Hmmm... sounds like I've read about this somewhere....

Why not do something active?

Why not get out and explore the country that you are in with your wife and kids?

This isn't true. There is a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun for a person. In the nominative case, that pronoun is "he". In the objective case, it's "him".

Yes, it's ambiguous that the gender-neutral pronouns are spelled and pronounced the same as the masculine ones, but it's far from the only case in English where we've got two words spelled and pronounced the same that mean different things. I always figured if people wanted to communicate in an unambiguous fashion, they'd choose a language other than English..

In the current arrangement, the parallel CA hierarchy allows you to provide a (theoretically) verifiable connection despite your registrar or DNS provider being perhaps less reputable than you'd like. For an attacker to silently redirect your SSL traffic, he has to compromise at least two external entities--your CA & DNS host/registrar or your CA and somebody in a position to MITM your traffic (obviously a local compromise gets him everything, but this is within your direct control). While I'm no fan of the CA model, the stuff pulled by companies in the DNS market (registrars and hosts both) make the CA's look positively responsible, and handing them all the keys necessary to silently redirect traffic makes me uneasy.

It seems that by suggesting these functions be consolidated into DNS, you're effectively saying that by consolidating two untrustworthy parties into one untrustworthy party, you'll be more secure. I'm pretty sure I don't agree with that, but I'm willing to listen. How do you address such criticism?

So, you use Solaris? Me too. And looking at alternatives now. It's a shame really, as the most stable gear I've run has been Solaris on Sparc.

While this was true in ESX 2.x (which introduced virtual SMP), this is no longer the case. This limitation was largely removed with the introduction of relaxed coscheduling in ESX 3.x (2006-ish). More information is available in this document.

That's not what he's saying at all. He's advising you to not put too many eggs in one basket. I'd be more inclined to trust a company that gives such advice, because it's good advice.

If you have all your data and DNS stuff locked up with one company and you want to switch to a new provider, you're at their mercy. If they go under or have a management change that inspires them to be less responsive, you're screwed.

If you use one company as registrar, another to host your DNS, another to host your live site, and another to host your backup, more people have to screw up before you've got an irretrievable mess. If the ones hosting your live site screw up, you can replace them with somebody else, repoint the DNS with your DNS provider, and restore the data from the third-party backup provider. Good luck doing this if you put all your eggs in one basket because the provider assured you they were competent and there was no need to hire anybody else.

Replaying this scenario with screwups on the parts of other parties in this arrangement is left as an exercise for the reader. Alternately, you could just place all your business with the same company and wait awhile. Eventually you'll be pulling your hair out one night saying to a coworker "If only we had placed [blah] piece of this with another provider, we could have had the site back up by now..".

I remember there being some small parks around Moscow, but I don't remember any being very large or particularly noteworthy. One of the things there seems to be no shortage of in Russia is labor--you'll find humans performing tasks there that seem either completely unnecessary or like they should've been automated away long ago. This extends to park maintenance, as well. I was amazed at how many people it seemed to take to water the flowers in the park outside the Kremlin the last time I was there. I'd be surprised if they worried about it taking a little more work to get the flowers to grow due to lack of insulating snowcover over the winter.

From the perspective of a modern-day westerner, russians seem to have an interesting relationship with nature. When they build cities, they don't play around. They pile in the industry, and the cities are typically dirty and hazy from exhaust of various kinds, dirt, etc. The parts of Russia I've seen outside of Moscow & St Petersburg look a lot like the photos I've seen of Soviet-era cities, aside from the gradual infiltration of english words in signs over the past several years. In contrast, it seems many families--not just the rich--have summer cottages on the outskirts of the cities which are teeming with gardens and plants and anything green or edible, and are quite pretty (ignoring the smokestacks billowing in the background). It's like they have everything neatly compartmentalized.

I can also see why they seem more willing than we are to screw around with the environment. They don't really have suburbs and sprawl in the same way we do in the US. As you ride the train through the countryside, you see a city with some villages clustered around it, then hours upon hours of solid trees and grasses, then another city with some villages around it, then more hours of trees and grasses. It's an enormous country, and it seems largely unpopulated by humans, aside from those small clusters around the cities you see every so often. It's easy to not worry much about nature when there's so much of it around.

You think those famous russian authors all wrote depressing novels by coincidence? Personally, I loved St Petersburg in February, but I'm a little odd that way. I've spent an aggregate of about six weeks in Russia over the past couple years, and while I find the culture fascinating and the people wonderful, I'm not sure I could handle living in any of their cities for an extended period of time. There's a possible exception in St Petersburg, but that one's too european to really be russian, anyway. Russia is definitely a cool place to visit, though--I highly recommend it if you get the chance.

I hate to break it to you, but snow in Illinois and Colorado contain the same amount of water.

Except that in a 5 light cluster, the bottom lights are always the TURN ARROWS. Green Light is always the 3rd from the top.

And even if it is green it does not mean you are clear to plow through with reckless abandon. Green means that you are clear to proceed through the intersection as long as it is clear of obstructions ( like other cars, pedestrians, etc. ).

The ones you see around Denver *are* designed differently.

The shield around the lights is open on the top, so that it funnels wind downwards and blows the snow off of the light. The ones in Illinois are not. The Colorado shields cost ~$30.

This isn't a case of LEDs being bad. Nor is it "greens run amuck". It's idiots run amuck.

The driver of the truck should be prosecuted. In every light cluster with turn arrows, the turn arrows are on the bottom. They are NOT the solid green. And being from Illinois, in Driver's Ed we were all taught that Green does not mean 'Go'. It means *proceed when the intersection is clear*. So, failure on several points by the driver of the truck.

Illinois needs to install the same snow shields that Colorado and other states have successfully done with their LED light installations.

We'd probably have them already, except we spent all our DOT money on 'Rod R. Blagojevich - Governor' signs.