Some of the worst pizza I've ever had was in Florence, Italy. Just terrible. Mostly raw, unseasoned ground beef as a topping. Probably the best pizza I've ever had was from Glass Nickel in Madison, WI. I live in New York, BTW, and there is a greater proportion of good pizza here than in most places I've been to.

because there's more h1n1 than regular flu anyway.

I'm one of those lucky people that got h1n1, and I can say that it is just a "regular" flu. It's just another strain like all the others.

I concur with meerling, JWSmythe, and Fantastic Lad on almost all points. Also no mod points!

I have to agree (and I'm an asterisk administrator). If you have POTS lines, the best way to utilize them is with an old school analog phone. There is no combination that is more reliable, and if you have a good phone and your phone lines don't suck, the sound quality will be excellent. Connecting old school POTS lines to VoIP PBXs or even older digital phone systems is very often problematic. If you want to use a modern phone system, use (more) modern phone lines: BRI, PRI, or just go with direct VoIP connections.

Not really. Statscounter, for all its bias and flaws, shows that most of the IE6 users are in Africa and China. North America, and especially Europe have far fewer IE users, and very few IE6 users.

I'm an asterisk administrator for several systems. I try to keep them up-to-date with the latest versions that patch security flaws, but I can't always get them updated immediately. The easy answer is to just not allow SIP or IAX (or MGCP, SCCP, etc) access from the entire internet. I firewall off those ports except to certain locations that require access to them.

One big question I have, though, is what about all those appliance-type IP-PBX's from the old-school vendors like Panasonic and Toshiba? I would wager that the vast majority of those are NEVER updated after installation. Surely they are subject to many of the same security flaws that Asterisk's SIP stack are. I know that at least one of Asterisk's security advisories was for a fundamental flaw in the SIP protocol. All SIP-capable PBX's would be vulnerable to this. Are Panasonic and Toshiba just not talking openly about this?

Fortunately, I am my own boss, and I would never do that. Oy! After a few early mistakes, I decided that I would not take on any jobs where there is not a clear path to completion and payment. Tablizer, it's a trap! Get outta there!

I was a Sysadmin and later IT director for almost 10 years. I, too, got really tired of the thankless work, staying up all night fixing broken stuff and having nobody even notice; having people literally yell at me because the copier had another paper jam. I quit life as an employee, and started my own IT support company. That wasn't a whole lot better, and when I started getting requests for websites, I jumped at the chance. I had to learn SQL, but I had most of the requirement of a CS degree, so I already knew C/C++. It was a short jump to PHP and Perl, and I had to brush up on HTML/CSS/Javascript a little. Since I've gotten better at SQL, I've taken on some DBA work, too. The people I work with as a developer actually seem to appreciate what I do, and I'm no longer the on-call IT dude. I do still fill in the gaps with IT work, but it's getting less and less frequent, and I couldn't be happier about that. Good riddance to IT work. I'm much more suited to development. Maybe it would work for you, too.

There may not be DRM for VHS, but there is an equivalent: Macrovision. You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovi_Corporation

And how to crack it here:

http://www.hackerscatalog.com/Services/TECH_Notes/nineteen.html

Word. I've been waiting for so many years for real typography on the web. Firefox just got support for @font-face, IE and Safari have had it for quite a while, and Opera support is forthcoming. If webkit supports it, why doesn't Chrome? Maybe google ditched this feature for some extra rendering speed? Please add it in, Google! We need real typography on the web!

Hmm... maybe this is all a secret plot by frustrated web developers trying to rid the world of IE6.

In which case: Go Mydoom!

they grind up birds like no tomorrow.

From what (admittedly little) I know, the current turbines pose no significant threat to birds. Unlike older turbines, the new ones have large propellers that move relatively slowly, and tests have shown them to be easily detectable and avoidable by birds. I remember reading that many more birds die flying into glass windows on large buildings than by flying into wind turbines. If it's any indication, my brother is an ornithologist and changed his stance a few years back to support wind turbines.

What effect did he have on politics, economics, the environment, diplomacy, transport, health...?

Why, no appreciable effect at all, but are any of these things more or less important than his cultural/musical impact? Are politics more important than music?