Or one day, amazon will be all that's left. You want that? I agree that many small businesses are badly run, and often can't or don't get the service right, but if you end up with only one or two massive impersonal players, you will regret it. That means, noiw, today even, making a choice to stop that happening by buying from the small guys even if that means paying a couple of dollars more.

Good. Don't know why, really, but I think that's a good plan. Otherwise, we'll wake up one day going wtf just happened.

Plus, the price differences are so negligible it hardly matters. Support the good guys, whomsoever you perceive them to be. Don't be a slave to tiny dollar differences.

Honest post I feel. I salute that. But 2 km walking isn't enough really, you need more calorie burn and less calorie intake. If you are going to rely on the 2k walk, walk hard! And just don't eat, if possible. Then eat meagrely when you have to. Don't accept your current physique. Just don't.

SOME programmers walk around in the "10 types of people" t-shirt and what-not. They are actually hyper-competitive and offensive people in my experience. They alienate men too. Myself, I wasn't really an outcast as you put it. But I could and do appreciate the astounding edifice we are standing on and I was amazed as a child by the various computers I encountered as they appeared in my lives. I wanted, instinctively, to understand how they worked and how to control them if possible, like any machine or system I come across.

But yet, the computer has never really done what I have told it to do. The normal result, of course, is that the program immediately blows up on the next line of code. Sometimes it works; and that is the reward, the micro-reward who's puirsuit I suspect defines a programmer. Sometimes, so rarely, the project bug list is actually emptied. Troubleshooting and debugging code is what makes it hard, tiring work. But the rewards are intellectually satisfying, like solving cryptic crossword puzzles, even if it's as ephemeral as cocaine.

I am sure it's environmental, the actual work involved can be done by woman as easily and proficiently as men. We just have to kill all the nerds first.

Tentatively, "this".

Dunno, it's all above my pay grade really, but either this is as you say utter dipshittery or it's so obscure it's irrelevant. Reads like a poorly written April fool joke.

I would assume so too. I once got involved in a C++ product that was licensed to oil companies for c. $10,000 a year. It had a 10,000 line main(). The owner wrote it at university while learning C++ on his course. Incredibly shoddy, unstructured code, but it works, and he's rich.

...and onion routing, kids.

So was I. You can't specify the port number in an MX record.

Aye. DNS amplification attack, for example.

I don't think you can call dictionary attacks on phpmyadmin and its possible installation paths a "scan". Well, you can if you want but in what I would call a scan one is scanning available ports for interesting services to attack. ydmv and fairly pointless comment on my part anyway so have a good day.

Both of you are wrong. A Linux box set up according to current good practice will not be easy to pwn, even for the great NSA. Where did you get this idea from? Pay better attention to the story please. The NSA has taken advantage of the treasure trove of network communication metadata primarily, which has nothing to do with linux boxen per se, The NSA has taken advantage of access to important nodes on the internet and to listen in - where possible - to the actual packet payloads. The NSA has taken advantage of security key infrastructure and no doubt been able to decrypt SSL and more. The NSA has taken advantage of its dark political power to coerce, force or flatter the big US internet companies into giving them as much access as they could squeeze from these mega data stores. All of this is already a massive, unprecedented, ominous new development in human society. This is what the NSA has been doing. But what they haven't been doing is pwning mcgrews linux box. Nobody is, unless he's an idiot.

Aside from the rest of your depressing post which I didn't pay any attention to, your line above is ludicrous. If you all stood up en masse, you'd all be stood up en masse. Rebelling against what, then? Anyway, historically, you haven't got a leg to stand on. Just to fix that for you:
"You have not fought your rebellions there. Your citizens do not know when it's time to stand up en masse. This has never happened."

And yeah: what? Stop working? Everyone? It's inconceivable. Humans are too entwined and reliant on the functions of the hive.

But the commie pinko stuff that is needed is organised labour. It's about time that the value of the workforce was recognised, bartered and bartered it for its true value. Individual democratic power has withered, the democratic vote is now dissipated and scattered or siloed against relentless, organised, self-interested business groups. The one group now absent almost entirely, at least in UK politics (ycmmv), is the workforce. Unions are needed. The interesting thing to watch for now is whether the trends in income distribution will give rise to the conditions that could see "the worker" take a significant slice of the power - and whether that can be done in a non-violent manner.

Indeed, the entirety of the security theatre is a test of one's mettle, every time.

26,500,000 km^3 = 2.65 x 10^16 kg
This transfer of mass over the globe will cause tectonic disturbances resulting in alterations to the continental plates - causing uplift in places. So it's probably a bit more complicated than you have it.