I've seen the baseball diamonds near my house used exactly twice. Once involved using it for fireworks. It was built around the time of the 1964 olympics like nearly every baseball diamond in the country.

When a bat is going to cost you $300 and a full uniform and gear to play on a team is close to a $1000, there isn't much demand. The Melbourne girls baseball teams positions are more about forfeits than wins.

I don't know why the local baseball teams need such formal rules with such official imported uniforms. What ever happened to wearing a shirt the right colour?

That was true before the days of disposable servers. Today, when it breaks, drop it from the pool of working systems. The HVAC is on a lease contract which makes them far more reliable as the manufacture no longer gets s cut by selling parts that used to be used for maintenance. The same is true with power systems but the electrical wiring is massively overbuilt between the stuff under contract and the racks. I have a rack in a recently built data center and they have an electrician on site less often than some small companies I work with.

Some people have been using port knocking to allow remote admin yet cut down on the ssh bots trying to login.

It would be trivial to do the same in a cgi where if your ip address is 1.2.232.121 you have to hit /target/232 then /target/121 to get the real data.

The problem is modern operating systems have taken on too much of the operating environment role leading to excessive complexity. Our modern opening systems are hypervisors like like xen or vmware. The OS has become a mess of other things that aren't related to security and suability of a system. The Operating Environment is where the rapid changes and R&D should be so features can progress and mistakes can be quickly removed.

... and not developed in the USA.

A thousand times this..... XFCE is great - but screen tearing and vsync problems make me rage. Now, I'm back to Windows 7 - although I did enjoy KDE - simply because it was the closest to XFCE and doesn't have tearing / vsync issues.

Now if only we could get decent power management on Radeon cards and three screens..... :)

Fixing bugs like the many year old "You have 39423 new messages" when a single message pops into my inbox would be nice.

I hate to say it - but most people who do OSS work for the masses don't get paid for it.

I do packaging for Xen used from hobby users through to Disney - yet I get about $400AUD per year in donations. I also have to go buy my own test hardware (I need UEFI kit atm!).

I understand exactly what Werner means and the challenges faced - but I too don't see a solution for this. OSS has been linked for too long as a 'free solution' - which means nobody puts a currency value on the software and services that are made available to the world. I think its the mental relationship of OSS being 'free' causes it. Nobody blinks an eye to pay $100 for a Windows license - yet go for a $10 donation to an OSS project and people lose their minds...

Someone used to collect videos of politicians singing Happy Birthdays in places where they are legally required to pay royalties but I don't remember who it was.

We need keys and host passwords checked as authentication types without having to revert to PAM hackery. Just how many systems have been exploited because some root process found a way to read some .ssh/keys and then hopped to other systems with no human intervention.

Where they acted like children:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/1...

The fun continues:
http://phandroid.com/2015/01/2...

And then this:
http://www.knowyourmobile.com/...

So yeah - they're nowhere near a mature company - and lets not forget when they forked CyanogenMod and pulled the "You made this? .... I made this!" move when getting venture capital in the first place...

Cyanogen sold out a LONG time ago..... Then screwed over a few phone manufacturers, and now this. Great track record they have...

Why not 20 digit number where wrong numbers all answer and charge the caller? That would fix telemarketing forever.

And wait until they start snooping everyones traffic and data mining it... for profit - I mean, reliability monitoring...

On another note, I see you're looking at hotel bookings with another hotel chain at your next destination.........