I've set up networks where the server infrastructure itself is on its own segment, so there's no need for firewalls between the servers themselves, but the whole subnet is firewalled by a border router.

A lot depends on how tightly you can lock down a server. On my *nix boxes, I tend to only run daemons with listening ports to the extent absolutely necessary. I have a LAMP server that basically has ports 22, 80 and 443 open, and everything else either shut down or set to listen only on 127.0.0.1. Do I really need to configure iptables?

Worse, it was fucking boring. The Hobbit would have made a fine two hour movie, maybe two 1.5 hour movies. But there is not enough plot for seven and a half hours.

And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.

And what would you define something that didn't ingest, metabolize, excrete, reproduce and have some sort of system of heredity? Other chemical processes; like fire and crystallization, might hit some of these marks, but we don't call them living systems. So while the precise chemical processes, heck maybe even many of the chemical elements involved may be different (silicon-based life on Titan or something like that), I think at the end of the day if it going to be called life, it has to have the same basic features as terrestrial life.

If it's life, it's going to have a metabolism, it's going to reproduce and it's going to excrete. It may not, at first blush, look like life, but there will be chemical processes that in some way replicate processes found in terrestrial life.

I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.

A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.

How much does a middle aged Slashdot ID go for nowadays? I might be in the market to sell mine to an astroturfer.

I'm not clear as to how, for instance, using buggy versions of SSL libraries fits into your whole theory. One possibility is that what you wrote is gibberish.

You could have saved some typing by not opening the article. But then you would not have been able to write this long pointless OT rant.

"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.

I have to confess, I'm pretty mystified. For our own internal servers, I have my own CA, and can see no reason why I would want to have someone else sign internal certs.

Sounds like yet another way in which the commercial CAs scam stupid CIOs out of cash.

Why is everyone so uncomfortable with the idea that something can be lost forever? How is that a problem? I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that information can be lost or irretrievable. I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that the universe will die of heat death. I'm also down with the idea that the Big Rip will swallow everything up in several billion years - talk about information loss... It just strikes me as fatuous and arrogant that humans think the universe has to work a certain rational, logical, way - like the universe gives a shit one way or the other.

Double kudos for writing it on touch screen devices. I do some Play-by-email roleplaying and at times I do posts on my Nexus 7, and man oh man it's difficult. I wouldn't even dream of doing long prose writing on a tablet.

Quite frankly, and this sounds stupid, but I'm emotionally attached to my glasses. I'm 42 now, and I've been wearing glasses since I was six. Frankly I don't even remember what it was like without them. I freely admit it's an irrational and emotional response, but I like my glasses.