I would like to see said federal law, I have doubts to it's existence. The only federal regulation that I know of that has anything to do with university communications (not involving specific dept of education programs with their own rules) is FERPA and it only involves granting 3rd parties access to student records.

At my work we have a simple one strike rule. If you want admin access to your PC, fine. If you get a user-initiated malware infection, install unlicensed software or otherwise abuse your admin rights you go back to making requests for changes. It's worked well for us as the power users/devs don't need to bug IT for changes all the time and we don't end up spending a bunch of time fixing problems either.

We use a WSUS server and Local Update Publisher at work. It has been a bit of a pain sometimes, Adobe isn't fond of sticking to MSI standards and has published stuff with bad MSI applicability rule content (windows installer would still install it but you had to edit the xml so WSUS could validate it). They also only publish MSI files for the ActiveX version of flash player so we have to deploy the exe version of the mozilla plugin (WSUS can deploy exe, msi and msp files but msp files are the easiest).

It takes about 1 hour for us to write and test the deployment rules for each update. We test against both WinXP-32bit and Win7-64bit targets as they will sometimes need different applicability rules. Then we let the clients check-in to see if they mark the update as applicable. After we are satisfied that all of the clients that need it and only the clients that need the update will try to install it (we have had issues with this in the past) we mark the update as ready to install and the clients will install it in the next cycle.

This usually means that an update is out for 1-2 days before our clients have it installed so if there is an exploit being used broadly we will sometimes force clients to update via our inventory tool that can have it done in 1 hour. We have had systems where the user has been hit by these type of scareware drive-by-installs before the patch was even out.

We are planning on using a few for remote UPS monitors. Sure we could buy a UPS with SNMP but these are both cheaper ($300-600 for most SNMP add-on cards) and offer more flexibility.

I agree, I've done both. By far the worst however are the systems where the user insists on dual booting.

Real Disadvantages: You risk data loss with any application that stores critical data using either (1) a truncate/write method or (2) a write/rename method without a asking the OS to sync it's data. I think that far fewer than 95% of applications fall under (2) and every filesystem will have issues with (1).

For (1) there is nothing the OS can do for the application, just about any file system would loose data in this case depending on how long it caches the writes in memory and if the application has a chance to finish writing all of the data. (1) is clearly bad application code at fault. Ext4 does increase the write-delay for the data but any way you use (1) is asking for problems if the system crashes/the disk fills up/etc.

For (2) the file system could implement atomic rename operations but that would be at a slight performance loss when the application didn't need this atomic operation. This is more of a do-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say workaround as I don't see too many situations where (2) would be used without expecting atomic operation. If the application didn't care about possible data loss in the file (1) works well. The real fix however is to call sync() in the application code in this situation, it makes the code more portable across posix filesystems.

If reliability was the only concern they would likely use ATM.
Speed is a major concern due to SAR bottlenecks. Also, ATM networks are expensive, difficult to implement, and inefficient at bulk data transfers.

There was a patch (not by S3) for the XFree86 driver that disabled VESA mode probing. It would make S3 chipsets "work" with VESA drivers if you got your mode lines just right in the config file. Even then there were some other bugs, you had to start the kernel in framebuffer mode and you could not go back to a console once X was started.

The stated reason from S3 for not supporting VESA probing was that it was used in the past to obtain firmware from the chipset and that Windows (9x) did not probe for VESA modes (even when using VESA drivers).

I like to think that linux support from manufactures has come a long way since then but it looks like some still don't care.

The flaw with this is that he would still be legally allowed to keep his own transcript of the performance, just not make copies. Oh, and live performances can not technically be copyrighted in the US (but you still need permission from the artist to distribute to avoid the anti-bootlegging provisions). Copyright only exists (in the US) for something placed on tangible media.

Quite frankly, yes. AFIAK most waste in the US is sold to Areva for reprocessing into usable material. Most uranium mines have been non-operational for several years due to the low price of uranium on the market, this might change in the near future however. In the US the NEC is quite strict on tracking where waste is shipped.

Full disclosure: I work in Richland, WA where Hanford is located. I do not work at Hanford myself but I know people who do.

I sent a wire 3 week ago using firefox (on windows).

On a related note, I still have not received my 100 thousand US dollars for facilitating getting the prime minister of finance in Nigeria's scheme to get money out of his country. (j/k)

If the thermometer was in the radiator then you would see this. The thermostat will shut off most of the water cycling through the radiator and cycle it internally through the engine only. This keeps the engine running at optimal temp and gets it warm faster when it is cold out. The dash thermometers in older injection cars are not coupled to the thermal sensor that controls fuel mixture but rather to the water temperature in either the radiator or the engine (found this out myself when my thermal sensor went bad).

If it was extremely cold out you might be able to cool off the engine significantly while it was running downhill at idle. The result would be that the fuel mixture would run a bit richer than normal for a short bit while the engine warmed back up. A normal engine has a fairly high heat capacitance and doesn't have that high of surface area, it would take quite a bit of cold moving air to cool it down.