"No, a firewall is an application"

Please learn what the hell you are talking about. I accept your apology.

"We are also blocking the ports at a local level using hosts.allow and hosts.deny. You don't NEED to use a firewall process to block things."

A firewall isn't a process, and you misinformed us. You originally claimed you don't have a firewall, but you just said you do have a firewall, you just don't know that you have a firewall. That being said, Have a nice day though!

I think you are pretty confused. If you need to use enterprise level tools you use enterprise level hardware and network configurations. This means that, if you are going to use it you have a separate NIC for each node and an "Oracle Only" subnet. If you don't / can't do that, you are most likely using a tool for which there is no actual need. In other words, you're doing it wrong. Even in this case, you should certainly be blocking the unneeded ports in the 0 - 1000 range.

" If I occasionally drink alcohol, then yes, I'm at risk of becoming an alcoholic."

Again, you have no idea what you are talking about. Your belief that you "become" an addict based an a use pattern is what makes it blairingly obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about. Until you have a drink of you have no idea if you are one on not. Once you do, if you are an addict (or in your words, an "alcoholic"), then you will drink differently from other people immediately. It affects an addict differently than a non addict.

"I claimed that responsibility decides whether you resist the temptation to experiment with drugs or not. "

Yes, and I pointed out the fact that you are an idiot who seems to think he is one of the few responsible people on the planet.

"But I would prefer if you keep the insults to yourself. Unless that is your addiction."

Yes! You nailed it on the head (pretty good for an idiot, actually.) I wasn't an inslult addict, but then I insulted you just one too many times, and now I'm an insult addict! Moron.

You should have paid more attention. This allows, at a minimum, them to not search the whole internet searchning for code. The proles will bring it to them! Why pay someone to look all over the internet for FOSS code and go through the work of pulling it to their servers, when trusting morons will push it for them?

"You know, the code that is already open and scannable by a web crawler"

Have you ever tried to write a Webcrawler that will crawl the internet and differentiate code from everything else there, determine if it is FOSS, decide if it is still in active development or interesting, etc.? Clearly not. You might think you can easily write an AI Webcrawler, but I assure you that you cannot do it at all.

Nobody mentioned rape, and nobody wished it on anyone.

Yes. You are more responsible than surgeons, for example. Either that or you are an ignorant idiot who still can't figure out that the reason you can stop at one beer is because you are not an addict. You still don't get that it isn't prolonged and excessive use that makes an addict, but being an addict that results in prolonged and excessive use.

It's called Boot Camp. In other words, no, I'm not making the claim and never did. Also, nobody in their right mind would ever do it unless they had a corporate imposed need.

"Here you can see your posts 10 pages in : http://slashdot.org/users2.pl?...

Congratulations on finally having something to add in a Slashdot thread!

"I have a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering."

You should demand a refund.

Yes, because one abberation equals a norm.

I absolutely agree with that assessment :-)

Or I misspelled it. Perhaps you were unaware that the "e" and "a" are nearby on the keyboard?*

* I don't type using the "Mavis Beacon" approach, since it is the primary cause of RSI. I realize it would make such a mispelling unlikely if I did type in that manner, so I suppose your ignorance can be excused :-)

Actually, some people do question their quality. We call those people uninformed, or in a word that gets people hot under the caller because they don't know what it means: ignorant.

"Most people seem to have this perception."

There is a reason for that. It's called reality.

"the collection of burned up power supplies I accumulated over the years (often due to crappy designs with improper strain relief on the cabling)"

Yes. The whole laptop sucks because you don't know how to use a cable without damaging it.