The problem comes when the school administrators micromanage said specifications in a political way that interferes with education.

Or even worse "crypto-anarchists" which is what this guy calls himself (no I don't know what it is supposed to mean). They don't really think through what Anarchy would mean, what it would entail, nor do they look at history and realize that Anarchy quickly becomes a chase where the strongest rule. No, they just think it'll be magic and pixie dust without a government. Everyone will be free to do what they want and the world will be an amazing place.

They don't see government as creating order, they think that it just happens magically and government just gets in the way.

Seriously, if you ever talk to someone that thinks they are an Anarchist you'll discover that either they:

1) Don't understand what Anarchy is, and actually want something else.

2) Have very poor knowledge of history, sociology, human interactions, law, and well, pretty much everything. They like the idea of Anarchy because to them it means they can do whatever they want and they really haven't considered the ramifications much further.

You don't find any that have a well reasoned and carefully thought out position on it, because it is the kind of thing that you quickly figure out doesn't work.

I was under the impression that fork() was still broken outside Cygwin.

It's like Twitter, only backward, in the same sense that BASIC string variables are like shell, Perl, or PHP variables, only backward.

I see that all the time in IT with people wanting to cowboy up solutions cobbled together from a bunch of random shit. Yes, you can do that, and it can be made to work. However how much time will it take to do and support? Because unless your time is free, you need to factor that in.

Labour is a big part of the cost of pretty much anything you buy. Software is the ultimate example. The materials and distribution cost of software is minimal even if done on physical media. However that doesn't mean it is free to produce. It takes a lot of labour, in the form of programmers writing the code, QA testers reviewing things, support staff, and so on, to make the product happen.

Physical devices are no different, they just have higher materials costs. However all the labour cost is there. People had to design, build, test, etc, etc, that product and they all need to be paid since they all like to eat, have a place to live, and all that jazz.

So which hosting company do you recommend that offers SSH over VPN? Shared hosts that I've seen offer only a web-based administration panel and a shell account. With VPS or dedicated, you'd have to rent two servers: one to act as the "hardened node in a heavily firewalled DMZ" and one to actually be the server administered through SSH. And even then, how would you administer the "hardened node in a heavily firewalled DMZ"?

Say I need to administer a server from home, from the home of a relative that I visit every other weekend, occasionally from public Wi-Fi in a restaurant or library, and rarely from public Wi-Fi in a hotel in another state. Other than opening the server's SSH or HTTPS administration port to the Internet, what other method would you recommend for me to log in and do work from all of those places?

And before someone going on a rant saying that that's a brain dead thing to do, it's something that pretty much every compiler does when using the stack.

Um, no.

The compiler doesn't really generate code that expects local variables to persist across function returns, which would be the equivalent to what we're talking about here. The one possible exception I can think of is that you could sort of argue that ABIs where there's a red zone beneath the stack pointer fit your description, but I would dispute even that.

The way the allocator is "supposed to" behave -- like a LIFO -- is like the compiler's use of the stack. The use-after-free is not.

Nah, that's too thin, even by Budweiser standards. Maybe for Bud DietXTRAlite(tm).

1,505,144.03 cubic cubits. 57.575 nominal volume "Olympic size" swimming pools. 4,750,000 bushels. 25,313,380 imperial pints. 0.00000000000020300 Pacific Oceans. I hope that clarifies things. :)

... and just like urine in the water, it would take a lot of poison to have any impact on the supply.

Viruses or bacteria that are chlorine resistant, on the other hand, could be a nasty problem.

Windows without Cygwin still lacked unistd.h last time I checked.

Unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile sues one that does for patent infringement or nonliteral copyright infringement. Or unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile benefits from a strong network effect among its users.

TLS library maintainers not caring about speed is part of what leads web site operators to use HTTPS for login and payment pages and redirect all other hits to HTTP.<cough>Slashdot</cough> This leaves the session cookie wide open for anyone to clone with tools like Firesheep.

Yup, that happens. Preview is your friend.
It's actually the HTML tag support that does this.
You can either use entities &lt; (--i <= 0) or wrap everything between <ecode> tags (no entities needed, but it quotes the wrapped text).

--i <= 0