So by your argument we should be using clay tablets I suppose, they have several thousand years of development behind them!

This is true of any storage medium. Also what happens if you laptop gets lost or stolen? Catastrophic loss of data is always just around the corner, as such you need to be making backups, ideally off site in case your home/office/data center/whatever burns down/gets flooded/clobbered by a tornado/hurricane/whatever. Bad things happen to good data, so make copies!

SSD's are definitely the way to go for 99% of laptop users (unless you need more than say half a terabyte of space), SSD == lower power, no vibration/shock issues, and waaaay lower latency. I've been replacing all the drives in my laptops with SSDs for a few years now, I can't imagine going back to spinning rust. As for large file storage in laptops I bet a lot of users can get away with USB sticks now rather than HDs anyways. About the only place for spinning rust now is as a tape like storage medium where latency isn't an issue.

You also have to remember when it comes to technical talent red hat is an open source company and we tend to hire open source people. One huge advantage of open source is we can easily see what people have worked on and contributed. Meaning for most of my coworkers you can plug their name/alias into google and find the projects they work on. Also the communities we work within tend to be quite well connected, for example in the Linux security community we all know each other because we help each other and work on issues together constantly. It makes hiring a lot easier when you can actually see with strong evidence that the person you're hiring is actually capable of doing the job you want to hire them for and even better that they are already a cultural fit.

As per http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/01/01/3 this issue was assigned CVE-2012-6084. Remember folks, you can get your CVEs in advance which makes life easier for everyone. Please see http://people.redhat.com/kseifrie/CVE-OpenSource-Request-HOWTO.html for details.

I work for [redacted] which is why I won't say anything about [redacted] or especially anything about the [redacted] incident that [redacted] 17,000 people and caused the entire town of [redacted] to go bald and [redacted] at 3 in the morning.

Which is why anyone with an ounce of sense doesn't talk about their company (especially the higher up you go in the management chain). And especially never put it in writing. Duh.

But let's say I didn't share my data with Facebook, my friends and associates did. E.g. photos from an event I attended get posted, they tag me in the photos, now Facebook recognition tags me (well in theory..). Someone else enters my birthday in order to be notified a week in advance so they don't forget to email me a happy birthday. Someone enters my home town (actually happened on linkedin, grr). So now Facebook has my name, bday, address, photos of me, and I never logged into Facebook. That is why we need the right to be forgotten.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Not when you are using old cast off machine of unknown reliability and you whipped it up quickly to get running and didn't factor in clustering/failover (which back in the Slackware 6 days you wouldn't have been able to do without some serious hacking/coding). Nowadays it's a lot easier with software like gluster/etc. But back in Slackware 6 days we didn't have anything like that.

Well downtime for example, if our mail server was hosting say 5,000 users that means a few hours of downtime would easily run you $500,000 in costs, so hosting it on a cheap server/etc with no backup/fail over would be a really bad idea. Ditto for the file server, did it have backups? What happened it if crapped out and all the data went byebye? Sometimes spending money up front is a lot cheaper than using some cheap and having to spend a lot more money later.

I started using Linux at 17 or so (asj introduced me to it), connected to the Internet via dialup and realized that if I could connect to systems on the Internet they could connect to me (using SLIP/etc I had an actual IP). So I started learning about security, but basically no documentation/etc. existed back then (this would be 18 years ago). So I started keeping notes, back then stuff like disabling stuff in /etc/inetd.conf (remember that file?) was serious high end security, and using tcp_wrappers was Matrix style kung-foo. I then realized I couldn't be the only person with this problem (not knowing anything about security) so I started documenting it, in early 1998 I registered seifried.org and put the docs up (where they remain today, out of date but somewhat useful) at seifried.org/lasg/.

This in turn got me a contract at SecurityPortal which got killed in the .com downfall, then I contracted for iDefense (then Verisign bought them) and then iSIGHT partners where I basically did information security analysis, focused heavily on Linux. But I wasn't super happy, I realized what I really enjoy is writing stuff for the public (not just paying customers). So I decided to go back to my Open Source roots and joined the Red Hat Security Response Team (https://access.redhat.com/security/team/) and CVE guy (e.g. http://people.redhat.com/kseifrie/CVE-OpenSource-Request-HOWTO.html).

Basically in the security community the way (everyone I know) gets hired is they get into security on their own time, do something like build an IDS, or create a secure Linux distribution which is basically their portfolio/resume when it comes to getting hired. Much like the Linux Kernel we don't have a lot of volunteers in the Linux security space, if you're any good at this you tend to get hired quickly. In other words "just do it" and if you are any good at it, a job will not be a problem.

For people down voting this, you may want to have your humour/sarcasm glands checked.

Everyone knows the real Neil Armstrong never left the moon, who do you think started building the first military moon base, and was later put in charge of it? In fact the entire Apollo program was designed to deliver astronauts to the moon, and then fake an Earth landing and use body double to replace them. Did you see how big the rocket needed to get all that crap to the moon was? And how small the lunar module was, no way did it have the power to escape to orbit and enough fuel to return to Earth. The Moon landings were real but the Earth landings are a HOAX!

Depends on the application. Day to day when I'm buying lunch meat not really, but if it's a technical issue or article then yes, it would be a problem. Technical and scientific articles have a much greater need for correctness. Getting these things wrong can lead to significant and expensive problems.

Something that weighs 2 pounds in orbit would have to have a huge amount of mass. I'm pretty sure they meant 1 kilogram which is a unit of mass. Science writing is really going downhill it seems.