So why can't they move their feet out of the fire by verifying the public key themselves and uploading it into their own Gmail account?

No registrar can beat the verification of me pasting the public key from my own server and verifying the fingerprint out-of-band.

I have. In fact I've deployed Firefox and other Mozilla applications to tens of thousands of users. I built the configuration and packaging environment, as well as some tools for us to manage site- and role-specific autoconfigs. A coworker of mine spent a lot of time in the JavaScript autoconfigs themselves and came up with some pretty impressive automations.

I can see how you might want GPO support if you're into it but for us it was great that we could deploy variants of one single file and support all 4 major OS platforms in use within our organization. We were able to provide preview releases of new Firefox builds that hadn't yet been tested with all the corporate apps and users could switch between them. As far as locking the settings or preventing auto-update, both of those tasks were both trivial and obvious.

Honestly Firefox and the rest of the products were fine to configure. The hassles really came a bit from what you'll have trying to automate any large organization, and most especially the politics from middle managers arguing about whether we could just push the update yet. Oh, the politics.

This is the fault of game " 'UI' 'designers' " who insist on drawing their own things instead of using system widgets. At best they act like the designer's preferred platform no matter where the application is running. More likely, they only approximate the coarsest features of the thing being emulated and leave the user with a constant feeling of frustration.

Really? You have to develop your own scrollbar?

(Scrollbars are actually a good example. I should note that this idiocy is now making its way into Web "design", where thanks to the "everything should be a tablet" crowd, you start to see people making custom scrollbars that hide unless you happen to mouse over the right place, and are too thin to grab with the mouse.)

As of late I've been noticing and commenting to friends about a growing disregard for spelling, grammar, and proper English as a whole. In school I was taught to never use contractions when writing a "professional" piece; I see that constantly now.

The problem is that your classes conflated a particular style (not using contractions) with basic rules of quality writing (spelling, grammar, and proper English). As a result, when you complain about the latter, people assume you are talking about the former and write you off as a dinosaur.

This is an unfortunate consequence of the arrogance of the last generation of English teachers. If, however, you're in fact using the latter to complain about the former, you're part of the problem and not the solution.

spell out any number ten or lower

This rule is harmful and it enrages me.

It seems to me that "Tweetspeak" and shorthand common to texting and Facebook messaging are now considered acceptable to journalism editors, particularly online.

It seems to be a common problem that people associate rules with media rather than giving any thought to what is necessary or unnecessary (e.g., "I'm not printing this onto a piece of paper, therefore I should misspell things"). Not to mention that while I think of it as a sign of respect for coworkers to write things in a legible manner for them, there sadly seem to be some who think the opposite.

rsync is brilliant at coping with interruptions

Just make sure you run it with -P if bandwidth is scarce and spotty.

I have had great experiences using the "Java EE" toolkit (basically just a combination of servlet and JPA technologies) and Spring MVC (Spring's front-end Web framework) to build nice clean modern Web sites and applications.

The great thing about this combination is nothing is too different from the stuff you've done before if you've done any medium- to large-scale Java programming before. Multiple vendors, commercial and FOSS, implement the specifications. JPA is one of the better ORMs I've seen (second only to CLSQL and probably more comprehensive, anyway). Most everything is done with simple annotations. And Spring is very well-mannered; you can take as much or as little as you like. Once I had to hook a Web front-end up to an application with a custom authentication system... it was cake to implement the Spring interfaces and suddenly my application was a fully acceptable auth provider for its own Web interface.

I have started a write-up on this at http://quadium.net/~vsync/tech/java-servers/ and my goal was to consolidate and smooth some of the information I had to scrounge over the years about the process. There is a lot of Java information out there but lots is outdated and much seems to assume familiarity or use of this or that IDE, and at least online I haven't found many comprehensive sources. That said, sadly once you get past the first bits of my write-up it gets to be more and more of an outline. But your perspective as someone familiar with Java but wanting to get into this aspect of it would be greatly appreciated.

If you're interested I believe a while ago someone on Reddit gave me some links to some Spring MVC tutorials that seemed decent as well. I can try to dig them up if you'd like.

I was hoping for something more dramatic. All I got was on one apparently long-suffering person's ignore list:

<vsync> Hi all, can I ask a question?
<vsync> I'm trying to get into hacking and I heard LUA is a good place to start, you can make viruses with it and everything right? I want to be able to pwn some guys giving me trouble in DCC haha
<Vinnie_win> this bs again?
<vsync> My only concern is LUA might be too slow being interpreted and all, I heard Stuxnet was like 20 megabits, isn't that too slow to do math and stuff with?
<Vinnie_win> Your next statement should be a reason why I shouldn't put you on ignore
<vsync> Um cuz you'll be my first target if you do haha, duh
<Vinnie_win> vsync: okay, now you've done it. prepare to be...derezzed!
* Vinnie_win adds vsync to ignore list
* vsync controls the horizontal and the vertical

This used to be the default setting in many browsers. It changed because people complained it asked them annoying questions, and site authors complained about users that had the temerity to refuse cookies.

I was going to give you a screenshot of exactly that preferences dialog in Firefox to smugly help you do that, but it looks like the simplification Nazis ripped that out too. It used to look like this.

You can still configure it in, of all places, the "history" settings. Once you do so, it acts exactly as you want.

It's a term of art[1].

1. term of art