HUMA

This is the real issue. Sysadmins tend to have hyper inflated views of their own roles. Many believe they are the only reason that the company exists, and have utter disdain for everyone else around them. Their "if it weren't for me you'd not have a job" attitude is what leads them to have the spoiled, bratty, entitlement attitude that they have.

Dennis Nedry's character has more than a little resemblance to the usual state of affairs in real life. Fat, lazy, obnoxious and totally convinced of their own indispensability.

Oh, and I know all this because I am a sysadmin. Now stop reading Slashdot before I revoke all your Internet privileges.

WINDOW POWER!

This is myopic, and I bet you are not a parent. In fact I bet you're probably still a kid, with that attitude.

It is not a new trend that companies make it easy to spend huge amounts of money before a parent knows what's going on. Buying a kid a toy used to be a safe bet, the purchase of the item was the sum total of the toy's price. Nowadays, every device has a built in app-store or similar functionality and a credit card is required to even make the device function (why does Apple require a credit card to download free apps or update apps that you've already paid for?!).

Expecting parents to be looking over the shoulder of their kids, who are still too young to have developed the ability to fully comprehend the consequences of spending 50c every few minutes over the span of a month, is unreasonable, and companies that engage in predatory sales in this manner should not be given a free pass on the back of the "well parents should be looking after their kids" argument.

I owned and ran a cell phone shop for 10 years, and one of the most frequent complaints was parents giving a "safety phone" to their kids at age 15 only to rack up huge bills on premium ringtone services. Sure, those kids should probably have been on prepaid, but that does not clear the companies charging $5 per ringtone, and then auto subscribing the number to a $5/day new ringtone service of responsibility. Yes, this happened, just like I'm describing it.

Companies feeding on the impulsiveness of children should be strung up and flogged. So should Apple, for making it a requirement that a credit card be entered into the phone at all times.

Stop being level-headed. You're ruining the opportunity for rich people to declare war on something.

OwnCloud is what you want if you want all the features the other people are pointing out, without the anal probe that is commercial cloud solutions. OwnCloud gives you a ton of cloud-like functionality using your own physical server which you are free to locate wherever you wish. It also offers encrypted transmission if you really are moving high-value information or if you're one of those paranoid types.

A receipt for disaster? I'm glad that the forces of nature are committed to providing accurate documentation of their transactions with humanity.

The use of phrases such as "reasonable people like me" usually indicates that the speaker is not a reasonable person.

Good catch. Few know the difference between who and whom these days, I suspect within a decade that shade of syntax will be lost like so many before it, and take another small piece of the English language's expressional range with it.

1. Email blacklists are a terible idea, and I really sympathise with this guy's plight. I've been at the nasty side of a Spamhaus issue with my own mail server and I can tell you, those guys are nothing but a bunch of digital thugs who have managed to get themselves a nice big stick that they use to hit people randomly with. My server, being private, had just about every conceivable spam prevention mechanism turned on. SSL only connections, authorised SMTP-submission sending only, properly set up SPF records, PTR records correctly registered against the IP to allow reverse lookup. It got registered with Spamhaus and it took me a LONG time to get them to play ball. I'm still listed with a few older BL's but oh well.

2. If someone in a country wishes to circumvent government censors, why on Earth would they use a proxy? Why would they not just use Tor, which can't be blocked or filtered in that manner? If the government is doing deep packet inspection and will infer illegality from mere encrypted traffic, surely transferring illegal content in the clear is worse? Furthermore, setting up Tor is not materially more difficult than setting up a proxy. Not trolling, genuinely interested to know why one would choose the proxy path over Tor.

Umm... I'm going to tentatively call BS on your rifle round in a board story. A rifle round without a barrel to direct the gas behind it won't have the energy to travel 20 yards, let alone impact something in any meaningful manner.

If it can be done, YouTube it and make a fool of me.

Dude, have you SEEN what a Blendtech blender can do? Guns have nothing on that.

That's not really a bad idea, given that the whole business of pawn brokering is based on a mix of brokering sales of stolen goods and feeding on the needs of the most vulerable members of society.

Personally, I think pawn brokers should be summarily shot.

Care to comment on the fact that the only time that Muslims, Jews and Christians all managed to inhabit the same land was actually under a Muslim government? History seems to poke a hole in your "Muslims will wipe out Jews the first chance they get" claim. But I guess, being pro-Israeli, you'll hand wave that away somehow.

The fiction that "the land has been disputed since ancient history" is just that, a fiction.
As part of the Ottoman Empire, the people living there operated their own local governemnt, which fell under the administrative purview of the Ottoman government. Saying that the land was disputed is like saying that Florida is currenty disputed, and ripe for the establishment of a homeland for displaced Russians.

Regarding your counter retort, all I can say is that it is totally morannic