By those criteria, just using recent news stories:

Catholicism is a cult.
Church of England is a cult.
Islam is a cult.

To make my position clear, I have no hard feelings towards people who are religious (any religion) so long as their religion does not impact me or those I care about. Anyone who tries to proselytise to me is greeted with my standard response of "I'm sorry, but I'm quite secure in my lack of faith".

BTW, an example of a religious organisation that does not use its community service to convert people is the Salvation Army in Australia (can't say for anywhere else). Yes - a significant number of people who they help do join the Salvos, but as a policy they do not discuss religion with the people they're helping unless they're specifically asked about it.

Having been officially both a (senior) software developer and software engineer (at the same time) I prefer a different term entirely: Software Development Craftmaster (and the related Software Development Journey(wo)man and Software Development Apprentice).

I feel it more accurately reflects what I do. There are elements of engineering (in particular the discipline which takes years to develop) combined with high levels of creativity.

Just wish I could claim it legally, but there's no Software Development guild here.

People who don't get competitive quotes but always buy Cisco because that's what they know.

Basically, yes. And the worst thing is that IMO the current government is almost complete crap, but they're far far better than the Opposition.

Economically:

We survived the GFC with minimal impact.

We have a tiny amount of government debt (despite the Opposition constantly harping about our "high level of government debt" - an example of them "creating an evil to declare war on").

We have a budget that is close to balanced.

We have an ambitious and important infrastructure project underway (the National Broadband Network) that is using largely-borrowed money to pay for the build and is projected to make a 7% ROI (and again, the Opposition opposes this as a "huge waste of taxpayers' money" despite it not being any such thing - neither a huge waste, nor taxpayers' money).

Socially:

We have reasonable public health care and education (not brilliant, but it's a pretty good safety net).

We don't have a lot of unstabilising elements in the community.

So evils like "illegal boat people" (no such thing - it is not illegal to seek asylum) and all the various justifications for data retention need to be created or blown out of all proportion to create hysteria.

Alyson Hannigan is modern-day proof of homo sapiens interbreeding with Denisovans.

1. Set up a secure VPN server at your site. This serves two purposes: getting access to external machines, and security.

OpenVPN is a good one to use, but if you can set up OpenVPN AS either on a Linux box or in a Linux VM you'll make life much simpler for everyone.

2. Set up the people you want to support with VPN access.

3. Set up VNC on their machines. TightVNC running as a service is ideal, but take the following precautions:

a. Set the service to Manual so they have to turn it on each time.

b. Have authentication.

4. Create easily-accessible shortcuts for them to use, and train them to use them.

5. At the start of a support session, get them to connect to the VPN, start the VNC service. You can either get them to tell you the IP address, or look at the currently-active VPN connections.

6. At the end of a support session, get them to shut down the VNC service and disconnect from the VPN.

I've found that even computer neophytes can be trained to do their part, and if they've got a minimal level of skill it's possible to talk them through the initial setup of the VPN and VNC client software. You just need to get them to the point that you can remote control, and then you can lock it down (changing service to Manual, etc).

I've done 2nd-year uni maths (multivariate and vector calculus), not that I remember any of it anymore ... In my 15 years as a software developer I've rarely needed any higher-level maths. What I have found is that my one first-year uni statistics course (which I paid very little attention to) has helped enormously.

Programmers often have large data sets they need to analyse and need to be able to understand trends, how to spot outliers, etc. If you're profiling or optimising, you need to understand the important of statistical sampling and error ranges.

Statistics is unbelievably boring as a subject. But it's actually useful and interesting when applied to real work.

Or when the former employer really has nothing but good to say about you. It does happen (thanks mate!).

Your'e absolutely right. The entire audience should have been armed so that instead of one nutjob shooting there would also be tens or hundreds of people shooting wildly in all directions as they hear gunshots and see someone near them with a gun.

And all the bloodshed would have been avoided.

Whilst I'm not going to be rushing out and getting Win8 (in fact, I'll probably skip it entirely) I applaud this move.

First thing I do with a new Win7 machine I'm setting up (for me or others) is to turn off everything except Aero Peek. Instantly makes the machine feel much more responsive and much easier to see the important stuff. I haven't had a single person complain yet (or possibly even notice), including some who had been using the default settings before they got me to prep their machine.

My ISP (Internode) has been providing opt-in dual-stack support for at least a couple of years, and enabled it by default for all new customers in January. Internode currently have about 2% of their customer base on IPv6.

Note: if you go to that page and the logo is spinning, it means you've connected via IPv6.

I get a static /56 prefix (earlier when it was still considered a trial they gave a /64 that could change when you lost ADSL connection). My router (Billion 7800N) acts as a DHCPv6 server and everything is hunkey-dory except for one minor quibble - the router advertises the upstream DNSv6 servers instead of itself, so if you've done static MAC->IPv4 mapping in the router they won't be returned when a DNSv6 request is made. The fix there is to manually set the link-local address of the router as the DNSv6 server on each of the machines.

Do what I did - realise old laptop is no longer up to the job; notice Aldi has a laptop on special the next week at AU$600 with suitable specs (in particular, 8GB RAM); figure "I can return it for any reason within 60 days so might as well see if it's suitable"; grab the third of four available at the store; get it home; realise it has a matte screen; go "Woohoo!".

A couple of days later (following a fair bit of tweaking) I had a new work laptop that I'm very happy with.

Personally, I believe there should definitely be a legal impediment to watching re-runs of Seinfeld, but that's just because I think it's a crap show (and Jerry Seinfeld has nothing to do with comedy).

The fact that so many people like him is testament to why we need that legal impediment.

IIRC LM12 shipped with MATE 1.0, and it was explicitly said at the time that it was an early release and there would be issues.

I've been using LMDE update pack 4 (with the current version MATE 1.2) and apart from some things being named differently (e.g. pluma instead of gedit) I can't notice any significant difference from Gnome2. Well, except that it seems snappier (but some people have a different experience, so make of that what you will).

That really depended on the "murder". For example, one of my ancestors (the one whose surname I have) was tranported here for two "murders". In actuality, it appears he was involved in a riot in Ireland in which two people were killed, and he was convicted on that basis. Unfortunately, the records stop there due to the loss of records in Ireland around the time (riots, church burnings, etc).

In any case he made good - became foreman for the chain gang that built the road to Mrs Macquarie's Chair; got his Ticket o' Leave; married; bought a pub; got drunk a lot; bought several cows (one at a time) ...