Only takes one...

Timothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik, both terrorists and both Christians, so by your "logic" we should watch Christians as well.

Why was the parent comment modded as Troll? Seems to be fair comment, sales taxes are regressive taxes, the less you earn the greater percentage of your income you pay. Are the mods FoxNews fans?

The South Americans may disagree with your version of history...

At least the Samsung workers don't need safety nets to stop them committing suicide. Glad to see Samsung is not infringing Apple's patent on suicide inducing labor conditions.

The two major parties are identical with these types of moves. The opposition will come from some sections of the media, but not the dominant Murdoch media, and The Greens and possibly some of the small right-wing parties.

Yes, copyright is one of the stated reasons for this draconian proposal.

You forget about ASIO, they will not require a subpoena, warrant or any form of court order. Once the data is stored it will be mined. Despite ASIO wiping up fear about terrorists, their main targets are political. ASIO targets environmentalists. The data retention is designed to strike fear into the general population, terrorists (if there are any) and criminals will use secure VPNs, Tor or what have you, to hide communications. The other target of this proposal is copyright infringement, mainly Bit Torrent users. There is no "HUGE" difference, if the data exists, it will be abused.

To back up your points, 27C3: Adventures in analyzing Stuxnet (Bruce Dang from Microsoft). An amazing video where Bruce gives a blow by blow account of the discovery of Stuxnet and the measures that were taken to close the holes it exploited.

OLTP database systems. The bottleneck for transaction systems is hardening transactions. It's the D in ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability). If you can harden a transaction in RAM, throughput will be amazing.

If you can use PowerShell, you can pick up Perl and Python. Using standalone executables defeats the purpose of using a scripting language. Want to know what a script does? Open the script the file and read, no so with executables, doable, but not ideal. I really like Perl, and in a mixed OS environment, Perl makes sense. In a team of windows admins, it's tough call to expect all the team members to learn Perl, however PowerShell is an easy sell.

I second that, ask if they like PowerShell. A windows admin that can script is a productive admin, an admin that has invested time in PowerShell is an admin that can adapt and possibly understands the windows environment well.

Asking someone how to query an Access database would frighten decent admins. "OMG they rely on Access in a production environment, nasty".

No benefit in trying out the latest hardware? We now have disk subsystems that can almost match RAM for speed, they didn't exist 4-5 years ago. If you're doing serious development, that is a huge paradigm shift. Sure, if you're not writing multi-threaded applications or test harnesses or running various database systems, you could cruise by with old hardware. To make the assumption that just because you don't explore the new or have reason to push bounds that no-one else does, is ignorance and time wasting. Your attitude is identical to Bill Gates claiming that 640K of RAM is enough for anyone. Then there is gaming...

I work with data, lot's of it and use a workstation to test concepts prior to using server resources. There is a marked difference between CPUs from 4 or 5 years ago to today. It's not just the CPU and it's cache, you have to consider the disk subsystem, RAM and PCI bus. If you'd not pushing limits on your hardware then yes a old PC will do the job. Can't believe you've been modded up for ignorance.