Naw, you'd probably need a Poisson distribution ;-).

I thought tying smart meters into the internet was an idiotic idea from the beginning as it would be my first hack should I ever work with gangs/drug-users/ordinary-criminals (pick one or several). Given how competent the existing security on the grid already is, well....

On the bright side, now I can think up lovely hacks of the robot internet (stuff the cloud nonsense) which would be even more fun(??)! Picture a worm giving the robotic version of enemas....

That's the first sensible analysis of the requirements yet! Fortunately, unless I'm out in the field, the separation between bed and work is two feet. This has been interesting so far (as witnessed by where this is posted). Nice suggestions all.

It worked out rather well in my case. I was expected to do the chores (cooking, cleaning) from age 6 on with my younger brothers picking up chores as they became capable. [I should also add that I was learning electronic engineering at that age, taught by my mother to my Dad and myself. Lissitude patterns are fun.] Then again, the very first book my mother handed me when I figured out how to read, age 3, was Robert A. Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel."

Further it should be no surprise that I grew up a Libertarian, able to independently function with or without society, and entered the military for a first career. Funny how standards change. In any rational society, your children are inherent labor force for the family unit. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Really depends on if and how your VPN handles DNS leakage. As always, caveat emptor. I picked mine on the basis that I had a choice of whether and how it was handled before I paid.

Proper configuration is the part that kills most servers and it isn't something to take lightly. Distributed Denial of Service (DNS amplification) attacks are enabled by any idiot setting up a DNS server without knowing WTF they are doing. So yeah, go ahead and do it.

The one day I don't have mod-points. +5 ROFLMAO.

On the other hand (I'm also an economist, sue me!), when/if Google were to try this, there would be open rebellion among the interneterati. Not that most people would even notice, but then again, they don't seem to think much, if at all, about the NSA spying scandals either. For those of us that actually might care about this, couple of clicks or one shell-script and we're invisible.

Partially true, at best. If you are serious about using GPU's for anything whose erroneous result can kill people, you don't use consumer-grade GPU cards. I don't know what you have but I only use workstation-grade and then I verify the results, just as I would do with anything hazardous. As an engineer, I can't afford those types of mistakes.

And on the whole database thang? The GPU is chained to a database-eating machine (5.65 GBps SSD array, and yes, that's GigaBytes). Yeah, it can make pretty graphics with the results of a crunching session, but that was not why it was picked. Taking lots of big data and teasing out predictive analytics was the chosen role. 'Sides, I don't twitch right.

I get your point but mostly due to the fact that I've been a heretic for the last forty-four years. The funny part is, what I was doing then is what everyone else is doing now, just twenty or so years later. The difference being, in one case, having to forklift my big data into the data center. It keeps me amused.

Frankly I'd resign before working with an EHR system on XP that was also even remotely (pun intended) facing the internet. The penalties from the government alone are frightening and should a patient be harmed or di?. No way. I've done every kind of engineering and analysis that even remotely touch the medical field and I also know the laws around medical systems. If what you represent is true, run. now. Maybe you'll get far enough away.

That needs a real answer. For close on a decade, the first thing to go on any Windows system here was the desktop. I can tolerate Windows 8 and 8.1 enough to use it. And on the Server side if they had a bunch of apps that displayed useful information, it'd be usable over there but that's a lack of foresight and also the fact most people don't even look at a server most of the time. [I use the high-end servers for my workstations as the memory management just works.] But I'm an old Amiga heretic, so ....

Thank you!

Got a chuckle here.

Yes, those alternative history stories are what immediately brought this to mind in reference to Mandela. And on the bright side, alternative history based stories have actually created paid employment for historians. [Rather than being bus drivers, ....]