-Fi in a restaurant or library, and rarely from public Wi-Fi in a hotel in another state. Other than opening the server's SSH or HTTPS administration port to the Internet, what other method would you recommend for me to log in and do work from all of those places?

What the hell... WHY?

I used to live in Portland for about three years and regularly drank the tap water The idea that I was drinking water straight from an open-air reservoir post-treatment nauseates me. Why would anyone want this?

Windows without Cygwin still lacked unistd.h last time I checked.

Canada can build their own export facilities and deal with the environmental mess when their pipeline bursts (and their taxpayers can pick up that bill.

The problem isn't just that it's not _benefiting_ America, the problem is that it's not benefiting America AND there's a substantial risk that there will be a large scale environmental disaster that the company who owns the pipeline will never pay to clean up.

We have no reason to OK it and every reason _not_ to OK it.

Unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile sues one that does for patent infringement or nonliteral copyright infringement. Or unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile benefits from a strong network effect among its users.

TLS library maintainers not caring about speed is part of what leads web site operators to use HTTPS for login and payment pages and redirect all other hits to HTTP.<cough>Slashdot</cough> This leaves the session cookie wide open for anyone to clone with tools like Firesheep.

It represents mass organization of a group of people in order to achieve a common goal that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

I sincerely hope you're trolling and that you don't really believe what you just wrote.. Blacks never had a chance. Ever. You seem to forget that until 1865 Blacks were barely considered human, and had no rights whatsoever. Go read "A people's History of the United States" for a start, and google about the gangs of roving private citizens that terrorized the Black majorities in the 1800.

You are right about one thing, slavery was going away for economic reasons. Slaves where slightly less disposable than immigrants. But racism in the South Was about more than money. It was about oppressing the _white_ man too. Rich Southern Landowners uses the Blacks as a lower class for the poor whites to look down on. It created a class system similar to what you have with India's "Untouchables". It kept White Southerners from asking "Why do I have so little, when they have so much?".

what are you going to do about it? Remember Occupy Wall Street? It was systematically put down using the anti-terrorism tools from 9-11 that everyone pinky-sweared wouldn't be used on Americans.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of _more_ federal gov't. Civil rights for Black People in the Southern American States only happened because the Federal Government stepped in with the National Guard. Hell, we had outright terrorism in the south up until the late 50s early 60s. Mega corps are just too powerful to be reigned in with any less than a National Government. It's a double edged sword. But it's the only sword big enough...

Keystone is at best a waste for America and at worst a natural disaster waiting to happen. It's a pipeline down to Mexican refineries so Canada can sell cheap tar sands oil to China. The problem is it's a _long_ pipe line, and they have a history of breaking and nobody noticing (since it costs lots of $$$ to monitor them) until after a community's ground water is heavily contaminated. If it happens in a mid sized town or city where it's too expensive to buy everyone out those people are just screwed.

The problem is these sorts of things are only a matter of time. With current tech maintenance costs more than allowing the disaster to happen. If the companies were severely punished for the spills that wouldn't be an issue. But if BP had to clean up their last mess they wouldn't exist as a company, and the owners would be broke. Those guys just buy off politicians until their in the clear. Heck, the CEO of TEP cried a little on Camera and got away with giving thousands of people cancer because he wouldn't pay to upgrade the safety on his factory. It was called a "Once in a 100 year event", but there were records showing it had been 100 years since the last one. That's some Mighty fine work there, Lou.

So to summarize my rant: You're asking me, as an American, to take a big risk that sooner or later is practically guaranteed to end in an etiological disaster in exchange for at best a few thousand jobs and a bit of cheap oil for China? I think This just about sums up my feelings.