This, exactly. I live in Alberta, and the enforcement of this law is almost non-existent. I've never met anyone who's been pulled over for using a cellphone, nor have I ever met anyone who's met someone who . . . and so on.

I don't drive, but I am a passenger quite a bit (I carpool with a 1-hour-each-way commute), so I have plenty of time to watch other drivers. About 5-15% of them are interacting with something slightly out of sight. Strange how this is a superset of the drivers that drift slightly off to the sides of their lane every once in a while.

N.B: I don't doubt there are people that can multi-task in this fashion, i.e. use a cellphone and drive safely at the same time. I just don't believe that most of the people who do, can.

May I point out that your math is incorrect? It should actually be (.5**30) * (7E9) = 6.5 engineers left, because every year the number of engineers halves, it doesn't go down by a factor of 10. :)

Oh, the irony. I attempted to read the article, and I get "Site off-line".

Anyone think that he might have just won the "pissed off the hackers" achievement?

In my own opinion, worth as much as it may be, the best way to learn basic administration is to run a Linux system yourself. I'm not saying to wipe your entire hard drive immediately and install over whatever Windows version you are using, but I do suggest you at least run a LiveCD regularly and maybe even install as a second operating system.

Work with it for some tasks, become comfortable with using the command-line and using the package manager that comes with your distro. Read a little bit about the kernel (nothing too in-depth of course, but even just the basic structure of how kernel modules are used), experiment with the different filesystems. Install and configure a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack (or use PostgreSQL if you prefer) and install various web applications.

If you really want to learn, teach yourself shell and Perl scripting. Those two are sort of the . . . "swiss army knives" of UNIX-derived systems.

I would write more, but I'm afraid that I need to get somewhere in the next three minutes. I wish you best of luck on your journey, however you wish to take it. You'll be frustrated, exasperated, and even angry at times, but . . . well.

It'll be fun.

'Twould be very interesting to see just how accurate these devices are. While they are undoubtably cheap and easy to manufacture, many applications require high-precision measurements, not just good approximations. Nevertheless, bravo.

Umm . . . obvious, per chance? It seems to me that this is sort of . . . common sensical. Many people (myself included among that set) use a common username across multiple sites for that very reason mentioned in the article. To enable others to track us via our username. Of course, the intended audience is not the scammers -- oh, sorry, "marketers" -- but rather fellow hackers. But it's a double-edged sword. Perform an action, and the consequences will arrive, knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Welcome to the world, people.