rovingeyes asks: "Immediately after graduating about two and a half years ago, I joined a local website design and hosting company that was looking for software developers. But soon disaster struck. The chief developer/systems administrator left the company soon after I joined and after a month of his leaving another developer quit, which meant that I was the only developer left in the company. Now for almost 2 years I have been taking care of pretty much everything from systems administration to end-user technical support to development. And after a long time I realized that the growth potential in this company is pretty limited. So I decided to look for other jobs and immediately got multiple offers. Now my boss wants 6 weeks notice plus on call service for another 3 months at subsidized rates. Is my boss being reasonable?"

Bronz asks: "In one day I went from pondering selling my IBM Thinkpad T20 on eBay to mourning it's inevitable death, and I don't think I'm alone (nor is the T20 is the only fatality). The symptoms are illusive but a pattern may be emerging -- be wary of putting your Thinkpad into a hibernate/sleep state and leaving it connected to AC power. A cursory web search has revealed a smattering of threads detailing the illness. First it won't come out of hibernation and then it simply won't boot at all. One interesting facet of the first thread is that the frequency of posts has been steadily increasing over the past few months and doesn't seem limited to any one particular model." Has anyone else run into this problem with their Thinkpad laptop?

Slashdot readers both contributed and helped moderate questions for the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate. You can read the answers below, but if you'd like to see an expanded introduction, thumbnails of the candidates, and different formatting, go to the Youth Debate page. And that's not all: We're supposed to get candidates' rebuttals on or about October 17, so don't touch that dial!

Theodore Logan writes "More than a year ago, MagiQ announced the world's first commercial quantum cryptography system (pdf), with ID Quantique following closely in their footsteps. Currently, the technology is limited to offering point-to-point connections up to a maximum distance of around 50 km, but this is likely to be greatly improved on in coming years. The systems available today are prohibitely expensive for the average Joe (MagiQ's are priced at more than $50,000 per unit), but one could envision a future in which they are built into the infrastructure by non-end user actors. Does this spell the end of the field of cryptography? Will systems like this ever become commonplace, or will they be reserved for sensitive financial transactions and military applications? What impact will quantum cryptography have on society? Good articles available from International Herald Tribune, EE Times and CNET."

This is an unusual Slashdot Interview, since instead of using email I asked all the questions in person last week either at LinuxAsia2004 or in casual meetings with local LUG members and other techies I met during the conference. Some of your questions were answered quite well by other Slashdot readers in the original post. (Slashdot has many readers both in and from India.) I also inserted a number of personal observations, which I usually don't do in these interviews, because it seemed to be the best way to answer some of the questions. And some questions were nearly unanswerable, as you'll see when you read the rest of this article.

Thanks to StatePaper.com for their article discussing a Nebraska radio talk show host's plans to create a one-handed game controller. The host, Mike Reed, "has learned to play many of the games using a controller with only one hand", following an accident which happened when "an acquaintance at a party pointed a loaded .410-caliber shotgun at Reed [and fired]", leaving him with very limited use of his right arm. He says that "many games are impossible to play one-handed", and has "designed a dual-motion game controller that consolidates all movement, button response and directional function into a one-handed video game controller", although he and his partners "haven't built a prototype yet." In the meantime, are there any existing console controllers that might work for those only using one hand?

Thanks to several readers for pointing to a Gamers.com article discussing the sale of limited-edition bikinis based on the Team Ninja-designed virtual costumes from Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball for Xbox. The article says that "..the Echo (Lei-Fang's schoolgirl suit) has been left out, leaving Tina's Asterope, Kasumi's Amaterasu, Ayane's Lamina, and Hitomi's Cepheus. Each can be had for the modest price of $149.99, which we deem quite reasonable for such coveted items." And if you're having trouble visualizing these 'unique' products, the Tecmo USA store has pictures of the available-for-pre-order bikinis (a tipster says "..try changing the JPG image numbers for some added perspective.")

Red Hat Linux 9 is out, and as of today the ISOs are officially available to Red Hat Network subscribers ($60/yr). Or, as of right now, you can grab the same ISOs using BitTorrent. For those unfamiliar with this free/Free P2P download protocol, an introduction follows, written by ololiuhqui. Update: 03/31 23:45 GMT by J : After roughly four hours, BitTorrent has transferred over 500 full copies of all 3 ISOs, and a total of over 1.5 TB, at 170 Mbytes/sec. Thanks to the more than 3000 people who helped each other download the data, and especially to the more than 200 who got full copies and still have their clients open, to keep serving data to everyone else :)

Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, Inc. and one of the architects of SSL 3.0, said, "The questions were great -- definitely one of the most fun interviews I've ever done." His answers score high on the 'informative' scale, too. Thanks to everyone who submitted such fine questions, and thanks to Paul for putting some real time and effort into his answers.

crank asks: "I've recently hoisted an antenna high upon my roof, since I'm bored with listening to the mega-watt corporate radio stations and instead and enjoying great, niche college and NPR stations. What I need is some sort of TiVo-like radio device, which will tune to the appropriate radio station and record to the hard drive (ideally to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats). Then, I could dump these to one of the many portable devices or stream from a computer for later listening. This is especially important with stations that change format frequently throughout the day, such as KFJC. Any suggestions? I think the tricky part would be integration of the FM tuner. I've had limited success with leaving the radio station pre-tuned to the station I want to tape, but I'd like something smarter that would power up, capture the program, and then power down."

Unne asks: "I just received notice from the foreign student department of my school (City College of New York) advising me to not leave the country anytime soon, or, if traveling is absolutely necessary, to return before the end of the year. It appears that a new system is being deployed called SEVIS, the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, which requires 43 separate pieces about me if I am to be verified thru this system. I did a Slashdot-search for SEVIS but came up with nothing. I'd love to hear some opinions from people who are familiar with the program or perhaps took part in its development. What are those 43 items of information. What type of computer systems do they use? Is the information exchange between INS and the schools really handled via the web, and how does that affect privacy and personal integrity?"

We posted your questions for Ransom Love, Caldera's CEO, on June 10. Here are his answers, which ought to clear up a few things about what UnitedLinux is doing, along with some discussion of Linux advances and how to (hopefully) make money selling Linux services and support. This is one of the best "CEO interviews" we've ever posted, with lots of straight answers and hardly any buzzwords or marketspeak. Lots of good insight about the "business of Linux" here.

Adam Jenkins contributes this review of The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, the newly re-named and republished telling of Babbage's insights and struggles in creating a steam-powered calculating machine, and the modern efforts to bring his work to fruition.

Reader Bob Johnson wrote this detailed review of Hacking Exposed followup Hacking Linux Exposed -- especially in light of the various color-coded Windows viruses still on the loose, this might be a good present for your your local Windows administrator as well, but both Bob and the authors are clear: GNU/Linux systems may be more resistant, but are not immune to cracking.

Last week you asked Bradley Kuhn, VP of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) questions about working with RMS, his views on software freedom, and much more. He's answered at length below, on everything from becoming a saint to the "web app loophole," perl, and the next iteration of the GPL.

Before the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, we were a pretty, innocent, and simple folk. We all looked like Ben Affleck, Josh Hartness, or Kate Beckinsale. Sure, we had our faults. We drank a bit and were awkward with the girls. There was racism and stuff; there was complacency, and dumb, technologically ignorant admirals who should have been sounding the klaxons long before the Japanese attacked. After all, the Japanese did everything but ring up Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House and announce they were coming. But hey, the countryside was gorgeous and lush, and we were all playing catch or golf or lounging around the beautiful Honolulu beaches. After the attack, well, you know ... coming of age, loss of innocence. We became an ugly, crowded, smelly, complicated country, losing our sepia tones and contending with social problems and divisions, with TV and bad airline service, with the Net and all that. SPOILAGE WARNING. (Read more.)

What started as something that looked simple -- a "double" interview with Michael Hart of the huge and venerable Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the brand-new Nupedia open content encyclopedia project -- turned into a series of interesting dissertations on the nature of copyright and online publishing, among other things. You may want to bookmark the page below and return to it a few times to grasp all that both gentlemen (especially Michael Hart) had to say.

Reader John Regehr contributed this review of O'Reilly's Understanding the Linux Kernel, which goes into greater depth than most people have ever seen of the kernel source itself. (I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.)

On Friday, the Librarian of Congress published the results of the DMCA comments process, which we've mentioned here before. Starting on October 28, the remaining part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has gone into effect, except for the two minor exceptions which the Register of Copyrights recommended.

Okay, here (as a refreshing break from all the political stuff) is what amounts to one of the most lucid primers on software development management I've ever seen, contained in NEdit leader Mark Edel's answers to your questions. If you ever expect to lead an Open Source project (or a closed source one, for that matter), you need to read this from start to finish, possibly even print out a copy and read it over and over. Great stuff!