I rarely reply to ACs, but this one is right, especially if you live in the South where tropical cockroaches like to nibble on PCB boards. Cover the air inlets/outlets with window screening, and clean them occasionally. Keep the box up off the concrete, it sweats and the case will corrode where it touches cement. My advice would be to strap it to the bottom of the floor. That will keep it away from rodents and most of the roaches. A fanless case would be preferable, both to keep out dust and because otherwise the vibration of the fan will come up through the floor. Pay attention to orientation, if you ever have to swap out a drive or plug some USB device into it you don't want to have to take the thing out of its mounting to do it. What are you doing for power? Not many crawl spaces have power to anything but maybe a pull-chain light bulb. Run a decent grounded outlet, extension cords get brittle, corrode, fray and get munched on.

Reporters Without Borders is not a French group, it's mostly a creation of the US State Department. You're thinking of Doctors Without Borders, which actually does some worthwhile work.

At the time the intel looked good

Uh, no. Saddam's son, who had been in charge of the program to destroy the WMD, defected to the west, bringing 11 filing cabinets of documentation with him. The US/UK knew very clearly that they had been destroyed, and in fact 10 Downing Street was complaining internally that "the evidence is being fixed" to falsify the reasons to invade. Iraq was allowing the inspectors free rein by then, even allowing them to search his private rooms in the various presidential palaces. The inspectors said that they were "more than ninety percent finished" when the Bush Administration told them they had to leave because the Air Force was going to target their compound.

You do realize that the Westboro BAPTIST church is not Catholic right?

Way to miss the point.

I think you just stepped on your own post. So far the Supreme Court has allowed prohibitions on hate speech, and until they rule otherwise it can be banned.

in the USA you can only restrict speech that poses an imminent danger of unlawful action

Where is that defined in the Constitution? Hint.. It's not

Horsepuckey. If you threaten to kill me you can go to jail. There are lots of limits on speech, and rightfully so. You're free to threaten to kill me, or to yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre, as long as you're willing to deal with the results.

Most of Gros Pointe Shores is extremely dangerous to black people at any time of day. By stepping inside the city limits they are allowing themselves to be arrested and beaten without recourse to the courts.

Even more epic fail, I've worked on the MS campus a lot, and in fact installed much of the security hardware. I take them on a mental tour of the campus, trying to get them to tell me what building they're supposedly working in, ask them whether the Ms Pacman machine is still in that stairwell, etc. It can be fun.

One would think that when I tell them that I've done server and desktop support for close to two decades it should scare them off, but it doesn't seem to. The ones that I've gotten have a script, and they'll follow it off the edge of the Earth. I've kept them on the line for up to 23 minutes, and even then I only hung up because it was time to throw things in the wok and I needed both hands.

why "Windows makes it so hard to do stuff"

It's what you learn on. I learned on Windows, when I use a Mac I'm utterly lost and think "Why did Apple make it so hard to find anything?"

I'll guarantee that if you and I spend the same amount of money on a Windows and Apple boxes that I *will* get superior hardware, but that yours is tested by Apple to be compatible with their OS. We'll both get operating systems that we understand where all the moving parts are and will both think that we got the better deal. If MS were to have full testing and approval of every piece of hardware and software and all drivers ever installed on every Windows workstation since the beginning of time it would be known for its stability as well. Instead MS went for maximum flexibility, with the result that their software is installed on most of the desktop computers and around half the servers on the entire planet.

We can only hope. It's not an easy job, and the pay/benefits tend to dissuade those most capable of doing it well. Application and network security get all the attention and all the budget, but what good are they if someone can just walk up to the server, download the database to an external drive, and walk out?

We've never had any problem, but we don't move money around beyond buying a piece of property or building a house. We just leave our money in US accounts and withdraw it wherever we are. For sending money to family we just leave one of our ATM cards with my brother-in-law, and he does the withdrawals for us. $3 per withdrawal, plus another $1.50 fee from his bank, and happens instantly. (We used to do money transfers, which cost $40, plus $10 in Peru, plus 1% of the amount withdrawn, and would take anywhere from 4 days to 4 weeks to arrive.)

Friends of ours have a business cleaning corporate offices. Twice they have been offered money to plug a netbook into a network port in an unoccupied cubicle, leave it for a few days, and then bring it back. They didn't of course, but it must have been tempting.

I can pretty much guarantee that the reason for this is the difficulty hiring competent guard staff in the SFO area. Silicon Valley salaries have have inflated the local pay scale enough that security companies are having trouble finding people willing to work for crap wages and still have an IQ above room temperature. The way contracts for the really large companies are generally done is the security vendor will offer to cover staffing for all their sites throughout the country for a certain price. Too many management types will automatically go for the lowest bidder, and competition for the major contracts is fierce. Of course the salescritters will always low-ball the price, so the local security managers are stuck trying to pinch pennies while providing the staffing levels contracted for. Apple and Google are going to skim off the cream of the available guard staff, leaving the dregs for the security contractors to dispatch to their other customers.

My wife is dual Peruvian/US citizen, and has passports from each country. Because traveling as a Peruvian generally means getting a visa beforehand her Peruvian passport remains unused. When we went to the college one of the first things that she did after getting her legal residency was to establish her legal residency in the town where we lived so that she could pay local tuition rather than the much higher out-of-town tuition or the obscenely expensive foreign student tuition. Working here in the US is also a royal pain, should your kids ever wish/need to do so, for a non-citizen.

BTW, I lived in Peru for three years, never filed to pay taxes during that time, and when I moved back to the US just filed them as "late" and paid a very minor fine. This was two decades ago though, so that might have changed.