If you are an idiot and leave your network ID as one of the 100 most common then there are hash table available. If you also have a password with insufficient entropy then you basically aren't safe against a determined attacker. If you're not basically an idiot, though, WPA/WPA2 is good.

I agree absolutely. While the version numbering doesn't much affect me (really small company... 3 linux boxes) I propose a corollary to Moore's Law which states that applications in general will require twice the number of transistors in order to function as well as they did two years ago. I hate the rapidity at which software bloat has crept in even among applications usually known for stability. I could continue to rant but I'm late to the party so I'll just say that I only use Linux for compatibility. I'd rather use Plan 9, BSD, or ideally Minix, but the thing is that most of the software that runs on them is just ported from linux. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but one which takes away many of the gains.

Because we don't have enough script kiddies in anonymous and lulz-sec running around breaking stuff as fast as they can already. Just awesome.

Yeah, that is true. I know that they are corporations and that it is their job to make money, but why do they have to do it in ways which make it so obvious that they're screwing you over?

Wrong, you're getting screwed in both scenarios. Sure, you pay less for the one with lower functionality, but that just means that they can afford to sell their products at much lower prices and still turn a profit. Guess I'll just have to build my own processor out of transistors...

I am really tired of them putting out major versions at this speed. Since these are obviously minor versions, why can't they just call them minor versions and stop breaking people's add-ons? I considered Firefox my browser of choice for a long time even though I disliked the large memory footprint, for one reason- Add-ons. ADD-ONS. The same ADD-ONS which they are now breaking as fast as they can. I've now switched to a webkit browser with far fewer features but less suck- Midori. You might want to check it out if you can't see the end of this Firefox crap. http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

I was just considering switching from AMD to Intel on my next build. I am really not excited at all about the new APU processors that AMD is coming out with, and sadly the Phenom II is still behind Intel's Sandy Bridge... But I just want Intel to know that I will never accept this kind of crap and that I will now buy AMD with the certainty that I have made the right decision.

If feel compelled to point out that the stability and customizabillity of Linux basically takes all the worry of booting up out SSDs or no SSDs. I founds a nice little distro called CRUX that because it comes with almost nothing pre-configured was very easy to make boot fast- once I had everything set up to my liking I was able to boot into Icewm in 10 seconds off a SATA hard drive. Furthermore the computer on for 5 months straight before the idle RAM usage climbed over 100Mb. This wasn't some ancient kernel version either, it was 2.6.36. So if you don't want to worry about boot times you have the options of either trimming your boot time or just never turning your computer off. With Linux it hardly matters. I haven't used windows for a long time but my recollection of XP was that if you left it on for more than a month or so it really slowed down and got buggy. For all I know 7 is better.

We (or most people) seem perfectly content to let other people control the internet. Suddenly the powers that be decide that they want to restrict the internet, and now everyone throws a fit. If we really gave a shit about freedom on the internet we would already have taken things like DNS into our own hands. The tools to do this are publicly available (eg, bitcoin, or just running your own DNS server), but no one cares enough to make this a reality. Maybe internet censorship will finally be enough of a driving force for people to make people realize just how powerless they have been happy to be.

I worked on one embedded project with a C# programmer and he had the same idea of a computer being a thing of mystery- he had no clue how the hardware worked and his method of debugging was simply guessing any error he could think of, even if it was physically impossible.

Most of my programming experience is in either C or assembly language, and a good portion on embedded devices. Recently at my job I have been learning perl, which is obviously an entirely different animal. I find it particularly interesting coming from this background to look at the different data types- In assembly, there really are no data types but only the hardware, in C, the data types are basically just abstractions of the hardware (pointers, arrays, etc). But perl has all kinds of things like typeglobs, and hashes and references (which still strike me as the english major's version of a pointer), which are far more abstracted. The hardware is doing the same things as always, but the model of the computer portrayed by the language is much different.