I've been professionally using, recommending, and supporting actual SMTP servers for email servers, a clean IMAP service and client for the email access. The interwoven account management very complex database storage of email in Microsoft Office have proven extremely fragile and not helpful to system automation or security. Note particularly that almost no company can run an MS Exchange server directly exposed to outside email: almost all use a commercial or in-house service to pre-filter the spam, and these are almost entirely Linux applicances.

The only compelling reasons I've seen to remain with MS Exchange ahve been legacy workflow, and the quite good calendar integration of MS Outlook with the MS Exchange server.

Gnome.

The Clipper Chip, and the SkipJack tools based on it, mandated, were a high grade hardware encryption for which the government would hold all the private keys. It had several flaws, and was discarded when it turned out to violated several patents of Silvio Micali, an MIT professor. It also turned out to be possible to generate your own private session key, which the government would not have, by running it for about 45 minutes communicating to another such chip and testing keys until you found one that passed the "Law Enforcement Agency Field" hash check. It was also expensive, about $25/chip.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and the "Palladium" technology, renamed "Trusted Computing", have achieved most of that chip's goals with even less legal protection. The "Trusted Computing" tools used to lock modern computers from booting with unauthorized kernels and built into hardware encryption and DRM for modern Windows systems has pretty much the same capability, with _Microsoft_ holding all the private keys in escrow. They hold the master keys, they hold they key signing keys, and they have the ability to _revoke_ and replace keys on active systems so you cannot even access your own hardware after such a revocation. And there is no direct judicial oversight even _available_ for such a company owned private repository. It's even more dangerous than the central signature authorities for SSL keys, which mostly protect transient communications. It's like a central, corporate owned repository for GPG private keys, along with the ability to rip the keys out of your hardware with normal software security updates.

Amusingly, it has a fundamental and embarrassing technological flaw, much like the Clipper Chip. It can be software emulated in virtualization environments. So the DRM capability, which is a major factor in _funding_ its development, has been made somewhat poiintless. "Trusted Computing" protected documents and especially visual and audio media can have their displayable content tapped from the byte streams of the video and audio outputs.

> Incorrect. The House passed numerous bills since 2010 and made numerous concessions to Democrats. Only the Democrats (Reid, Obama) would not negotiate. It's well documented.

"Well documented" by a "fair and balanced" news channel, perhaps? I suggest you take a look at the voting records on the "Obamacare" health bill, on anything that involves birth control, and on anything that affects Latin American immigration.

I'm afraid its primary use will be as an NSA honey trap, to allow federal agencies to be able to look up reported vulnerabilities and use them without warrants, due process, or notification of the victims of federal monitoring.

> For external conversions, all what matters that the internal format can be easily converted into the widely used encodings.

And this is the difficulty. It's not the _ease_. It's the consistency, predictability, and portability. Many external displays of Unicode content have varied between platforms in alarming ways, especially due to mishandled character displays which the programmer has little control over. It may have gotten better since my last go-around with it, but even simply layout issues like column alignment have been screwed up, especially when the legitimate Unicode character generates an erroneous on-screen error code instead of a single character display. And _that_ can ruin Nethack layouts, in ways unpredictable to the maintainers.

It's a tax on a system that profoundly affects interstate commerce, and a great deal of "Internet traffic" and "Internat commerce" are interstate.

> Everybody has already settled on the little-endian presentation.

What makes you think this? There are plenty of old Motrola architecture based systems still in legacy environment use, preserved for stable scientific or business computing environments. NASA has a great deal of it still in use, because they've been forced to keep old earthbound hardware in use to support old spacebound mission hardware. And there is a significant amount of new, bi-endian hardware being produced now,

I'm afraid I have quite a lot of experience with Unicode compatibility and cross compatibility. Frankly, for a multi-platform tool like Nethack, I'd stay with the 8-bit, one byte, extremely stable 'POSIX' standard.

The old POSIX compliant user-group-others model does have some limitations. The non-root user can't arbitrarily add another individual user to have access or deny access, and only root users or site admins have access to create new groups. In the older systems, such as in UNIX's /etc/group and /etc/passwd, groups cannot contain other groups directly and there's a maximum line length on the number of characters in the "/etc/group" line. This gets quite awkward if you have hundreds of members of a group, or want to be able to say "all members of this group, *except* this one account, should have access to this". It means you have to add a new group and reset all files to owned and managed by that group: it can become painful to administer.

When compared to the obscure rat's nest of ownership in NTFS, however, I can see why the old POSIX ACL's have remained in use. And let's make not be confused, in the Windows world it is _extremely_ common to leave file ownership profoundly broken.

> Unix/Linuxs permission system is 70-era bit-saving stupid. There is no other way to put it.

It's extremely simple, and extremely fast to handle computationally. Those "bit-savings" come out of every file system access, including pipes and symlinks and block and character devices. When a developer "meets the limit of what can be expressed with a single-group me-us-everybody", it's usually a sign that they're doing something fundamentally wrong and trying to invent special groups of their own on the fly. It can also be the case that they're trying to allow access for one other person at a time, which I acknowledge can be problematic if you don't have easy access to create or remove user groups.

There are network based file systems that support more complex Access Control Lists, ACL's. NFSv4, for example, supports it. But it also tends to be confused, abused, and unstable in use.

Pinball.

Telephones actually ringing.
Rotary dials.
Hand-cranked telephones, which I've heard in equipment that I restored as an act of technological homage.
Children playing outside in most suburban streets.

> While pshycology is not as easy as other medicine and physics, there is no doubt that it is a science,

There is certainly _some_ science. But a tremendous amount of it is theory driven nonsense. Look at how psychological and psychiatric was limited until the discovery of seasonal affective disorder, the better diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the unfurling of phobias from the "hidden memory theories" that Freud popularized.

The reference to David Miscavige and Tom Cruise looks like a reference to Scientology, which makes clearly fraudulent claims about "scientific" discovers but are actually rooted in hypnosis and conditioning under a lie detector.

That sort of thing pays a lot of my salary and consulting fees for my group. Code even six months old can be nightmarish to dissassemble and replace when the original programmer is no longer available, or doesn't care enough to remember why they did things. I find myself treasuring the experience that helps me rember _why_ we did things certain ways before a new application or operating system even existed.

It's true today. Many of have to deal with internal corporate web services that do not have a signed SSL key, or deal with intervening proxies which we have no choice but to use in our environments.