Brainfuck missed.

Lord knows who would have one, let alone flaunt it.

XKCD puts it well: http://xkcd.com/792/

How often do you reuse passwords?

What financial or other control information transits your email account?

What blackmail or other information could be gained via your email account(s)?

I've utilized this myself in legal cases for fun and profit (lawful access to data, natch).

Going through a proxy (crowded, busy, high traffic, concentrated) makes hack attacks that much more difficult. From the defense standpoint, proxies may be known (lists of know proxies are widely available), detectable (reverse operations), or identifiable via patterns (large volumes of traffic or attack from a single or narrow IP band not otherwise known).

You do highlight the point, however, that patterns of behavior are what are critical. You want to see who's coming in, from what IP ranges, whether or not they're suddendly having a great deal of trouble with their passwords, etc.

I've had more than a little success identifying sources of abuse via CIDR block or ASN using the Routeviews reverse IP-to-BGP Router Data lookup (the txt record is the CIDR block and ASN of an IP). Not just in spam, as indicated in the linked paper, but for apache logs, aggregating ranges of IPs to a single identifiable source.

Sure, someone using a widely distributed botnet across multiple ASNs isn't going to turn up in that analysis (or rather, it will be more weakly distributed), but in that case, you're going to want to find other patterns of behavior to track.

Four dead in Ohio. There's also the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, the labor movement, the Trail of Tears, and a few other odd highlights. I'd suggest picking up a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

The one sticking point I've seen at any organization using Exchange (not "Outlook") is the integration between calendar and email. And yeah, you've got to use Outlook (or Entourage) to benefit from that.

Google's now attacked that with GMail + Google Calendar. One large company I know well is starting its transition this summer. And where most big IT changes are greeted with groans, this one took wild applause at an all-hands meeting. Calendars are already segregated (two different staff directories due to mergers), 150MB mailbox size limit, frequent mailbox f-ups, and the outrage and insult which is OWA.

News shows there are others making the step as well, particularly among educational institutions and younger (growth) companies. Yes, there's some back-and-forth, especially as Microsoft sweetens the pot (read: reduces its operating margins) to buy back business.

As someone who's eagerly waited for over a decade's worth of "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" articles has become mildly aware, shifting mass computing markets takes time and an overwhelmingly compelling argument. The tide for Microsoft has been going one way for over a decade, though, and as its key corporate strength -- monopoly control over the enterprise desktop suite -- is eroded, the chips will fall faster. And that strength is falling in several places: the corporation, the desktop, and the suite.

My only hope is that what replaces it will be a more diverse computing ecosystem. That might just happen.

I've got a local virtual XP instance (mostly for dealing with Exchange brokenness, which I haven't had to do for weeks, so I haven't even fired it up). My experience is that rdesktop to a remote host (usually a terminal server) gives better performance, and is useful for poorly-written, nonstandard enterprise/corporate applications (fortunately there are fewer of these with time in my experience). A server pool would allow for occasional access as needed, and Google could presumably work out licensing for CALs. Better than pigging out RAM and disk with a virtual instance. x86/AMD64 based virtual computing still hasn't hit the efficiencies the IBM 360 series boxes had, and GUI shells impose slightly more demanding resource/feedback requirements than something as elegant (coff) as TSO/ISPF.

I've long since determined that NO web designer has any clue how to specify fonts properly.

$ grep -C4 font-family userContent.css
BODY {
padding: 8px 8px;
font-family: serif !important;
}
--
* {
font-size: 100% !important;
line-height: normal !important;
font-family: serif !important;
}
--
/* FONT {
* color: inherit !important;
* background: inherit !important;
* font-family: inherit !important;
* font-size: inherit !important;
* }
*/
--
/* OK, undo the damage for <pre>. */
PRE, TT, CODE {
font-family: monospace !important;
}
--
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 {
font-weight: bold !important;
font-family: sans-serif !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding-bottom: 0.25em;
}
--
textarea, directory {
font-family: "Courier New", monospace !important;
font-size: 90% !important;
}

What's kinda amusing is that WindowMaker (itself a NextStep clone, which is where Aqua has its roots, that being what word+dog is imitating now) has minimize all the way to the left, and close all the way to the right. You gets your two buttons and you likes it. I've configured my workplace KDE3 desktop (WindowMaker dock bug if anyone has a clue) to be similarly decorated. The GNOME / Ubuntu silliness is amusing in a sad sort of a way. Fortunately, this is GNU/Linux. We've other options.

I tested that capability of my car during the test drive. Since most cars now offer at least ABS (and some will give traction control), understanding what happens is very helpful. Level, straight, deserted stretch of road. Sped up to ~60 MPH. Stood on the brakes. Did that in several different vehicles I tried. More recently I had the opportunity to drive from San Francisco to Chicago for Christmas. Again, a deserted, level stretch of road, this time: how does the car handle braking at low speeds (10-20 MPH) in a panic stop on snow and ice? Familiarize yourself with such behavior, in a safe setting. Understand how your car handles differently on different surfaces: dry asphalt, wet roads, sand/gravel, snow/ice. For my own perspective, sand/gravel are the worst -- they appear without warning, vary greatly in quality, and have a bad habit of jumping up and leaving an impression on your windscreen. Oh well. In practice, the main problem with panic stops is the idiot following too closely behind you. I defend that space vigorously. NB: most insurance companies will pay completely fix the windshield if damaged as it's a safety hazard.