I don't deny this. The entire health insurance industry is a parasite on our economic ability to keep people healthy; it extracts value from the economy without producing anything of greater value. However, in the current environment, it's practically non-optional (actually, post-Obamacare, it's required even more so, but it was almost mandatory beforehand too). Healthcare in the US is phenomenally expensive compared to practically anywhere else in the world, and while I'll happily note that our doctors are excellent, they are *not* worth what they cost in most situations. Very few people set aside the kind of money required to cover the time when they *will* need it, and even those who otherwise would do so may find themselves unable to set aside that much if a medical emergency hits them young.

So yeah, universal health insurance (through mandatory patronage of for-profit insurance companies) is a sucky attempt at a solution. Sadly, it is *still* better than what we had before, for those who previously simply could not get such insurance due to pre-existing conditions or medical history.

While I agree, in general, with the claims of how shitty Obamacare is...

I have friends who now have health insurance, and another who has finally been able to leave his old employer (to start his own company and become self-employed), because of Obamacare. Specifically, two of these friends are cancer survivors (throat and cervical), one has fibromyalgia, and one has a chronic autoimmune disorder whose name I forget. They wouldn't have been able to buy health insurance, otherwise; nobody was willing to offer it. So, for them personally, Obamacare *is* better than what they had before.

Of course, there are a lot of less-fucked-up ways of addressing that issue.

That's *significantly* less than I made as a no-benefits intern (if you had extended said internship to a full year) with 3/4 of a Bachelor's degree six years ago. It's about 2/3 of the entry-level salary for a developer around here even if you aren't working at the good places, about half if you are, and that doesn't include benefits.

Are you sure that union is helping out? I mean, I assume your cost of living is a lot lower than mine - I'm in Seattle - but that is a seriously mediocre amount of money for this field. Are you saying that would make up the difference between what you make now and what you would be making working some other field?

Note that I'm not opposed to unions in theory. I just tend to think their implementation tends to have problems and sometimes is a significant net negative. There are fields where unions make a lot of sense - construction comes to mind, for example, and mining, and other dangerous jobs where one worker is largely interchangeable with another and consequently the workers have no power - but IT in general (be it support, development, consulting, or so on) are not such a field. I work 40 hours a week, have four weeks paid vacation a year plus paid sick days and holidays, can work from home when needed, make six figures plus bonuses, have a generous training budget, and get benefits. I'm 4.5 years out of college with an Engineering bachelor's, and took a six-month break in the middle of that. What would a union have gotten me that could possibly be worth its dues? That's ignoring the risk of the union making it hard to get rid of the people who sincerely need to go, and other such potential problems.

1 - Right-click the network icon in the system tray (it's in the same place on all versions of Windows from the last decade, and XP too for that matter).
2 - Select "Open Network and Sharing Center" (if on XP, just go to Properties, but make sure you got the right network interface if you have more than one).
3 - Click on the network interface name (something like "Local Area Connection" or "Ethernet"; XP users skip this step because you already chose the interface) to open the interface status.
4 - Click on Properties and, if not already running elevated, go through UAC. This gets you where the XP users were waiting (for the 13 years since their OS came out...).
5 - Double-click on "Internet Protocol Version 4".
6 - Change IP.

There's a number of alternate ways though some of those steps. You can also short-circuit the whole thing using netsh, but it was implied that you wanted the GUI technique. Oh, and these steps work for the last four (arguably five) OS releases, on everything from the extremely basic Starter SKU to the highest-end Windows Server Datacenter Edition to even the RT versions. Care to give the steps for Ubuntu 9.04 (a mere five years ago), or for Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc.?

MS creates a lot of generic drivers (think stuff like USB mass storage, generic monitors, SATA controllers, Media Transfer Protocol devices, anything like that where there's a standard that the hardware implements). You can get a basic (but functional, if you don't mind probably having the wrong video resolution) computer running almost entirely on Microsoft-written drivers.

With that said, the vast majority of Windows drivers (by count, not necessarily by usage) are developed by hardware vendors. Microsoft probably doesn't even have 20k people in the Windows org at all, even if you include test, PM, and management. They certainly don't have that many on the kernel and devices team, never mind the portion of that team which is actually developing (including designing and testing) drivers.

Wow, you didn't even read the *summary*? That's some impressive skill there. Hint: Juniper routers do *not* run Windows. They do terminate SSL though, and therefore see all the data that goes in or out. Which means Heartbleed can be used to extract all that data... including login credentials.

No, it's not a good point because you're missing the entire point of the Heartbleed vulnerability. Heartbleed lets you get *everything* SSL-related on a host. It's not "just" the private keys and such; it also contains passwords, authentication tokens, two-factor auth values, and so on. In short, it gives you everything that is required to successfully impersonate a legitimate user, and gain just as much access as that user does.

As for IDS, how the hell is an IDS supposed to recognize that this is an attack? Sure, if it could recognize Heartbleed requests that would work, but if the IDS had been updated since Heartbleed went public then surely the router would have been updated too...

I like how you didn't actually refute a single one of my points. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to be subjected to insults on my intelligence from people who can't even make a counter-point. The closest you came was failing to understand what an implicit bribe is. If the crash dialog message - the one that pops up when the program segfaults, the equivalent of Windows' "do you want to send an error report to Microsoft?" box - includes a button to submit feedback about this whole project (which just ate your file and wasted your time), most people will ignore it but some fraction will take the chance to vent some spleen. That kind of thing is easy to get added to a project if you have a little money to funnel to some coder, but will inevitably produce far more complaints than accolades. There's opportunities all over something like this for money to subtly make life better for those who complain.

But, if you want to take the concept of "bribes" more literally, remember my third point above. There are, statistically, many times as many people who are annoyed at this software as there are complaints filed; given the number of people involved in this project that's inevitable. People don't like change, they don't like needing to learn things, they don't like it when the new thing introduces even minor annoyances that the old thing lacked (and conveniently forget that the old thing had worse annoyances that the new one doesn't), and there's always the minority who honestly like even an inferior product. If Microsoft managed to identify even 10% of those people and give them the least bit of incentive to file a complaint, most of them would not turn it down. "Oh wow, sure, I'd love tickets to the football [soccer] game! ... Ha, you want to hear my thoughts on the software? Be ready for an earful! ... You know, I'd never thought about it before, but maybe if I complain somebody *would* notice..." Hell, just offer entry in a drawing for some fairly-cheap prize if people submit feedback and then only advertise the drawing amongst the disaffected...

I will readily grant that I'm surprised that so many people thought gothzilla's post was insightful, considering that it literally contains a fundamental flaw of reading comprehension: the inability to separate the hypothetical scenario from the statement of fact. I never implied, or even "ask[ed] questions" suggesting, that this had actually happened. I pointed out that it was *possible*. In fact, I explicitly pointed out that it was implausible. Did you think I was trying some weird reverse psychology BS?

As for the "naïve" part, it's either that or simply ignorant of history. Microsoft, and various other moneyed interests on the other side of the libre-vs.-proprietary debate (Oracle, SCO-via-Microsoft, Sony, etc.), have a well-established history of throwing money are successful open-source initiatives and sometimes successfully making them go away. In what world is "Microsoft has money, Microsoft wants people to complain about the project, therefore Microsoft finds a way to buy complaints" not a completely obvious possibility to anybody who isn't the "oh, they would never do that!" category of naivete?

Maybe its a queue for Linux developers to pull their heads out of their asses

There's a line for that? Man I just thought we were supposed to do it on cue...

Reading comprehension fail?
First, I said there were ways it *could* happen, not that I thought either had occurred. So no, I don't "really, honestly" believe that...
Second, bribes don't need to be anything explicit - in fact, they rarely are, simply because it's so likely that people will report it - there just needs to be some kind of incentive. It doesn't need to be anything traceable to Microsoft; the people taking the hypothetical incentive never need have known from whence it came.
Third, there are always tons of people upset about any given change; with the years this project has run, MS has had plenty of time to find them and encourage them to complain. No need to bribe people to file false reports; just convince those who wouldn't otherwise have complained to do so (and maybe those who would have sent praise not to do so).
Fourth, I'm a security consultant. It is literally my job to be paranoid about potential attack vectors. That doesn't mean I think they'll happen - in fact, another part of my job is rating the risk of each threat coming to pass - but it's there.
Fifth, anybody who *doesn't* see that as the obvious answer to how MS having a bunch of money at stake could lead to this is (IMO) dangerously naïve. It's not complicated; it just requires asking yourself how you could generate complaints if you had lots of money and no morals.

In fairness, there are at least two ways that could happen:
1) MS bribes people to complain. Unlikely, but not impossible.
2) MS bribes the relevant officials to *say* there have been overwhelming complaints. I mean, there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes. The question is at what point they become important enough to sway the overall decision.

With that said, I suspect you're right.

"Long-term" in this case meaning hours rather than seconds or minutes, which are typical times for a capacitor to discharge to an effectively useless voltage (though I admit to not having tried building a system that could use them). The system my parents use can run off stored capacity for around three days if needed (assuming typical usage but no charge for whatever reason), although the batteries would suffer damage from being drained (typically you don't want a nominally-12V lead-acid-chemistry battery to drop below about 11.5V if you can help it, anything below 11V and you're probably losing significant capacity; empty is around 10.8V).

Gel batteries are a form of sealed lead-acid, yes, although not the only such form. Another common one is AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat). I forget exactly why we went with gel instead of AGM cells, but there was some reason (and it wasn't cost; AGM is cheaper). In any case, there's some interesting reading about sealed lead-acid batteries on the mighty Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Apologies, you're correct. You'll note that I used "energy density" later on.

Also, it may cast doubt on my knowledge (which is actually fair; that's a easy mistake but also a beginner or casual one) but I don't think it casts aspersions; you should look up what that word means. Anyhow, I'm a computer security engineer, not an EE or an electrician. I've only ever wired one large PV-charged, DC-stored home electrical system, and did it with under my father who *is* an EE. I'm guessing that's still one more than you, though, and the aforementioned system is still going strong some 12.5 years later (though the batteries did need replacing once and the charge controller got upgraded).

I'm not sure if the sarcastic approach was the right one here, but I agree with what I'm pretty sure you mean. Sarcasm has no place in rational debate, though; it's a tool to play on the emotions (humor for those who support you, anger in those you lampoon).

The concept of making a post endorsing the presentation of rational arguments via the use of sarcasm is... weird. You aren't going to get many people disagreeing with you that, objectively, logic and citations are goo things, so there's no need for satire, either. What gives?