What isn't true? That water can kill you in high doses, or that the ratio between toxic dose and normal intake would rank it fairly high on their charts?
If you drink enough water within a relatively short time frame, you will die. Look it up. You have to drink a lot, but it's not an obscene or unreachable goal, though you would probably be very uncomfortable.

Nutmeg's ratio wouldn't come close on their chart. Sure, it's sold in quantities that *may* kill a human, maybe a child, but the regular dose is a light dusting of it. It's overdose ratio is probably up there near cannabis.

How are CDROM, DVD, and BD more proprietary than what Nintendo and Sega used at the time?!?!

Satellite radio (SiriusXM) packages start at $9.99/month and go up to $18.99/month. If you want to listen to Howard Stern, or any sports, or their up to the minute traffic and weather, or get any of the 70 stations not included with the cheaper plan, then you need the more expensive option. If you want to listen to sports and that includes both NFL and any other one (MLB/NHL/NBA/etc), then you need the most expensive package.

When the two were competing (Serius and XM), the lineup differentiation made sense. Now that they're one company, it just looks like they're milking it for every dime they can get:
$9.99 = 80 channels that are essentially those in common between the two
$14.99 = 140 channels from the old lineup (either the Sirius lineup (howard stern, NFL, NASCAR) or the XM lineup (MLB/NBA/NHL)).
$18.99 = 150 channels with the combination of both of the special features.

$4.99 for ad free pandora seems about right. Granted, I think they should all be cheaper, but I rarely listen to anything.

Money.
They are businesses, therefore they want/need money.
There is little risk in this. If the (Iranian) user complains or sues, to whom will they complain? The user was breaking the law.

In general, you're probably right. However, if the Iranian government wanted, they could simply block access to that outside VPN that was not working with them, thus artificially limiting the users choice to those that abide. It's really not a far stretch of the imagination to think that may be happening.

Someone really needs to define "children". This conversation is an absolute mess without defining the terms we're using (include a description of the various levels of "bad" content as well).

I was around and of prime age when BBS's were popular, and I had two computers, but we didn't have a modem, and I didn't see anyone that had one. This has little to fuckall to do with this conversation :-)

How was it different back then? In that, there IS a huge difference. The entry age to someone getting access to these areas was MUCH different. The percentage of children under 8 that had unfettered and unrestricted access to BBS's was nearly, if not absolutely, zero. Today, the percentage of children under 8 that have unfettered and unrestricted access to the internet, often via a phone, ipod, or tablet, is significant**.

** I don't know the exact figure, but I have eyeballs. I can see enough kids with those things that I know it's non-zero.

Combine those two, and there's a solid case for internet filters. Add to that the idea of "surprise" links or posts, such as cat videos that end up being dickspin, and there is plenty of reason to have, at a minimum, some basic filters on all items with access to the internet that your kid uses.

Lastly, why the hell is everyone shying away from the actual question? Who cares about the motivation?!? Maybe he wants to sell it to people he knows? Or maybe he just wants to know what's out there for some other reason (to build something else off of those tools)? Why do you care so much about the absolutely useless part of the question, and why are you ignoring the core question?

Obama said,"The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers."

That's utter BS.
* If it's some local law enforcement types, they've already been unable to do this in a timely manor for ages. The public doesn't demand answers because the answer is clear - the data was thoroughly encrypted.
* On the other end of the spectrum, if it's something we're not allowed to know about (NSA level terrorist stuff), then the public won't know about it to ask any of those questions.

Some edge cases in between those:
* it's still high level, but the public does know the NSA knows... then they can clearly get a warrant and trace the source. They also have the most massive amounts of cpu power and maths to throw at the problem, so if anyone will get to the root, they will (assuming it's something they have full authority to rampage after full force).
* If it's still local law level, but pretty important, they can also escalate and get warrants and get the FBI/etc involved as needed.

In either case, a backdoor doesn't solve the problem if said person is using something that doesn't have a backdoor (or has one unknown to the agency working the case). Backdoors have been identified (and originated in the NSA) before, and none of those helped all the normal cases (state/local). We have no idea if that helped any other cases that were top secret (and/or questionably legal), or to what extent... but that doesn't matter with regards to Obama's statement because we, the public, won't be demanding answers if we don't know about it.

Besides, if he's only worried about saving face, that's an awful reason for anything.

Let's see.... who owns Hulu? Twenty-First Century FOX, Walk Disney Co, and NBCUniversal (owned by Comcast). Gee, wonder how they're able to get series faster?

Who owns Netflix? Publicly traded Netflix does, and it was started by two guys (Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings).

I'm not saying any of them is perfect or anything like that, but comparing Hulu to other services like Netflix or Amazon Instant Video etc is just not possible. There's a significant problem regarding media distribution rights and licensing, and it just keeps getting worse. Companies have tried to setup DVD players and stream that and got shut down; There's the recent place that had an individual antenna for each subscriber and the streamed OTA (over the air) digital TV, and got shut down; Netflix would love to have loads more shows and movies, as would Amazon I'm sure, and as would lots of companies, but the various media companies keep that from happening.

IMO, hulu, as it currently exists, is only allowed to live because it reduces piracy and keeps the likes of Netflix at bay (makes them look bad.... skim some of that money for themselves). The various players and point to Hulu and say, "see, if it was viable then this would be doing better and offering all shows for free and 100% ad supported, or vice-versa and 100% pay supported".

In addition to all that, Comcast was one of the companies with the biggest Netflix conflicts (network stuff), and yet they own a part of Hulu... how is that fair competition?

Sorry ramone, and all those like you. IMO, this /. post thoroughly proved your point. The majority of posts are from people trying to argue that knowledge of fundamental concepts are not needed in order for them to do their job; they missed the point entirely.

First, it must be re-stated that you're looking for a senior developer/architect. This isn't someone who can just get their own job done (give them a complete spec, and they tappity-type-tap and write the implementation), it's a position that must have a solid understanding of many fundamentals, and the ability to think and combine those and problem solve and make the spec that someone else may use.

I'd argue that, when hiring for this level of position, they should know many of the things brought up throughout this /. page:
* basic PKI principals
* linked list implementation from scratch (pseudo code is acceptable)
* basic understanding of sorting algorithms (ex. bubblesort)
* how CIDR masks work. If they don't know this offhand, then ability to pick up the concept quickly once explained.
* bits, bytes, kilobytes conversions
* basic SQL syntax
* basic DB concepts (ex. normalization)
* basic understanding of binary trees
* knowledge of some raw protocol (nothing specific, but they should probably have picked up a few of these in their years of work. Examples: http, smtp, ftp, memcached, imap, dns, etc).
* waterfall vs agile etc
* basic storage concepts/implementations (RAID levels, LVM, networked filesystems, distributed filesystems/locking, snapshots, copy-on-write, etc)
etc etc etc...

Some folks even implied that appropriate candidates may not do well in the interview when asked questions that make them think on their feet (implying they may have social or communication issues). If one can not do so, then how are they appropriate for a systems architect position?

Missing any one of these wouldn't be a deal breaker, but if you're hiring an architect, he needs to understand the materials he's working with; and if you're hiring a *systems* architect, he'd better know what he's working with.

That was a bit much just to say, "I agree". Good luck out there.

Change that (as the candidate), and you're quite likely to get more job offers.
In every interview I've ever had, even from back when I was a kid getting a paper route, the interviewer asked if I had any questions (sometimes with the suffix of "about the job" or "about our company" etc). Come prepared! The interviewer had to come up with all their questions and concerns and such, and you should too! When you do, you'll seem very smart (knowing what it is that you don't know is more important than recalling facts, and it shows an strong interest in your career and quality of your employer).

As to the general knowledge questions (the replies here made me feel quite good about myself), those in TFS aren't bad. The general process of private/public key encryption is some very old and well defined maths. If they don't know anything about it, then they don't know anything about that whole subject area. That may or may not rule them out for certain projects/positions. Maybe a follow up request something like, "here's a computer and the internet; I'll come back in 20 minutes and will ask you the same question again". For the question regarding sending something sensitive, that could have any number of answers that could be appropriate... how they solve that problem is a good example of what you'll be getting. If it's, "paste the thing into excel and clicky-clicky and send them the password via SMS", then that speaks volumes about that candidate. Exchanging information securely is hard (applying encryption correctly is the easy part).

:-) This topic is perfect for /. because of the complete lack of scope.

When you refer to "scripts", what level/layer are you referring to? I don't even think there is a well defined naming convention for that (ex. something like an OSI model with respect to configuration of hardware).

Given the networking example...

On the GUI level, there are loads of interfaces, many specialized, to aid in configuring the network. Some of them are protocol-specific, such as various VPN utilities, kppp and other ppp utilities, dial up interfaces, and a bunch of wifi ones too. Many of those are somewhat modular, with a backend/libs, command line interface, gnome/gtk interface, qt/kde interface, and possibly others (curses, xfce, tk, etc). That said, there is a primary target within this cadre: Network Manager and all its cousins.

On the other end of things, within the kernel, there's loads of drivers and standardized ways for those to interface with the various kernel subsystems. Those drivers necessarily have a wide variety of options... that's kinda the point. The vast majority of those can be compiled into the kernel, built as modules, or not built at all. This layer is fairly well defined as there is a clear separation of user space and kernel space; this ends at the first layer that provides a user space API (and this could be considered to constitute two layers... kernel space and user space of that... think OSI layer 1 and 2).

On that kernel level (similar to OSI media layers), I don't think we have a problem. This is, at least partially, due to the monolithic nature of the kernel and it's management by a benevolent dictator. A few comments here have mentioned support for old hardware, but I don't think they are referring to the drivers themselves nor the kernel... they're likely referring to something further up in user space. IMO, if the question is posed here, the answer is "No, Linux is not becoming too complex".

On the top end of the GUI side, I'd also argue that, "No, Linux is not becoming too complex". Yes, it can be a quagmire of various utilities at times, and some work better than others, but that *should* be fine. Hell, that's the only way to quiet those that complain about supporting all that old hardware - just snip it out of the GUI utility or hide it in advanced areas. I would never want to enforce a rule that these must all go through some specific middle ware, though that's really the part we should all be talking about.

So... the middle. This thread referenced "/etc/network/interfaces". That does NOT exist on all distributes (ex. redhat based systems don't have this). Personally, I like /etc/network/interfaces, but it's a good example of fragmentation of "standard" ways/interfaces to configure the kernel networking subsystem. Is it bad that debian and redhat both do it different? IMO, the "becoming too complex" question would imply that this is NOT bad, since this has been this way FOR A LONG LONG LONG TIME, and I'd agree that this amount of differentiation is ok and even good, but this could easily be argued is and firmly into the grey area.

The part that I have very large concerns with is what is currently happening with the low-level just above kernel... specifically, systemd and its related parts. Networking is an example here, as one of its goals is to provide one unified/common way to configure the network.... but doesn't that already exist!?!? It's called the kernel! On the other hand, maybe it will prove to be a useful shim? The fact that a single framework is going in above the kernel, which some direct ties to the kernel, and is casting a very wide net in terms of things it is, or can, control (logging, network, dhcp, login, init, sessions, mounts, consoles/vte, timedated/ntp, devices/udevd)... we'd better hope and pray it's designed well cause everything and the kitchen sink will soon have direct dependencies on the interfaces it's implementing.

Grow lights; Bitcoin/etc miners; Servers; Electroplating; whatever...

Any spikes will be pretty easy to see. Just put a cap on it and bust those that are exceeding it. Bonus, you'll probably ID a lot of existing growers/etc.

As far as the basic idea of free minimal amounts of electricity to the poor, that sounds like a very good thing. Heck, just give everyone their first N kw/month for free.

While I agree with the sentiment, I think you're confusing XFCE and XUbuntu. The distribution, XUbuntu, chose the default theme. For 12.04, that's Greybird, which has 1px wide borders. I've honestly been quite annoyed with that, and I had tried other themes in the past (much much older installs), and just learned to deal with it. HOWEVER, I just tried the theme's again, and "Default-4.6", which I assume is the default XFCE theme, has 5px wide borders... those seem just right to me.

So, complain to XUbuntu. XFCE provides a default theme that fits your default needs. In addition, it's REALLY easy to change your theme. If they had set it to the 5px wide one, I'm sure someone else would be complaining because the border is taking up all their precious screen space and why should they have to go into a menu to ... blah blah blah. The fact is, there is an easy to use settings manager, and it's a couple click to change it. THey're not burying settings like so many other apps these days (gnome, firefox, chrome, etc).

RE the bolded part, it's a well known syndrome known as the second system effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors due to inflated expectations.
The phrase was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/360 on the 360 series."

You may be asking why it was gnome 3, rather than 2, and that's because 1 wasn't really a success (2 was a simple evolution of 1). In 3, major changes were made to meet some new design ideas. Ditto on KDE4... they made it through 3 major releases before succumbing to the need to re-write.

I honestly hope the following is helpful...
It sounds like you just need a decent window manger, rather than a whole desktop environment.

You can configure it as one would have done with startx (editing ~/.xinitrc), and instead just edit ~/.xsession. For example, have it include:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
xterm &
exec xfwm4

You may have to tweak your desktop manager (gdm/xdm/kdm/lightdm/etc) to use an xsession. For lightdm (default in ubuntu 12.04), here's an example of how to do it:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Custom...

You can add on whatever panels, launchers, etc you'd like that way, and keep it as light or heavy as you want. Replace the xfwm4 with whatever window manger you want. NOTE: that xfwm4 won't run the whole xfce desktop... it's just the window manger. Personally, I'd suggest taking a look at sawfish, but to each their own.

If this all means that the new ma bells will be selling off all their landline stuff, I'm all for it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

All the systems have re-united under either AT&T or Verizon. There is a spattering of smaller LEC's, but those two hold the vast majority of system. Why did we break up Bell before? Why in the world did they (regulators) allow these to coalesce?