Your work, and the work and research from countless medical professionals following in your footsteps, has had an immeasurably postive impact on the lives of millions. Sir, rest in peace knowing that your leave is well earned.

Maybe as progress continues with Wine on ARM you won't have to worry about that.

One might say the entire TLD is PhuKed. The teachable moment here is that security rolls downhill, and depending on any single layer of public infrastructure, at least for authentication of who you're talking to without giving serious consideration to cryptographic concerns, is asking for trouble. This is still something that the world is failing at on, well, a global scale.

Well, that and taking perimeter security seriously in terms of access to critical components, and having short order failover to components with completely different codebases ready to roll into production for select services in the event of something nasty happening. These days, virtualization on multiple platforms running in parallel makes that easier, although it does have the effect of acting as a cost multiplier (sliding scale factor-wise) depending on what you're trying to make as bulletproof as possible.

TLDR = Security is hard. Be prepared to be compromised. Have alternate plans in place that assume at least one $major_thing is already silently compromised. Yeah, it's tough. Life is tough.

As with any position in federal service, you do what is asked of you. This isn't meant to sound trite; speaking as someone who has drawn paychecks from the military and has worked in the private sector in various information technology roles both before and after the DoD (and some gray in between), it's a reality that should be given serious thought. Take it for what it's worth, the primary point being that regardless of your job title, your first priority is your orders.

This has advantages and disadvantages, which measured against one another may invoke the urge the urge to seriously consider your personal value system, i.e. the value system you expressly agree to largely discount on the basis of placing your faith in your particular chain of command. If anything, it's a fun ride.

I see what you did there. Or maybe I don't.

It's not a matter of competency. It's a matter of others outside your network not giving a shit about your QoS preferences.

It's quite saddening to see Mozilla playing the race card. However, I'm glad to report that I'm getting ~22 FPS using Firefox 16.0.2 on OS X 10.7.5.

There's a difference between defending dogma and noting that someone appears to be making gross generalizations. I did the latter, and if anything you seem to be persisting in defending your own dogma at this point.

I'll ask another question. Do you believe there might be value in sitting down over a cup of coffee with someone like me, with my admitted political leanings (again, not to be confused with the particular beliefs of anyone else), and just having a nice afternoon talk about whatever comes up? That's how I prefer to have these sorts of discussions, as it seems the participants gain the opportunity learn more about who the other person actually is as a whole being.

So again, my objective in the previous post was quite removed from any attempt to defend or assail any particular approach to politics. Instead, it was to see if you might be interested in slowing down for a moment to think of someone as a person, instead of a cog in some political collective. I look forward to your reply.

Please reference this comment thread, which contains a comment I posted in response to what some might perceive as an "attack" on Ayn Rand (a person who undoubtedly doesn't care a bit about it, as she's dead). In broad strokes, if pushed to classify myself in terms of political affiliation, I might reasonably be described as strongly identifying with many of the principles espoused by the Libertarian party.

Based on that single comment thread and my open admission of apparent LP affiliation, I'm curious whether you would presume to make a summary judgement of my character per your post. In different terms, I wonder if you would not only believe that you have a deep understanding of me as a whole person based on this limited criteria, but would also act upon that belief if you believed it would serve to reinforce your particular worldview. I look forward to your reply.

Charitable donations aren't the only way of creating value in the world.

I'm probably wasting my time here as you're posting AC, and it's certainly offtopic, but I feel compelled to respond to this. What you've posted is a perfect example of rejecting a message you would otherwise hold in esteem because you have a personal problem with the core philosophy of the messenger, followed by substitution of a message with that is quite nearly functionally equivalent, yet represents the work of someone you happen to like more.

If anything, I would characterize your behavior as irrational, and thus amusingly at odds with both your reference to meds and the point of both quotes. The end result, at least to my perception, is apparent manifestation of quite an elitist attitude. Are you perchance employed in academia?

That doesn't seem to make any sense. The whole point of multiple DNS servers is to have them distributed across separate hosts and preferably separate networks, but putting them on exclusive hardware doesn't provide any gain unless you're handling a ridiculous number of queries per second (in which case there's no point to virtualizing the servers in first place). That is, unless you actually meant to say you make sure the second sentence applies, instead of potentially saying no other VMs run on hosts that happen to host your DNS servers.

I use KVM on Debian hosts for all my production stuff, but yeah, my first thought was "those servers are all virtualized now."

You seem insecure. It may surprise you that I don't really care whether you served or not, nor do I consider the fact that I did to be all that remarkable in the grand scheme of things. If we're honest, neither of us really matter all that much in the bigger picture. Unfortunately, you seem to be demonstrating an oft-seen reaction to exposure to people who affirm prior service in the context of conversations like these, and I'd guess it's probably based on insecurity stemming from something else in your life. That's too bad, but it is your problem, not mine.

Getting back to the topic of the story, the statement that there was a fuck-up is redundant. That failures occurred is obvious, but the specific nature of those failures and their dependencies are something that neither of us are direct parties to. One of us simply has more subject matter experience here, and is better qualified to point out ignorant and puffed-up speculation on the part of others. Really, the core problem remains that you simply have no basis of experience to speak from. In other words, you don't know what you don't know. That's perfectly okay as long as you can admit it and work forward from there. You don't seem prepared to do that, though.

It doesn't really matter here, but I can't help but note in closing my suspicion that you also wouldn't be prepared to use your closing line in person. Thus, it seems one of us is indeed interested in attempting to prove his manhood, but it isn't me. Have a great day!

You're absolutely wrong. Please look up some actual caselaw before continuing to demonstrate your ignorance. I'd invest 15 minutes of my life doing this for you, since you're apparently incapable of doing it for yourself or you presumably would have already done so, but at this point it seems I'm wasting more of my life than is justified by even replying to your post. HAND.