Very rarely do teams bring their A game, or all their fanciest plays, to the exhibition matches.

If you're talking about the Unix epoch, shouldn't it ve 1970? While I know the 0 of the Unix Epoch, I have no idea what weekday it was.

Thank you. I didn't have to think about this ever since college.

There are also a plethora of "technically correct" answers. You could say: "I scp the file to your server", where you presume the server is secure, and ssh is secure, so the documents confidentiality is guaranteed. (Upload the file using https works as an answer too). Hey, just connect to the companies VPN and copy the file to a Samba share. Valid too!
The question of what kind of file it was, isn't even that dumb. I'm not familiar with PDF, but I could -for example- imagine there is a standard for encryption within PDF. Someone from with a document management background would most likely think of such solutions.

It's a vast field, and expertise of people is usually just a subset. I'm not even sure what the answer you you expected was, but I'd say: I'd use your public key to encrypt the file to you and then send it to you. Personally, I wouldn't know which commands to invoke to do this, but I know that's the theory.

So, should any developer know this? That is debatable. I've had very competent developers who had next to no clue about how DNS works. They could do their job just fine with that. Me? Personally, I'm not up to snuff with the finer points of SQL queries and all the joins that exists and when it makes sense to create an index, etc. Could I find out? Most likely, but I haven't had the need to recently.

The problem is, that you are mapping your knowlegde to "what people must know". I used to do that too, and I probably still do often enough. The DNS example above didn't come from nowhere: I had the case, and I was really thinking "how could such a competent person not know this", but then this person could probably enlighten me about dozens of things I don't know well enough.

It all comes down to what you define as "general knowgledge" for a developer should be and that is highly subjective.

TL;DR Hiring people is hard. Especially, technical people.

Yeah, I was being somewhat flip. Of course natural compounds, often plant-based, are capable of making large changes to body structure and chemistry; we call it 'medicine.'

Hallucinogenics on people who possibly aren't really capable of giving properly informed consent, though? That gives me pause, I'll admit.

Do you honestly think 'Hey, I'm looking for a way to wire up a button to trigger an SMS or email' would have gotten posted?

I don't. That's a google search. That's a solved issue.

But: "Hey, my epileptic wife who's medication doesn't work so well any more stays home all day with my baby and two-year-old, and I need the two-year-old to be able to push a PANIC button in case mommy has a bad seizure! How can I roll my own?" Now that, my friend, that brings in the page views.

I tried the following. On the affected machine, I created a DomU (Virtual Machine), assigned it 4CPUs, 4GB RAM and two disks. A root disk on which I installed a minimal debootstrapped wheezy, and an empty disk for the dd test. I made sure the VM boots from the affected kernel.

The bug doesn't happen in that context:

root@minimal:~# ssh root@othermachine "dd if=/dev/vg0/remote-lv" | dd of=/dev/xvdb1
root@hammerhead's password:
31457280+0 records in
31457280+0 records out
16106127360 bytes (16 GB) copied, 2156,62 s, 7,5 MB/s
31457280+0 records in
31457280+0 records out
16106127360 bytes (16 GB) copied, 2164.91 s, 7.4 MB/s
root@minimal:~# uname -a
Linux minimal 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Of course, the situation is not exactly the same in a virtualized environment.

The thing is, this is the host, not the VM. I haven't seen it happen in a VM yet. (In Xen lingo, it's the Dom0 causing this). However, you're right, I should try to reproduce it in a virtual environment. I'll try to do so.

Unfortunately, I was not diagnosed until I was in my 20s (Asperger's wasn't in the DSM when I was of prime age for someone catching it, and I'm a woman and considered "gifted," which made me even more likely to fall through the cracks of the system), so I didn't get the early interventions. However, I can share my experiences from *not* having those services available to me.

Sorry, did I read that correctly? Do you think Autism is something you catch, like a flu?

Also, pinball machines.

Not in evidence.

True, true, but not a completely unreasonable inference.

It could as easily mean she had one seizure after 10 years without and in an abundance of caution they want to add monitors. What is it these days with making assumptions that would explode William of Occam's head and then condemning people for it as if it was verified fact?

Erring on the side of caution. Though, to be fair, your 'once in ten years' statement is about as hyperbolic as 'OMG two hour seizures and the kids are instantly smoking crack!'

Honestly, the guy should have left all of the details out, and just asked about something that can detect a circuit closing and do something about it. Enclosure contacts are a cheap and bog-standard thing. But, without the salacious details to rile everybody up, would the question of landed on the front page?

Well, the original story says 'Her seizures have been well controlled by medication until recently.' Therefore, they are actively expecting more, and they're bad enough that he feels the need to have remote surveillance.