He's a physicist. He was just imagining the electrical grid as a perfect sphere on an infinite frictionless plane.

Unless you said the bolded portion gleefully while grinning and rubbing your hands together, you don't really hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux Zealot.

/Linux sorta-Zealot

It's already close to 99.99%. Set up ssh on port 22 and don't block it. Check your security log. Valid logins versus failed attempts to access root, admin, or other common usernames. Even with fail2ban or denyhosts and ignoring slow distributed attacks like in the article, the number of failed attempts can sometimes dwarf valid logins. I remember the "Web 2.0" just prior to captchas. It was tough finding content that wasn't written by a spambot.

Sort of like how a destroyer is easier to lift with one's bare hands than the Empire State Building?
The real bad part about a grammatically correct sentence is memory mutation.
"I'm going to take my dog, Spot, to the park."
"I'm going to take my dog to the park today."
"I'm taking my dog, Spot, to the park today."
"#&@*!!! What was that passphrase?"

the block size setting is a lot of bs. (bs=)
You can't be guaranteed to escape a kernel panic or general screwiness when the system tries to use swap space or access a file. That's why I suggested a "run from RAM" distro.
Also dd dead stops if it hits a bad block. You're better off using shred or ddrescue to overwrite stuff when going directly to device.
You can target other partitions like say, /home , /data , /var , etc. if you've actually partitioned them separately. You can also turn swap off and target it. But like I said, you're best off nuking from RAM.

An OS reimage with 'doze and use sdelete.exe from Sysinternals Suite. http://technet.microsoft.com/e...
Or 'nix, dd a huge file and shred it (remember to restrict the passes with -n since the default is "a lot")
Neither is perfect, but better than delivering your data to the next schmoe on a platter (pun intended).
If you can request the specific OS image, send them a copy of a memory-resident linux installation configured to auto-wipe the HDDs with shred.

"What can I do to supplement my Java-oriented studies?"
Learn C. Learn C++. Learn Assembly. On the other end of the spectrum: Learn LISP. Learn Prolog. Learn learn learn.
BTW, I heartily agree that Java should be a second-year type of language. "Now that you know all about pointers and how to use them to make the data structures we discussed in CS 190, we'll let the computer handle memory management so we can focus on algorithms."

Switch all of the info docs back to man pages. man pages are neatly organized and have all of the info in a handy grep-able format. info help pages are as disorganized as 1990's websites with their random hyperlinking. Something GNU got waaay wrong.

I thought Interpol existed to catch Carmen SanDiego.

The type of people who bought the Wii will use it until it dies. Nintendo saturated the market and should have focused on selling Wii games or attachments. Of course, some MBA tool will decide that future consoles should self destruct when a newer console becomes available. That will kill your brand faster than anything.

Why not? Put congressmen in jail too.

Astrophysicist kept his foot on the scale again.

Gandalf knows that Sauron is back. This directly contradicts LotR. In fact, there's no reason Gandalf would let Bilbo keep the ring once he knew Sauron existed. And what's up with the Smaug fight scene? Instead of deducing Lake Town as the source of the intruder and exacting his revenge on the town (since he can't find the intruder), the movie version of Smaug runs around under the mountain for a while (so they can show off all the cool under the mountain visuals) then inexplicably decides to leave the dwarves without killing them. And the barrel riding was supposed to be a leisurely ride down the river; an escape plan showing the dwarves how clever their burglar really is, escaping with no danger or bloodshed. Also, Smaug didn't die in the second movie. That's the climax of the second portion. The cliffhanger should have been the first hints of the gathering of the five armies.

How did they get the gull to say that? Was it part parrot?

Children who smoke their mothers have bigger issues than DNA alterations.