Again, I disagree, and I'll add that I'm basing this off of personal experience. With proper training any reasonable policy should be able to be implemented, the hard part is actually making sure that people are trained and understand the repercussions. "Hard" is the operative word, it's not "impossible," and can even be easy if you do it a lot. If you have important data, like medical records, credit card numbers, socials and people don't follow simple policies like that, then they should be terminated. If you're telling me that in your organization anyone can just walk in and plug a laptop into a jack as long as they're wearing coveralls and a Verizon badge, then I truly hope that you don't have my SSN or credit card info. An inability to enforce such a simple policy in an organization that deals with sensitive data is a terrifying thought.

I respectfully disagree, it's very easy to put a policy in place which states that any visitor to the office needs to have a representative from within the company vouch for them and act as an escort on premises. If everyone knows the policy it's not very difficult to enforce, all it takes is proper training. It's a pretty small price to pay if your data is important enough to worry about it in the first place.

At Towson University, which is located outside Baltimore, they have a "guest," unencrypted, open WiFi network that anyone can join, but which is out in a DMZ. After you connect to that you're brought to a landing page about the secure, authenticated, WiFi network, which is tied into AD. They have a java auto-configurator applet that works on any OS. Should that fail, or should you be running a linux box without a JVM, they have a shell script you can download right there to get you running. I believe that also have a dmg, but I don't remember. This is a university with a full lab of Linux boxes, exclusively Samba-based student storage, and automatic SSH access to a dev environment for every single student, though, so YMMV. There are definitely universities out there that support Linux, there's no reason they shouldn't aside from, well... the money it takes to hire people who know anything about Linux.

I'm not doubting you, however I run reverse proxies with Squid3 using both SSL offloading onto the proxy server as well as SSL passthrough and I've had absolutely zero issues. Are there documented cases of problems with SSL through modern proxies?

once you get past say six programs, it starts taking way longer to alt-tab than it's worth

At that point I just start closing programs. I don't often encounter situations where I have more than six programs open at once and am actually using all of them.

...which means taking a good 300% more time to maximize a window

I disagree, I feel that the time it takes me to center my mouse over a tiny little button and click it is about the same amount of time as it takes me to quickly swipe the pointer up the screen dragging the titlebar to the top. In addition, if you use multiple monitors, this feature rocks - you can drag a maximized window from one monitor to another and keep it maximized. This may sound trivial, however if you used multiple monitors in XP you would know how annoying it is to have to minimize or restore a window, then drag, then maximize. In addition, I rarely actually use the mouse for these functions (indeed I rarely use these functions), I use meta+up for maximize, meta+left/right for side-snap, and meta+down for minimize. I guarantee that's quicker than doing anything with a mouse.

I also never, ever minimize, I just keep everything maximized and alt-tab. I can't stand using an application that's not taking up the whole screen. If I really need to look at two things at once I use the Win7 side-snap. That's what the Gnome designers are saying, as well: just don't minimize, ever, because what's the real point? And with maximize - are you really claiming that double-clicking anywhere in the titlebar is 3x slower than getting your pointer into the maximize button? In the end It still does just come down to personal preference, though; if you have two programmers watch each other use a computer for 30 minutes, I guarantee each of them will walk away thinking that the other wastes time in navigation.

Imagine a PC dealership trying to enforce such harsh software usability limitations like "never ever install any other software than the one you got it with, or forget the warranty"

Fair enough, but If I then imagine a car dealership saying this, it makes pretty good sense that installing custom software on my car would void its warranty. I'm not saying that cell phones are like cars, but I am saying that cell phones are different than PCs. If you brick your phone because you accidentally overwrote the bootloader, they should not be held responsible, you should. You can always say "well, you can always put the bootloader back on if you know what you're doing," but the truth is that a lot of people don't, and the manufacturer shouldn't have to shell out for their mistakes. That being said, I do feel that locking people in with certain software options is really, really crappy. You should be physically able to install whatever software you want in an ideal world.

They weren't given to companies, they were given to to APNIC, the Asia Pacific regional Internet registry, so they could be split up and sold to private companies in reasonably-sized chunks.

Haven't they been on Nagios Exchange recently? check_catastrophe.pl has been out for like 3 years!

check_catastrophy -H blowout-preventer716.haliburton.com -w ANY_LEAKS - c ANY_FRIGGIN_LEAKS

Seconded - these were great for any age and I think there are still new versions of them with nice prototyping boards built in. Look on the shelves near the dwindling supply of components in the now tiny bins at the back of the store.

Great, now I'm sad and pinin' for the fjords!

PININ' FOR THE FJORDS!?

Check out the graph for Perl! I might start using it again just because I feel like I owe it to the old friend...

Fair enough.