When considering solar power, wind farming is quite practical for large scale production (not for the residential home) however you still need some sort of storage or alternative power generation to offset the hours or even days when there is little or no wind (hence a survey).

Actually no matter what methods are used for large scale energy production it will always be "consumer pays", so if you as a home owner want to offset your electricity bill then solar panels are the way to go, but only after you have done your homework and by that you need to work out the initial costs verses the longs term benefits. Unfortunately it is so easy for so called "experts" to rip people off since most people have no idea how to work out what really is best for themselves in regard to energy utilisation.

I hope you realise that Redhat 6.2 release/update came out on the 6th Dec 2011, which IMHO is fairly recent since 6.2 is still under "Production 1" support. Will it run on older hardware well yes it will providing you have checked what hardware is supported. I have actually upgraded (well reinstalled) from Redhat 3.1 to 6.1 on Proliant hardware with graphics support without issues.

I never have recommend upgrading (not just Redhat but all version of Linux/Unix) from one major release to another, preferring a fresh install. In fact I have found this to be far quicker with less problems.

As far as VM's go I have always used VirtualBox and have never had issues with Redhat. CentOS, Ubunto, Fedora and even Solaris.

I agree, it sort of reminds me of the alcohol Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. While I would assume that was brought in by well meaning people, however they did not think it through and that led to "boot-legging" and organised crime. Even today alcohol abuse actually kills more adults than smoking which in itself can cause all sorts of health issues.

Banning so called recreation drugs including unhealthy food and drink is not really the way to go. The best solution is unbiased education but even then you are always going to get abusers who will ignore all the facts and do what they want since it is really their choice. Personally if people wish to abuse themselves and as long as they don't hurt others which is easier said than done then let them.

If it is legal for UK intelligence to monitor people connecting to a service outside of the UK then using their argument it should be legal for them to monitor all incoming and outgoing communication and by that I mean phone, fax, surface mail etc. Where do you draw the line? Hmm! better get out your brown shirts and polish your jackboots (be careful of knives in the night), fortunately I have not seen anyone sporting a Charlie Chaplin moustache yet :)

Basically if you display 80 or even 120 lines of code it does not matter if the monitor is 1080 pixels or 2160 pixels in height. Sure the higher resolution will display a well designed highly detailed font better than a lower resolution font but that is all, however programmers normally use a mono-spaced font like "Courier" so a fine detailed font is pointless.

Displaying more than 100 lines of code in the window/screen is IMHO stupid because the human eye and consequently the brain is not going to help you debug or even write code any better than if you used 24 to 80 lines. When coding you need to know what you are writing the code for and you should be writing the code in such a way that it is easy to understand and hopefully easy to debug.

As for gamers a screen with a 30Hz refresh rate is pretty much the "sweet spot" for general gaming however fast action games such as FPS's and racing benefit from high refresh rates such as 60Hz and above.

If a programmer is coding for a game then they will need a high resolution monitor with a good refresh rate, assuming they are going to use the monitor for both applications, although if you look at game programmers they normally use two or more screens with at least one low resolution for programming and the other a high performance one to test out what they are developing.

Err! not all organisations use Microsoft Exchange.

I assume NSA has such a massive amount of storage to do just this and it must be a logistical nightmare (not to mention expense) to back the whole thing up and keep the tapes safely stored. The next question to ask is how do they collect all this massive amount of data since they would have to have a means of capturing all emails from all mail servers that they can infiltrate since in most cases it would be done illegally. A "man in the middle main server" could do this but once known it is simple for a System Admin with appropriate approval to route mail to a different mail-server and notify the appropriate authorities (namely police) first.

Even capturing email metta-data is also problematic since the above still applies and foreign countries take a very dim view to this (especially if it done from another country), hence the backlash to the Snowden whistle blowing. Of course that is not to say some countries can't be hypocrites.

It is when that hard drive has been hit with a sledge hammer a few times or put through a shredder, which is precisely what some organisations require when a drive is faulty. Of course the data on the faulty disk can't be copied over to the new drive because "the old drive was faulty" so data is effectively lost. Backups? what are they :)

Actually keeping a copy of received emails is just about impossible without duplication since backups are normally carried out on a daily basis at specific times. If you as the receiver delete select emails before the backup can save the emails they are effectively lost. However if the mail system duplicates your email specifically for backup purposes then it can be argued that this is effectively tampering with mail and in most countries this is a serious offence. This won't stop backing up metta data (ie mail to/from and time) files which is important when users complain that their mail is either not being sent or they have not received it. Using the mail metta data for other purposes is IMHO tantamount to snooping which depending how the Law views this can be taken as a serious offence.

BTW. On the subject of email metta-data. The only way for an outside source to get this is either request it formally via legal channels or get it by stealth and if this is the case then the laws of most countries would treat this as a criminal offence. Of course the System Administrator has access to this data so like it or not you do have to trust your System Admin.

The problem any person (Government Official or other) has with email is deciding what to keep and what to delete and while keeping all outgoing transaction is fairly simple, keeping all incoming mail can result in your mail-box filling up which normally gets you a nasty email from the system administrator. Sure you can keep all mail on your PC (if you have one) but again you can still run into space problems and how many PC users seriously back-up their machines anyway :)

True, but if you have radical changes to the environment and there have been a few in our planet's history then life-forms which cannot adapt are going to become extinct.

In what way is intelligence a handicap? Intelligence allows what would be a fairly physically weak species to survive when stronger non-intelligent (from a human perspective) species die off or become extinct. Pit an unarmed human against pretty well any predator past and present and that predictor will win, however pit that same predator against an intelligent "armed" and organised human and in most cases the predator will most likely be food or clothing.

Err you do realize that OSX is not Linux don't you?

There are good and bad programmers. The bad ones don't last long before their credibility is in tatters and they never get to work in the programming field again. One major thing I always look for in software is it's ability to be maintained. If not, as far as I am concerned it is junk and should be replaced and replacing is not that difficult when you know the core requirements of the software.

Just saying all software is terrible (I won't de-nigh that some is) and insulting all people who do programming is very short sighted and your credibility in saying that is effectively shot.

I run Fedora 20 and have just got the latest upgrade of SSL. Yesterday it was:
openssl-libs-1.0.1e-37.fc20.1.x86_64
openssl-1.0.1e-37.fc20.1.x86_64
With the last entry in the "libs" change log being Mon Apr 07 2014.

Today:
openssl-libs-1.0.1e-38.fc20.x86_64
openssl-1.0.1e-38.fc20.x86_64

From the "libs" changelog (removed the accents from the name):
* Thu Jun 05 2014 Tomas Mraz 1.0.1e-38
- fix CVE-2010-5298 - possible use of memory after free
- fix CVE-2014-0195 - buffer overflow via invalid DTLS fragment
- fix CVE-2014-0198 - possible NULL pointer dereference
- fix CVE-2014-0221 - DoS from invalid DTLS handshake packet
- fix CVE-2014-0224 - SSL/TLS MITM vulnerability
- fix CVE-2014-3470 - client-side DoS when using anonymous ECDH

Not bad a fix, virtually on the same day the vulnerability is announced. Of course in a production environment you should not be using Fedora but if you are using Redhat there is a fix already, however any self respecting System Admin should now be raising change requests to upgrade the relevant packages (you most likely don't even need a reboot although managers normally feel better with one) after checking with their software support. Actually the same procedures should apply for any Linux distribution that is used in a production environment.

Sure. Buy a mac. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks macs are overpriced trendy hipster-ware.

We are talking about $400 and I assume that is in the USA. just saying "Buy a mac" is a bit unreasonable since you have no idea what that person wants the computer for. If they want the PC for gaming although IMHO $400 is a bit cheap for that, then a MAC is most likely not suitable.

If they want to predominately surf the web or just some general purpose computing such as view movie files, edit photographs, basic office work .. etc, then a machine running an Apple OS, MS Windows OS or even a Linux distribution OS would be fine.

Of course if they are considering the odd "Games for Windows" as well then they are pretty well locked into a Microsoft OS and for a new machine that usually means MS Windows 8/8.1.

Have you ever seen and compared an equal sized (assuming an aspect ratio of 16:9) 4k TV against a 1080p TV with appropriate content respectively? There is a huge difference although there is little content for 4k TV at the moment.

Err 4k TV with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (most HDTV's are this) is actually 2160p (3840x2160 pixles) and surprisingly the difference in price may only be about 20% more than a HDTV. 8k HDTV's are really in the prototype stage and will most likely be quite expensive when they do come out.

This is going to be interesting, since there are few if any content providers (ie. Free to Air, Foxtel, etc) that provide more than 720p and will not provide 1080p content for the foreseeable future so what hope for 4k and 8k. I would assume the 4k and eventually 8k content will be on Blu-Ray disks which would require you purchasing a 4k (PS4 and XBone can supposedly do this) and eventually an 8k display device (PS5 and maybe an XB180/??? :)).