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

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.

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?

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.

Needing to hand-translate a program into a separate language for each platform violates don't repeat yourself.

We start with the assumption that the vast majority of the market isn't willing to pay a company substantially more to ship a formal proof of a software product's security along with the product. I'm interested in your bright ideas for making such a formal proof economical.

It sort of reminds me of Bill Meyer's negative space cipher.

If I were making a Windows 8.1 video, it'd go like this:

1. On the Start Screen, click Desktop.
2. Open Internet Explorer.
3. Go to ClassicShell.net.
4. Download and install the Classic Shell application.
5. Congratulations! You have upgraded to Windows 7.1. Now watch our Windows 7 video.

Yes, that's how important I think Classic Shell is: it goes on even before Firefox.

There are areas where land's contribution to the cost of food and shelter can far exceed the contribution of labor. How much does farmland cost again? And where can one lawfully pitch a tent to sleep for the night?

My understanding is that capital gains tax is lower because the business you're investing in has already paid its half in corporate income tax. It's like the FICA (Social Security and Medicare) tax in the United States: part of it gets deducted from gross income, and part of it the employer has to pay separately.

Just because no carrier will provide a cellular signal to a smartphone doesn't mean it's useless on the black market. Is it really that hard for a thief to fence an iPhone as if it were an iPod touch?