There is truth in what you say; see also The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks for a further discussion along those lines.

However, I have also seen cases where the person they're talking about really is an incompetent and/or immoral idiot, and what management are parsing as name-calling and a possible shifting of blame is, in actual fact, one of your staff warning you of a significant danger.

While management might not like to believe they've hired someone with those qualities for a role, if it has happened, they would be well served to listen to the bad news being reported and take some action to assess and mitigate that risk!

Those traffic lights are designed to protect against such. Advisory locks they 'aint.

And regarding your trip. Depending on how long you stay there, if it's more than a week, try to find a neighbourhood pub (a real one preferably, not one of those modern things) and meet the locals.

A friend of mine put together a list of decent pubs in the area; see: http://ashok.org.uk/thelist/

The decentralised nature of this system will directly threaten Facebook, Twitter et al.

The DNS system works, and scales, because everyone publishing information to the DNS is responsible for the upkeep of the nodes that publish their own records.

Facebook and Twitter, however, have scaling and financial problems. Facebook, so far as I am aware, continues to make a substantial annual loss despite its enormous success, and I have yet to hear that Twitter has managed to turn a profit.

More importantly, the privacy of everyone publishing much of their personal, private correspondence using a small number of centralized agencies is directly threatened -- and it could get particularly messy if, in a few years time, $SOCIALNETWORK fails to become profitable, goes into receivership, and the vast databases of private information are identified by the administrators as the organisation's most valuable asset.

In contrast, a Wave infrastructure, like DNS, will distribute the upkeep and storage of private information to many (hopefully) locally trustworthy systems. Because of social engineering / hacking attacks, leakage of private information can and will still occur, but the impact should hopefully be minimized if the Wave protocol and its implementations have been suitably well engineered.

This is going to be interesting.

I bet you'd get quite a few high-quality contributions if you opened it up as a competition.

You could cheat and use leading zeroes. Or unconventional but entirely valid number bases..

Creating a portal tunnel between your room and the surface of the Moon would fairly rapidly result in most of the air being evacuated from the Earth and deposited in lunar orbit around it.

This idea definitely falls into the Egon Spengler "That would be Bad" category.

Better idea: create a perpetual motion machine -- free energy -- by opening the exit portal above an entry portal, fixing a turbine in between them, and chucking in some water.

We deployed OTRS locally when we had to deploy something open-source off-the-shelf quickly, and it's proved painful. It might be possible to make it do what you want with more time and customization.

Since then, I've seen RoundUp appear, and it looks most promising, though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

You can bash the man if you like, but you'd be more convincing if you laid off the ad hominem attacks and got your facts straight:

This latest is just the gasp of a flunkie, uneducated has-been science fiction author whose work is so spectacularly bad that he had never had a commercially successful work.

On the contrary; his latest novel "Little Brother" made the New York Times Bestseller list (Childrens), reaching the #8 spot after 6 weeks. It's had multiple print runs, been published in both the US and the UK, where they've sold well, and has been nominated for and granted a range of literary awards.

I'd say that qualifies as a commercially successful work by any reasonable definition!