I concur and want to re-emphasize the most important part: definitely get involved in the community. Drupal has a very active one.

At the end of the day, remember that credentials are a foot in the door. If you have the same expertise as someone with the credential, you're equally as valuable in an organization, but you have the disadvantage of having to prove it. To reiterate: the sole disadvantage in this scenario is on the front end. Therefore, your focus needs to be on getting that first interview. The best way to do that? Involve yourself in the community at events like DrupalCon.

One other thing: we, and several other companies with which we work, are actually looking for a Drupal developer at the moment. If you or anyone else is looking for some work, drop me a line. I'm fairly sure my email address is listed on my profile, but if not, reply and let me know.

--J

Two-factor authentication disables replay attacks (after, typically, several minutes). It doesn't disable MitM attacks.

This appears to be a more useful link:

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-27-09.html

Also, while we're at it, how much were you financing on that truck? Unless it was more than the cost of the truck, you were paying exorbitant and usurious rates of interest, or you were in a less than five-year loan, I cannot fathom how you'd come to a $650 payment on $25,000 or less in principal, considering I pay less than $470 or so on an original loan amount of $25,200.

--J

Thinking back just a year or two to a comparable situation, I was 23, with a credit score of approximately zero, in a car with a declared value of around (US)$5k (that I owned outright), and I was only paying (US)$400 or so every six months. And that was with comprehensive coverage, too.

You were paying somebody's salary at your insurance agency. You really need to find out why your premiums (premia?) were so high. You might be a victim of identity theft and need to clear your record while you still can.

--J

Obviously [nuclear disarmament] is never going to work

Damn it.

Every year that nuclear weapons exist there is a certain chance that someone uses them and triggers the apocalypse. I don't know what that chance is. But even if it's very low, given enough time it is certain to happen! Bear in mind that nuclear war has almost started on several occasions, including by accident. We cannot survive this situation forever.

Qualia are the one thing for which there is no scientific evidence, but everyone knows exists.

The thing about qualia is that they cause humans to go about arguing about qualia! Given that they have this massive effect on the world, I find it hard to believe they aren't physical.

It looks to me like it's intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of free will: i.e. assume free will exists, then show that ridiculous things follow. To me, it's obvious that free will doesn't exist. Our brains are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, obeying the same laws. These laws may be indeterministic, but since we have no control over quantum randomness, that randomness doesn't help us in any way.

A2's hardware and pricing appear a bit out-of-date. Consider BlackMesh; it's the company I work for, and we run a tight ship in a tier-4 datacenter with name-brand equipment and massive onsite technical expertise.

In terms of load-balancing, I'd agree with earlier posters that you really don't need any for 1,000 visitors a day. As you scale up, I can't recommend strongly enough the use of a hardware load balancer; we've had excellent luck with those from Kemp Technologies, which incidentally run a version of the well-known open-source load-balancing daemon ldirectord. The load balancer then automatically covers your HA needs in terms of a Web front; depending on what you have going on in the backend, a combination of NFS, DB replication, or other service-specific replication configuration, often alongside a deployment of Heartbeat, will cover your data-persistence needs.

To the OP, or anyone else, feel free to poke me via email if you'd like to discuss options any further. I'm a network engineer, not a sales guy, so prices aren't my strong suit, but we can work together to design a platform that you can then get bid on by a number of hosting providers, us included.

--J

The #1 problem with WiFi in my area is the lack of available channels. Half the problem is the all the unsecured routers still set to SSID "linksys" and on the default channel. So, add in a feature that can connect to each visible network that has a default SSID and admin password and moves its channel to free up a channel for my use.

Women are valuable because they are less replaceable [...] you need women to carry the babies.

Ridiculous. The human race currently has over 6 billion members. It's not some endangered species where females of breeding age are to be preserved above everything else. If a man and a women of equal age have to choose between them who gets rescued, they should flip a coin.

"other alien races are as leery of sending out giant seedships that they themselves can't ride in"

But for this argument to work, you have to believe that every alien race declines to send out automated self-replicators.

"Maybe we are the first to achieve this capability."

Absolutely. That's the explanation I favour, but it means that intelligent life is much, much rarer than a lot of people suppose.

"Paradox solved, right?"

No. Some planets suitable for life have almost certainly existed in this galaxy for billions of years longer than the Earth. By now, one would expect there to have been civilisations that spread throughout the galaxy and therefore brought Earth within detection range of their signals...