> The whole industry is plagued by this idea that ... the people who do the bulk of the grunt work are mediocre

Which is true by definition:

me·di·o·cre [mee-dee-oh-ker]
adjective
1. of only ordinary or moderate quality; n

Indeed, the bulk of the grunts are "of only ordinary or moderate quality". "The bulk of" and "ordinary" mean pretty much the same thing, don't they?

The mediocre generally know enough to do the task, badly. They screw things up pretty badly by making it "work" just enough so that on the surface, it appears to work most of the time. If your car crashed once a week, that would be the worst car ever made. An operating system that crashed once a week became the market leader, and by a large margin.

The quality of "professional" software shows us that the ordinary, average (mediocre) developer is, unfortunately, not quite competent. There's a huge productivity difference between mediocre developers and competent developers, much greater than the difference in their salary cost. That's where "The whole industry is plagued by this idea that only the superstars are any good" comes from. What you call "superstars" are those fully competent people who make stuff that actually works, reliably and robustly. Because they cost only 20% more than the mediocre ones, only those people are a good hire. Hiring a mediocre person for 20% less is almost always a bad decision.

So where you work, bad code that appears to work isn't accepted? Where is that? Are you hiring?

I thought I worked at such a company once, where I was the one deciding what was accepted and what was not (as well as doing most of the software architecture).
Over time, I had to work on code I'd approved or even written 5-10 years before. I'd learned enough then to know that what I once thought was good was actually pretty awful.

That said, while all of the COMPANIES I know produce some pretty gnarly code, I've worked on a couple of open source projects which have fairly high standards.
The Linux kernel, of course (my names is in changelog exactly ONCE), the Apache web server, and parts of Moodle. It takes three rewrites to get accepted by one of the Moodle maintainers.

> Personally a big red flag for me is when a dev says "I have to completely rewrite this persons code."
> Not saying it doesn't happen, but a decent developer should be able to deal with other peoples work.

Indeed there is a big difference between "I have to" (because I don't understand the pattern or idioms) versus "It would be best to rewrite" (because the architecture or data structures are wrong).

Atzanteol mentioned another common case "if the original is confusing or buggy" and in that case a refactor is likely the best option.
I've done major refactoring of my predecessor's code of the type where I didn't attempt to understand the code confusing, buggy code until much of the refactoring was done. Just by mechanically breaking up the 200-line functions with variables like $bob and $fred into 15-line functions with variables named $radius and $scrollheight, the code was made much less confusing and the solutions to bugs were then obvious. That mechanical refactoring process ensured that it continued to work the same way, though, so I wasn't rewriting any logic, only reorganizing it to be more maintainable.

libvirt, as used by CentOS, also has virtual switches. The libvirt virtual switches can do IP masquerading NAT, routing mode, or complete isolation mode.
http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/VirtualNetworking

Some would say that if you spend 30-60 minutes per day actively learning, that's the equalivent useful knowledge of adding a new postdoc degree every few years. I could see such a person easily producing twice as much value per hour.

How many times have you had to completely rewrite someone else's code, or spent so much time on it that you might as have rewritten it? The "typical" developer creates enough future problems by poorly thought out systems that their net productivity approaches zero. It's not that hard to be twice as productive as the guy whose code only survives a year or two. Just learn to build systems that a) actually work b) for at least four years between major overhauls.

Thanks for going the extra mile with your students.

As AC said, a separate LAN or VLAN, or multiple separate LANs/VLANs handles most of what's posted below. For example, a rogue DHCP server would only be visible on that VLAN.

Red Hat has a Virtualization Security section in their manual:
https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Virtualization_Administration_Guide/chap-Virtualization-Security_for_virtualization.html

CentOS/RHEL includes comprehensive support for KVM with virt-manager. While VirtualBox et al are fine for running one or two virtual machines on your desktop, for many VMs, with new ones created and removed each semester, the enterprise level support of KVM built into the distro is more appropriate. That support includes creating VLANs within the same management interface, for example, and integrates with the built in storage stack administration tools. Again, VirtualBox may be simpler to set up for one or to two machines, so I'm not saying it's not good - it's just not the best tool in this particular scenario. In this type of scenario, the KVM / virt-manager / virsh stack that RH baked in is probably a better match to the needs.

There are at least two other ways of getting location data leveraging standard protocols (no special software needed on the client.

> There's GPS and location by wif works well for desktops. IP address is
> the obvious solution. I believe google us also fingerprinting. IP address and fingerprinting
> would be just as effective without the location information.

IP without location isn't nearly as effective, especially with mobiles, but also with desktops. IPs change.
When you power cycle your cable modem, you'll likely get a different IP address. We can still tell you're in the correct neighborhood, so it probably really is you.

> No need to outsource this kind of work to a company unless they have some special proprietary algorithm that's better than what you can cook up in-house.

it's easy to get this wrong. We've specialized in this for 15 years and still continue to make improvements and corrections. Your error above thinking that location doesn't add anything beyond IP address is an example that there is more to it than you might think. There are at least three different actions you need to take for different types of proxies. We've analyzed hundreds of millions of login attempts and still we don't have it down pat, there's more work to do.

I'm not familiar with Toopher specifically, but the general idea works quite well. We've been doing it for fifteen years.
I always post on Slashdot using a small Android phone in Bryan, TX, and my ISP is Suddenlink. I've posted on Slashdot hundreds, if not thousands of times. 20 minutes after I make this post from here in Bryan, if someone claiming to me tries to log in using an iphone in Canada, that's guaranteed to be bogus. That's a simple, obvious, and common example.

Now take that same general idea and apply fifteen years of R&D and real world experience. You can catch most unauthorized login attempts. If you do any late night surfing, on sites like GirlsGoneWild.com, you may have noticed half of those sites say "protected by Strongbox". They do that because it works.

> Ultimately, your goal is to get paid. If you don't do what the customer wants, you have failed to achieve your goal.

If your ultimate goal in life is to get paid, I'm sad for you. What a pointless, meaningless existence that must be.

Perhaps you're saying that's your ultimate goal AT WORK. The time you spend working is most of your waking hours, so still, that makes me sad for you.
You might get a lot from reading Viktor Frankl's 184 page book "Man's Search for Meaning".

> There can be, be definition, no new "inventions".

So said Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of US patent office, in 1899.
Since then, we've invented airplanes, computers, and a million other things. Al Gore even invented the internet.

> Let me ask you: does it makes a new invention if the time machine would be implemented only in software?

Is either a new invention, or not. Whether it's rendered into a few transistors (a circuit) or many transistors (a Flash memory) doesn't make any difference as to whether or not the invention is new.

> The general purpose computer is already invented. So be definition, you can't patent that.

Metal was invented thousands of years ago. That doesn't mean the internal combustion engine wasn't a new invention in 1807, just because it's a configuration of metal.

Given no requirement that the firearm be in any way useful, one would want to get as close as possible to "encase in concrete".

If you add the fact that you want some benefit, you want to be able to protect your family and those about you, one must balance availability to the owner or other authorized users vs. availability to unauthorized persons. That's very much situation dependent. A family with a three year old and five year running around the house is very different from a retired couple with no grandchildren, for example. For the retired couple, it matters whether you live in the hood or you live in a gated community in a very safe part of town. (This is one reason that the more specific laws are, the worse they are - they require specific behavior that's not appropriate to the situation.)

One method that's too often overlooked is keeping the weapon secured in your holster, on your person, with a safety mechanism that ensures it won't fire from being dropped or similar. That makes it very available to the owner, while unauthorized people aren't going to get to it without a fight.

You may very well be a smart person, and be able to reason quite well. If I told you all about waggles, you could probably come to some reasonable conclusions about waggles. However:

"As if I have to have to touch, see or own a gun to determine what to do about guns. I can very well think about what a gun represents and what it is capable of."

"What a gun represents" is, without any actual knowledge, whatever a political comedian on comedy central, or a movie, represented TO you.
The basis of your thinking is some fiction presented to you on an entertainment program. It therefore completely undermines your otherwise logical thought process. It is precisely as though I gave you a book about waggles and you came to some conclusions, but half the the statements in the book were false.
Your conclusions would be completely without merit not because you were wrong in your thinking, but because you're reasoning based on a false
representation. That's reason #1 that it's silly to advocate a position on a topic you have little knowledge of.

Further, suppose I know a little bit about cats. I know 5% of all there is to know about cats. You, on the other hand, are a cat expert, knowing 90% of everything there is to know about cats. When it comes time to make a decision about cats, should we vote? Would that result in the best decisions? No, I would let you to make the cat decisions. If you argue on a subject about which you have 5% knowledge, you are (attempting to?) offset someone else who knows ten times as much. That's guaranteed to result in bad decisions, and that's reason #2.

Lastly, suppose you are the cat expert, and I'm the cybersecurity expert. The cat and the computer both have a virus. Should I spend my time trying to figure out the cat's symptoms? It would be much smarter for me to fix to the computer, while you tend to the cat. That way both jobs are done well. If we instead split our time, with both of us working on the cat and both on the computer, we'll probably just screw both up. So if you've never fired a gun, but you do know a lot about economics, you are wasting your talents and knowledge spending time arguing about guns. It would be far better for you to spend that time helping our society figure out this huge economic problem we have. All of these 50-something year old people will be 60-something in ten years, we know that for a fact. We also know for a fact that we're fucked when that happens, because we can't pay their social security. Please, please, if you know anything about budgeting, economics, etc., please go advocate a good solution to that problem rather than spending time spouting bullshit about someting you know nothing about. There are other topics where your knowledge could be very helpful. That's reason #3.

Thank you for your kind compliment.