You can get cheap dumb phones with long battery life, or you can even get one with AA batteries (like SpareOne). That will give you both voice and text functionality and spare you the embarrassment of asking someone to page you (at least I would feel awkward mentioning pagers to my clients).

Also, you could setup a simple email to SMS gateway, so you can get a text message whenever somebody emails emergency@yourbusiness.com.

In a nutshell, your phone battery will drain quickly only if you keep using it as a smart phone, i.e. using data, wifi, bluetooth, having your screen on all the time, etc. If you keep a dedicated mobile phone for emergencies only and use it primarily for texting, you will have all the benefits of a pager while remaining in the 21st century.

You can push a dumb phone battery to a full week if you do it right, and to me at least, charging a phone over weekend or in the car is easier and cheaper then swapping batteries.

Use Kerberos with one of the heftier encryption types. Don't use the default Crypt Password type used in Shadow Passwords, and store your accounts in OpenLDAP, not a SQL Database

What are the advantages of using OpenLDAP over a SQL database for storing user accounts? Any real world experience that you could share?

Regarding our parent, I doubt Macedonia is in CE(S)T. Greece definitely is not. Except they changed since I have been there the last time. (To lazy to look that up)

Macedonia is in CET, as well as everything north of it (Serbia, Hungary, Poland...). Both Serbia and Macedonia still keep CET as part of Yugoslavian legacy, though geographically, IMHO, it would make sense to shift a timezone in their time zone, since we are on the far east of our timezone. We get very early sunrise and if you work 8-5 or 9-6, you don't see much daylight after work except in the summer.

Greece is the odd one, but if you look at the map, you'll notice half the country, including Athens, are quite to the east compared to e.g. Skopje and Belgrade, so it makes sense for them.

I think he said after the war

Even after the war they wanted to keep it a secret - just because the hostilities ended didn't mean they had no more use for the advantage decryption gave them. Even if occupied Germany wasn't a real threat anymore, why would the Allies (or at least UK and USA) want the world to know what their capabilities are in terms of decryption?

How does one demonstrate knowing how to program during an interview process if one doesn't know at least a fair amount about the language and its basic methodology?

Candidate should be able to answer any questions in pseudo code. You are right that each language has its own intricacies, and e.g. perfect code in C is terrible code in C++, but C++ is not specific enough that general programming principles don't apply.

Reading a book about the language over the weekend before the interview won't make an experienced programmer out of you, but you will know what the language is about and you will have a good overview of most features of the language.

Besides, in my experience at least, candidates who have a lot of experience in the language that's used don't gain as many points as the ones who know ins and outs and best practices for libraries and frameworks which are used in the organization.

Before Uber: person needs a ride. So they get a car that's available. It has "Taxi" written on it, and stands in line waiting at the kerb, or can be waved down. Person gets a ride, and pays in cash.

In Belgrade, Serbia, I can phone a taxi and request a ride. I tell them where I am, and they give me a pretty exact estimate and the number of the cab that's going to pick me up so I can identify legitimacy of the car I am entering. I can also specify smoking/non-smoking vehicle, or I can request a vehicle with an extra-large trunk because I have a lot of luggage. When I am done, I can pay with cash, and some drivers now accept credit cards (in many cities around the world - taxis take credit card regularly).

I honestly don't have a problem paying with cash - I usually keep enough for a ride in my wallet, and the couple of times that I didn't - I asked the driver to stop by an ATM so I can withdraw some.

Uber would simply be a competitor to our regular taxi drivers - it wouldn't offer much otherwise (and it would never fly - as our taxi drivers are well organized and won't let competition in that easily). To me, it's much easier to just pick up a phone and speed-dial my favorite taxi dispatching service, than to install an app, learn how to use it, and then invoke it anytime I need a cab.

It looks optional. I just updated and on directory tiles you get options: "Enhanced", "Classic" and "Blank". I don't see a difference between Enhanced and Classic but I am going to guess that Classic is ad free.

Anyway, why be so negative about this? People at Mozilla provide a great browser and if that means you get to see some ads (that you can disable) every once in a while, what's the big deal? If they were injecting ads into pages you load, I would object, but seeing them on an otherwise empty page is as intrusive as default search engines they give you. Both things are perfectly fine.

This is the problematic part from TFA: the BBC Worldwide indicates that ISPs should be obliged to monitor their customers' activities.

If anything, ISP's should be regulated never to monitor their customers activities - I really think ISP looking into what I am transferring should be illegal. Just like a phone company should never listen to my conversations, ISP should never look into my data.

I am not aware of any. My "solution" to this problem is to allow only unambiguous characters to be used. I really mostly have to deal with only about 60 characters in total which I allow people use for unique fields, so it's manageable.

That kind of phishing already exists, even more sophisticated: a bug that a lot of software contains is not distinguishing between same looking characters in different alphabets. E.g. you can sign up on many forum/bbs platforms as Administrator if your leading A is cyrillic A instead of latin A. Both look the same but have different html entity codes and are different unicode chracatres, which is true for most vowels and many consonants (e.g. cyrillic B and latin B, C and C, E and E...). Or, for more fun, look at this (single) character which looks exactly as "lj".

Those of us with customers who use two alphabets constantly have known about this problem for a long time and we've seen phishing on all different kinds of platforms using this strategy.

IDN (internationalized domain names) solves this problem in domain names with policy: you can't register a domain which looks exactly like some other domain except for that change in character. Still though, you can register both casino.it and casinò.it and that's where the real phishing potential is. I think, at least most native English speakers, would probably be fooled easier by a domain such as paypal-customer-division.com than paypàl.com.

The owner of trademark has to "protect" it or they will lose the exclusive right to use it. It's described here. Lawyers have to send C&D letters and sue for infringement because that's what the law says they have to do in order to keep the right to use their trademark.

IkeaHackers does use IKEA's logo and it really can be mistaken for IKEA's trademark, so the lawyers had to act. It was routine, and it wasn't some evil corporate guy who just wanted to make that blogger's life miserable.

When I was visiting my parents once, after getting out of shower all wet and with a towel on, I got an epic line from my father: "Go back to the bathroom, put on some clothes, and lose 10 kilos, before you enter the living room".

In many parts of Europe (I can speak for the Balkans for sure), it's perfectly normal to comment on weight and friends and family. It's not said out of malice, it's with best intentions. And if anything, when everybody you know starts commenting on how fat you are getting, you start and think if it's time to go on a diet. It also usually means that you can get some support from family and friends if you need to change your lifestyle to lose weight, so it can work out good.

It's different with children though - they can be rough and tease/bully you for being fat. For some kids that can be an incentive to take up a sport, for some it will be nothing but trauma.

1. Rent a cheap VPS
2. Tunnel connection through it (e.g. via a SOCKS proxy) or set up your own VPN
3. Keep the IP to yourself so you don't get flagged

That's how I get to watch BBC's premiers at the same time people in London do, and if I care about something in the US, I just switch to another VPS.

point being, nobody would have heard of this without this gimmick, so bravo for them for the gimmick. but let me ask you this, will you seek this song a year from now?

Honestly, it's not my cup of tea and alternative music generally takes some acquiring of taste before it can be enjoyed.

Still, I'm sure they'll find the audience, and they certainly get +100 geek points for this release.

De gustibus non est disputandum. I just heard about this band for the first time and I would categorize them as an "alternative electronic" band. I was first introduced to that kind of music during the mid nineties, just before the Internet came to my country, as it was swapped by artists on a BBS I frequented. I think it appealed to artistic geeks because they could create it with a heavy use of their favorite toy in their bedroom.

We even have a show dedicated to this kind of music on a national radio station, so it has its audience...