Had to dig a bit to find it (no link in article). The law itself just says that registered offenders have to provide Internet IDs as well as name and address, that the state may disclose them in certain cases, and that a certain subset of offenders may not access a certain subset of websites. How this translates into account closures is that the gaming companies, or whatever, consider the accounts to be in violation of their Terms of Service; for example, the Facebook ones specify:

You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender.

If someone doesn't like that, they need to sue Facebook; this particular law did not require Facebook to add it.

Strange thing is that both domains are anonymized now, makes it hard to tell who's who in this argument:

• Domain ID:D160468854-LROR
  Domain Name:CYANOGENMOD.ORG
  Created On:21-Oct-2010 18:09:32 UTC
  Last Updated On:01-Nov-2012 04:14:02 UTC
  Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
  Registrant Name:WhoisGuard Protected
  Registrant Organization:WhoisGuard
  Registrant Street1:11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
  Registrant City:Los Angeles
  Registrant State/Province:CA
  Registrant Postal Code:90064
  Registrant Country:US
  Registrant Phone:+1.6613102107
  Registrant FAX:+1.6613102107
  Registrant Email:f400f5cbeeb24eebbd31e75924334a65.protect@whoisguard.com

  versus

• Domain name: CYANOGENMOD.COM
  Administrative Contact:
  Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 0121602432, cyanogenmod.com@contactprivacy.com
  96 Mowat Ave
  Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
  CA
  +1.4165385457

For bootstrapping and security, I imagine. If there's a cold outage, or an extended spike in network traffic, or a misconfiguration on a switch that blocks all network traffic for a few minutes, a few services will need to be working without depending on anything else when everything else is brought online. That might be master NTP, master DNS, master LDAP, or as stated monitoring (so you can see what actually went wrong in one place). And you could run all of them on one box, with two or three similar as backup, but the point of the question is that you don't need a 64-CPU SPARC box for those services even in a large datacenter; and even if you ran it on a 4-CPU x64 blade, that would be harder to find in the dark or with alarms going off than a standalone box.

It's not just this particular video, I'm sure there are a lot of other things the people rioting are upset about: general economic problems, lack of political voice / security in their own country, heavy red-tape for their countrymen who actually do want to study in the 1st world, creeping secularism in their country, scantily-clad tourists from the 1st world on their beaches. If said video hadn't been released recently, there are a lot of other things people could have protested in a riot.

Just like the Boston Tea Party wasn't about the price of tea alone, it was about taxes in general, and more beyond that about the right to self-government.

Actually, BYU has been coed since 1886 (or earlier?). I live in a college town (outside Utah), so a lot of families in the LDS congregation I attend have at least one parent in school; it seems like more of those are men, but in several families the wife is the one attending graduate school. And three of my siblings have graduated from BYU, so far, including my two sisters; my sisters both earned graduate degrees as well.

And apparently Ann Romney went to BYU, although French is admittedly not a "technical" subject.

If that's the only reason to have validated the account, you might as well go ahead and deactivate it, then ask for it to be permanently removed:

FAQ "What do I have to do to permanently eliminate my account?"

Before doing so, you might want to do the following, just to be safe:

1. 1. Download a copy of your data, keep it somewhere safe.
2. 2. Announce on your wall that you will be deleting your facebook account permanently soon, and that anyone who wants to stay in touch needs to take note of alternate contact-info.
3. 3. Make note of alternate contact-info for anyone you might want to stay in contact with; send them an FB message if nothing else
4. 4. Attach alternate e-mail addresses to your account, so that you'll be deleting them all at once
5. 5. Wait some time (a week? a month?)

Of course, none of this stops someone from creating an account purporting to be you, with a similar-sounding name, and a throwaway address at some web-mail provider that looks similar to yours. Keeping a FB account open doesn't do much to avoid it, either, except that someone who searches on your name get two hits and have to decide between them.

Counterexample: my wife found a box of DVDs of "1000 classic commercials" (mostly from the 1950s or earlier, many of them black-and-white) and bought it, I don't know where. Our 8-year-old son watches them sometimes for fun; it's a lot safer than what would be on a random TV channel. The ones that talk about products that don't exist, or make outlandish claims, are especially funny.

For a gaussian ("bell curve") distribution, all three are the same. For a lot of actual or plausible distributions, all three are fairly close to each other; though it's certainly possible to think up pathological cases where none of them is useful.

Footnote ... link to said 1942 Census Indexing start-page and blog.

Interesting comment on the article:

"Dear Professors,

"Please supply citations for the quantitative data and analysis that led to your claim that; "pseudoscientific" health courses are undermining the international credibility of Australia’s universities.

"Your article's references in the Medical Journal of Australia neither support nor contradict your claim, they indicate no causal link between the international credibility of Australian universities and the offering or otherwise of alternative health courses."

Forget earthquakes. On a typical sunny day the Zocalo is filled with Aztec ceremonial dancers stomping, peddlers selling imported Korean and Chinese goods, and hundreds or even thousands of tourists. I hope they're planning to use glass block rather than traditional "windows"; and will even that stand up to all the foot and hand-cart traffic?

On the other hand, sewage / drainage isn't as big a problem there as it would be in a coastal city. Mexico City is at an altitude of 7,900 feet, and a couple centuries ago they drained the lake-bed by digging tunnels along the lowest nearby mountain-pass.

... and Visio 2k10, at work. Everything else I use is supported (or originally for) Linux: Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, Rational, Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle SQL*Plus, WebSphere, emacs, gimp, xfig (I have Cygwin installed). PuTTY is a little bit easier to configure with funny fonts/colors/scrollback per host than xterm, but that's what programs like Gnome Terminal are for.

At home, my kids use Windows ME to play some games, but everything else is Linux, and my kids play games on that too. Family finances, personal e-mail, genealogy ... all on Linux. In the past we've had Windows XP and Windows 2k3 server, but not currently.

There are some border cases where things are apparently not supported as well; for instance I haven't been able to share a webcam using Skype (at home) on Linux, and SameTime for Linux apparently doesn't currently do desktop sharing. On the other hand, a lot of stuff is faster on Linux on the same hardware; boot time on my wife's laptop went from over a minute to just a few seconds (sometimes tens of seconds) by wiping it and installing Ubuntu.

If you can do that, more power to you. In my case, I need the Java plugin for a number of core work functions:

• The corporate expense-reporting application
• The desktop/webcam/slide-sharing portion of the corporate standard audio/video-conferencing platform
• The corporate standard e-learning platform (which was used to deliver "data security and privacy" training 4Q last year)
• The download-assistant at the internal site where I obtain official copies of our software products (customers use a different interface to the same site, with the same Java applet to download "images")
• The drag-and-drop-to-upload function of one of our document-management products

My employer is a Java licensee, we have our own VM, I would hope that makes our Java plugin less vulnerable.

I might be able to get away with disabling the Acrobat plugin, but I need some sort of PDF viewer because a lot of the documents I have to read are only available to me in PDF. I might be able to get away with disabling Flash, although other divisions' salesmen have been publishing some videos they want me to watch on YouTube, and the old version of a system I'm helping write a replacement for uses Flash on its front page. (You didn't mention QuickTime, but the above-mentioned audio-video-conferencing platform exports recorded conferences as either QuickTime or Windows Media, which means I need a player for at least one of those formats.)

I guess I could run a pluginless browser (say Konqueror?) in a low-privilege account in a VM, or on a remote server, and use only that to access third-party vendor and customer websites... but Java was supposed to solve the "running code in a browser" problem when it first came out, right?

Really this is a black mark for Oracle, even though they didn't write the MySQL database: they've been owners of that website for over a year now, and they were selling "unbreakable Linux" way before that; what kind of system-administration process is in place that allows an unknown party root access to one of a company's high-profile front pages?