For the record, I have a 12 year old 450 Mhz PIII Dell desktop that continues to do duty as a network monitor, with 100% uptime except for reboots for software updates, and forgetting that it won't boot unless a keyboard is plugged into it.

I could replace it, but why? It's been perfect so far, and recently took an upgrade to 32 bit RHEL6 without a hitch.

Oh, wouldn't it be nice if all those loving parents just put the smack down on their obviously under-disciplined children? You haven't parented children. Come back with an informed opinion when you have.

Now speaking to the problems...

1) The term "pedophile" in a medical sense actually refers to people who are attracted to pre-pubescent children . Clearly this is a problem since 9 year olds can't reproduce.

2) The term "pedophile" in a more of a legal sense refers to people attracted to people under a certain age.(18 being common, but actually ranges to anywhere from 12 to 20).

Think about this for a moment: a range that differs by some 80% of its base value, as the basis of whether or not we should ruin somebody's life. 12 is legal in some places, in others you have to be almost 2x as old to afford the same legal protections! Clearly, the age of "adult" is an imprecise measurement, at the very least.

Biologically speaking, it's appropriate for men to be attracted to young females. They are healthy, don't already have children, and are likely to be available for bearing children. If you are a guy and you want to generate posterity, paying particular attention to newly minted young women is a particularly successful strategy. 200 years ago, it was pretty common for a young woman to be wed at 14, and an 18 year old unwed woman was regarded to be almost a spinster. Life was simple, life expectancies short, rules weren't so arbitrary.

Enter civilization, which lengthens lifespans but doesn't lengthen puberty. Abstract ideas create complex hard rules somewhat divorced from individual situations. Life is more complex, and the ramifications of a bad decision can be much worse, and it takes much longer for people to be truly cognizant of the effects of their actions.

But millions of years of evolution (or a moody, jealous god, your choice) have created a life form that is hard-wired to reproduce at about age 15 to 16, while the circumstances of that life form in its present circumstance has the real, ideal age of reproduction some 10 years later. Young people are impressionable and easily manipulated, and society seeks to defend their decisions by letting them incubate longer before making major decisions.

Folks, this situation just isn't going to end well for everyone.

While we should definitely work to defend young, newly sexually active people from the manipulations of far more experienced adults, we shouldn't ruin the lives of people who otherwise do what they are hard wired to do. And we certainly shouldn't group them with people who have an actual, diagnosed mental disorder.

I'm a father of adult children. One of my sons had a healthy, sexual relationship with a young lady 4 years, 3 months his junior. It was a courteous, long-term relationship, and he was civil and polite the entire time. It was terrifying to me, and there was precious little I could do about it. He was legally an adult, but had any authorities found out about it, could have face serious legal consequences, including being branded a "sexual offender" for life, treated as a diseased sexual deviant that he is not.

Try telling my kid no? Puleeeeaaaase.... your ignorance is part of the problem.

And this is the part that drives me NUTS. Just because you can mount a loop back device with the command `mount -o loop /path/to/file.iso /mountpoint` doesn't mean that you HAVE to do it that way. KDE/Gnome have provided easy ways to mount ISO files for like EVER.

But here's the truth: doing it the "double click the icon way" is the lesser way. While fine for users that just want to mount the image rather than burn to disc first, it's limited. It's the way that can't be scripted, it can't be automated as part of a server process that (in my case) I use to build install files of my software for OSX.

Knowing the script form gives you power, a power similar to the written word - the power to have your ideas preserved and replicated for posterity. This isn't some goofy idea, it's reality for us programmer/hacker types. The things we do get replicated and spread broadly, thousands or millions can benefit from our ideas encoded.

Want to double click? Go for it. Even mentioning the command line option is a fail for those that can't see the power of the next level.

I would be ok with even 24 hours, or a week. A month becomes annoying, longer becomes obstructive. What bothers me is an increasing tendency to "lose" controversial footage. While it's a good move to record all police activity, we must realize that if we expect the police to document their crimes, they're going to do a lousy job of it.

We need to pass laws/regulations that make losing the recordings itself a crime of significant note.

So let me get this straight...

You think it's part of a well-rounded education for a programmer to (apparently) know how to use tools like flex, while still lacking any competence whatsoever in manipulating the very basic, simple data types you learn in your 101-level courses? You know, integer... float.... char.... string... ?

And further, you think that it's reasonable that the programmer in question that has (apparently) demonstrated "mastery" in using flex to build a SQL language parser, is still (somehow) not able to write even an approximation of a SQL database query?

Is this the education you received, the one that poor, unqualified me is lacking? And based on this advanced education, you want me to hire you?

I don't get it. Somehow, you seem to have missed that one of the main points of a key exchange is to protect you from a MITM attack? See: Certificates, how do they work? You even said: "to establish a completely private connection on something that you are broadcasting, and do not know who might be listening in?"...

Well, if they could do a MITM, wouldn't they be listening in?

(cough)

I changed my interview style after that. I ask a bunch of simple nitty-gritty tech question now, no matter how impressive the candidate sounds. You would be surprised how often someone whose resume looks stellar can't answer multiple simple questions - like what is a /24, a tcp reset packet, port used by http, etc.

This oh yes this! Interviewing for programmer positions, I've seen gorgeous resumes by people with Masters in CompSci at reputable colleges and universities, with "accomplishments" like writing SQL language lexical parsers, who could not write even an approximation of a SQL query or even write a simple string replace function. (how do you get to lexical parsing without being able to manipulate strings?)

This may seem a bit provocative, but this is very consistently the case with graduates from India. Having interviewed so many such people, so often having such beautiful resumes, you'd think I could have at least found a single one with enough programming expertise that I could hire, but that's so far not yet been the case.

I really feel for these guys, because they've obviously spent lots of time/money doing something, and whatever it is that they're doing, it's not helping them much.

Okular's not bad, and makes adobe acrobat look like a pregnant redneck with down syndrome and a half-dozen beers in its gut, but doesn't hold a candle to Chrome's build-in PDF viewer, which is so good it's barely distinguishable from any other web page, at least in speed.

San Francisco is a terrible place to have a car. This city has among the highest densities of cars per mile of road of any city anywhere in the world. Having lived there in the early 90s, I can say that my car was much more of a hindrance than a blessing!

San Francisco has great public transportation and stiff density. Walking isn't such a big deal because you don't have to go so far, and buses take you where you don't want to bother walking.

And when you drive, you rarely get to go faster than 20 MPH. You certainly never *average* much more than that. And at that pace, a guy on a bicycle could easily match your progress. The car isn't so much of an advantage.

An "engineer" is somebody who takes the time to understand a problem, and creates something to solve that.

Having done software from scales ranging from "quick shopping cart application" to enterprise scale organizational relationship management software, the only real difference between the two is that with the latter, you create a large number of smaller projects roughly the size of the aforementioned shopping cart application, except that the "users" are often other pieces of the same system. In larger systems, you'll be talking with other developers who have built or manage the pieces your parts will communicate with. You'll read more documentation, and it will be generally of higher quality than the shopping cart scripts.

Don't *ever* lose the "hacker" mentality - exactly what you described is what software engineering is. The toughest part IMHO is getting to an understanding of what the end user actually needs. That's far and away harder than all the other stuff, which boils down to implementation details once you understand the algorithms.