I have no opinion on the change.org website, but I do object to your feelings about SGU.

I too had to 'force myself' through season 1; I hated the build-up of the characters and the spun out "we have problems out there AND at home, man we're pathetic" story line. BUT, once they got over that and got (some) control over the ship, things got quite interesting imho. I quite enjoyed the end of season 1 and probably the entirety of season 2 which you -I'm pretty sure by your sentiments- probably didn't bother to look at (yet).

I agree that I only kept watching it because there wasn't much else to view + I had all episodes on DVD. At first I was on the 'I can see why they cancelled this' team too, but in the end I think they completely missed the ball.

... I assumed everybody knew by now you should always go with Monster Cables ! ...or maybe they didn't run them in properly ?

I've tried 3 monitors for a while and it didn't 'work out'. I think mainly because my eyes/head had to turn too far to go from the left monitor to the right monitor.
Admittedly, this was with 3 different monitors so not quite the layout as you suggest, but still.

Anyway, I absolutely agree that going from 1 to 2 monitors is a big jump up in productivity !

I wonder if Comcast users will get reprimanded for watching this ...

AFAIK, most of Europe-mainland runs on 220V but you're right that some buildings have 3-phase 380V coming in which might indeed cause some legs to not see the other as they are on different 'combinations'. But in this case I doubt this would have been the case. Then again, I too find it strange that a GFCI would interfere with the signal so I'm most surely going to ask him next time we meet. Interesting take on the problem.

Anyway, my neighbour and I tried to link our powerline networks just for fun but the devices were unable to see each other. Not sure if this is because we're on different 'legs', because the distance is too big (not-connected houses, all in all the cabling takes about 100m) or because the meter-boxes between them somehow block the signal. The only thing I know for sure is that there is no transformer along the route.
Wifi works fine off course (line-of-sight is a much smaller distance to begin with).

PS: most PoE devices allow for some kind of encryption along the line, it's probably more secure than some of the things we have on wifi for the simple reason that I don't know about any software that automates brute-forcing the thing, thus keeping bored script-kiddies out. Off course I never looked for it nor have a clue on how hard/simple it would be, might well be that some determined technician works around it in couple of minutes; I'm most certainly not holding my breath on that one. Personally, I run mine completely open as I assume that the lack of encryption saves me a little on energy and gains me a little on speed, although I fear both will be very marginally.

I'm not so sure about this. At least here in Belgium most apartments have their own 'circuit' with electricity meter and ground fault circuit interrupter(s) [GFCI]. From practical experience, the signal will not get through that barrier.
In fact, a friend tried to connect his (free-standing) garage with his network in the house using EoP and couldn't get it working as the cabling to his garage had an extra GFCI upon entry. As a work-around he installed an extra outlet 'before' the GFCI and plugged the powerline in there, works like a charm.

The trouble is not that you're writing some big blocks, the trouble is you're writing a lot of small blocks. Given the way NAND works, even changing 1 bit requires an entire 'sector' to be erased and re-written.

FYI: To avoid my SSD getting worn out too quickly I've taken the following measures :
* I enabled write caching and turned off write-cache flushing for the SSD.
* I disabled the 'last-accessed' thing on NTFS, not sure what use it has anyway
* tempdb (MSSQL) got a (small) extra log and data file in a ramdisk, seems MSSQL prefers to use that part over the ssd location as long as it has free space in there
* when testing out IO-heavy stuff I always try to do it from a combination of the ramdisk/secondary HDD unless I'm in a hurry and then I use the ramdisk/ssd combination.
* I take backups pretty much every weekend, if things go wrong on Friday you'll hear me curse from 3 blocks away but in the end damage will be limited.

I've considered figuring out how to put e.g. FireFox cache in the ramdisk too, but in the end I think adding more RAM would probably have a much bigger benefit as the filesystem then can do some extra caching without having the memory pressure to write the buffers to disk.
I've also been meaning to try out eBoostr to 'cache' the most active parts of the secondary HDD by means of the SSD, but most stuff there is either 'very big' (games) or very volatile (source-code) or simply not worth caching (music).

I may have sounded a bit too harsh, I did not mean to slam you as an evil-doer. Upon rereading my post it seems it does read a bit like that though, sorry.

Anyway : I really don't care what you do with the data that passes through your network. Like you said, there is no EULA/SLA being agreed upon so implicitly all is fair imho. I mostly wanted to point out that there's probably a lot of people, me including, who have Skype running all the time who thus inadvertently --quote: "Anyone pounding on Skype to get it to work gets banned by IP address" -- will be denied access to the network entirely while in fact they may have no bad intentions at all. AFAIK I can't make Skype play nice, but then again, I haven't tried very hard either. I understand you want to block things like Bittorrent and eMule etc... the only reason I can think of to run those over "free wifi" are to avoid getting metered on one's own ISP connection and/or trying to avoid getting traced'; both things an open wifi should not cater for indeed. Then again, I've heard WoW also uses bittorrent to push updates so it might be more of a grey area than expected.

PS: In a way I actually applaud what you're doing as it helps understanding how things work under the hood; there's way too few people around who wonder/care these days... Simply don't abuse whatever you find.
[preaching mode=OFF]

I understand the why, more or less.

But honestly, how many laptop-screen-size-like TV's have you ever seen ? There isn't all that much overlap IMHO ! The resolution of a 32" TV (or bigger) may be identical to my Dell laptop here, it still requires a different production line to make this 15.6 inch screen. They could have stuck to 1920x1200 and pump out just as many, it wouldn't have affected the TV-production-lines in any significant way IMHO.

(I guess they can re-use the driver/electronics parts somehow but I doubt it would add that much to the cost. Damned bean-counters.)

That's not quite true.

My wide-screen allows me to have 2 pages next to each other which can be utmost convenient at times. Off course you need to have decent resolution for that, but I have my current wide-screen 1920x1080 over your 1280x960 any time. Sadly there's a lot of 1366x768 screens out there which is like going back to the middle ages.

I'll admit that I hate everything has shifted from 16:10 to 16:9 though, 1920x1200 was bliss.

So, actually, you've been running a 'not very open wifi' ... worse, seems you're actively playing Big-Brother on unsuspecting users. I guess those tcpdump logs must have gotten you quite a bit of login/pwd credentials. Not that I care that much. If you log on to some unknown SSID you're implicitly giving up all "rights". IMHO that's true for anonymous wifi as well as the UTP port in your hotel room. Heck, I often wonder how much of my paid-for traffic is being traced/rerouted/throttled/manipulated by my ISP.

Anyway, to be honest, I think you're a bit harsh on Skype and iCloud. I have no experience with the latter but I have Skype running 'all the time' although almost exclusively for chat. So if I'd connect on our network, I'd get black-listed "instantly" although I'd probably would not want to do anything other than check email, see if any messages are queued on Skype and browse around a bit.

If everyone would use these 'rules' for his "public" wifi we'd soon all be running VPN services that route all traffic via port 443 leaving 'volume' to be the only viable measurement left.... So why not simply skip all the complexity and ban abusers when they are hoarding the connection ? I honestly don't understand what it is you are trying to protect here, it's not like 'exotic ports' are a scarce commodity or anything... Simply turn on quotas and throttle whomever tries to get more out of it than seems reasonable. I'm pretty sure I do a lot less 'damage' to your network with 'my' Skype than some random guy watching HD Youtube videos.

PS: IMHO you also seem to be naively paranoid about 'hackers' willing to put in effort to circumvent your rules... do you honestly believe someone will be that desperate ? In an extreme case scenario I can see some bored neighbour taking a stab at it just for fun, not because he actually needs it but rather because a closed up system screams 'hack me' to the 'initiated'. Once he had his fun and that itch is over (s)he'll be gone again but you'll probably go all mental if you read the logs =)

ah, I guess that's why all laptop and computer displays these days are plasma then ?

We did rewrite the question over time as indeed some people managed to understand it in other ways than we intended.
But if the answer is just a copy-paste of the sample output (including the three dots and 'etc') then he either missed the question or was putting up his middle finger to us. Not sure which one it was (I presume the former as he claimed to be a SQL enthusiast but was unable to OUTER JOIN two tables) but the end result was that we didn't think much of his programming skills indeed.

In any case, that answer will never be the only reason he didn't get hired; chances are we'll never hire anyone if we get too picky. We have several people from several departments talk to most applicants; usually those who do things related to the things found on the CV and/or the things found in the application advert. And quite often people get turned down because they try to bluff their way in. It somehow seems logical to me that when you write on your CV you speak a certain language fluently but when presented with a native speaker it turns out you're unable to keep a simple conversation, well that will reflect bad on all your other 'claims' too. Same goes for all the buzzwords regarding IT IMHO. Just put down what you know/can, add what you've worked with in the past with a note that it's been some years and for crying out loud don't go wild on every single buzz-technology you might have ever read something about.

PS: It's too long ago for me to remember how he did on those other tests/talks, but all in all it's always the combined result of these tests and those interviews that go to HR and they decide on who gets the job (or not).

Alas, he DID include the 'etc' =/

Otherwise, if he had done as you suggest we might indeed have considered it a valid answer. Although we'd probably have asked him about it in the talk afterwards.
In fact, we've had several 'creative' solutions to the problem were they somehow interpret things in the most contrived ways and I think that over time the question has been changed slightly and split into two questions to make it as non-ambiguous as possible.

From top of my head it's now something along the lines of :

1) write a function that takes a positive integer as argument and returns a bit that indicates if the input is prime or not.
2) write a procedure that prints out the first 100 primes using the above function.

And yes, we've had solutions that hard-coded-wise check if the input is 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or ... for the function. But AFAIK, so far nobody persisted all the way through the first 100 primes. Those that started out hard-coding them kind of realised they were on the wrong track when working on part 2 and either gave up or wrote a more generic approach. Those that already had a function you could feed any input never had any trouble with part 2 either.

The issue at hand simply is that people either seem to be willing to lie in their CV (and I mean outright lie, not just 'make it sound a little bit better') or they suffer from some kind of reality-distortion field where knowing the difference between starboard and port makes you the perfect captain.

Because he completely missed the question ("Print all prime numbers up to 100.") and simply copied the example output (including the 'etc' !).

When applying for a job it's not just a matter of being a smart-ass but also about being able to grasp what is expected of you.

It's like as if an applicant for an interpreter role would get the question "How do you say 'House' in Spanish ?" and then answers "House in Spanish". Or when a cook is being asked how to prepare chicken answers he gets it from KFC.

All fun and well here, but I would suggest you go the extra mile when doing a job-interview. If time permits you can still put a note/example of what might be a better approach but I think we both can agree that these interview questions rarely are rocket-science in need of ultra-optimisations.