Recently, sold to one of the bigger boys. It was ... too much work, really. (bunch of "entitled" folks in community made life difficult)

Don't regret doing it. There was NO chance of anyone in that area getting connected without our work. But - glad to be free of it.

For anyone who's read security posts on this site - all too often NSA folks pop up and respond :)

(and are frequently very helpful)

IF I remember the writing of the law correctly (I'm not a lawyer. I've a dreadful habit of reading books of law for fun) - the hatred laws in Canada have to do with the inciting of violence, not as much on who the targets of the violence are. It's an interesting difference from what sounds to be English law.

We've got anti-hate laws here too (hatred described - IIRC - as any speech promoting violence against someone... a bit of a simplified explanation but it'll do)

We haven't got a strong history of anyone paying attention to requests. There are rather a lot of people who flock to hate sites and use the information to 'excuse' their own violence though. (with violent voices agreeing with a speaker, violence is more likely. "righteous" violence can be triggered by hate speech)

I'm with removal of public promotion of violence. Why do people take the right to speak as meaning the right to bully others?

Microsoft's history of security - at least in anything it lets people at home use - suggests to me that the first virus that triggers kill-switches will probably appear as the first phone appears.

And if they protect it with something stupid - like the DCMA or its kin - they are failing to protect users from whatever fallout might happen.

I look forward to being happily surprised. I don't expect to be surprised.

While my copy of Al Kemi has disappeared, this is it exactly.

My father was that kind of alchemist. It also turns out that in alchemical studies a lot of farming practices and improvements were developed. Many take more effort and time to get going - but they also take a lot less work later.

Also, the violin comes out of alchemy. I have the first one my father made. It's beautiful.

Speaking as an experienced sysadmin - that's the right call. Also possibly negotiating with anyone affected but due to privacy laws (and at least in Canada this is the case) NOT publicized.

Part of a sysadmin's responsibility is ensuring no one has access to data they shouldn't. This includes the administrator themselves - but has to be taken on trust, barring unusual ways of securing data. I'm actually trying to design some software to do that, but it's slow going as none of the APIs are very well documented.

So - good call firing him. That is not proper etiquette for a system administrator.

I hate them too - or more precisely the kind of second and third-grade cruft that everyone thinks of as a computer. (Mac's not bad but they have their own quirks. Mostly better hardware though)

If I were paid for more than minimal wage and had a spot of spare time - I'd try to do something about it - at least in the open source world. (I've been studying chrome source lately... just in case I get time to try some of the fixes I want to do)

Silly little fragile things they are.

Back in introductory CS - I'd been programming already for a few years and had read through all of the local college CS texts (not many - but the music ones were neat). The instructor used my code as a basis to spot both cheaters and those who would ask for help. Apparently he could always tell both....
I still don't know what was so distinctive about my code.

I will say though that my favourite instructor marked based on how I planned out, documented and finished my code regardless of how well it fit the course. 1989, first year CS while I was finishing my grade 12 - and my final project was a fully functional text-based word processor with built in simple encryption (variation of playfair cypher).

The novel "Shockwave Rider" (John Brunner, 1975) proposes a computer-based model very similar to this one doing "crowd sourced predictions, with prizes". He even gave proper attribution, calling it "Delphi".

so yeah, nothing new here - not even method.

Basically - it's all obvious.

I've ended up homeless and unable to get a job on multiple occasions because there were -threats- that the stuff I was doing might be patented. I had no way to know and no way to find out - and everything I was doing was mathematically obvious. After all is said and done - the patents I -have- seen paperwork for - are all obvious processes. I haven't seen a patent for anything that wasn't obvious for a mathematically-able diligent mind.

To sort of expound my feelings on this: software patents create thoughtcrimes. It makes into criminals those who think and the gedunken (computer software) that is working these thoughts out. I know this is an emotional response.

In my grandfather's day, only a "Russian" could get a degree in Russia. Not a Mennonite (which he was), nor a Jew nor any other group - just what they termed "Russians". He was refused his degree because he was Mennonite. Mind - his home town as well as all the other communities in the area were purged in the 1920s and we get stories like "Fiddler on the Roof" from that area.
fwiw: his hometown - all of it that I know of - ended up in Manitoba - because he hauled them out on ships. (it's a complicated story. There's a couple of books out about it). If you want to know more, investigate into the Ukraine area and how Jews and Mennonites were treated, 1880s through 1900s as well as 1920s.
I don't know when they started allowing Jewish people degrees in the USSR, but I'm going to guess it was probably post-Stalin.
on the flip side, my grandfather was also very antisemitic. My grandfather died long before I was born - and he tried to get his degree in the early 1900s, so this isn't modern information by any length.

Linux: 2 cores = 2 times faster, usually. And so forth... it's had scalable multicore/multiprocessor support for years.
Windows: extra core means 10% of programs are faster. So I very much confirm windows needs a rewrite for this.

Now some specific apps under linux still need work - but only if they are resource hogs. The only programs I've run into problems with this with of late are firefox (I'm now mostly running chrome - which is far smoother), thunderbird and - possibly - the X server itself. (I've looked into X server code though - it looks like it's now set to scale)

I can't say anything about BSD or MacOSX as I've never run either on a multicore system. For MacOSX though I'd wager that if it isn't already up to par - it will be. The OSX and even NextStep GUIs are designed to scale.

I'm not in a rush for bind10 - I find bind9 to be quite sufficient, on the whole. I do look forward to seeing what it brings and how it may make my life with the systems I manage much easier. This does look interesting though!