Well played. There's no way to argue against the conclusion that any argument would be akin to a crack addiction. Might as well have said Solaris users are the new racists or just gone ahead and invoked Godwin.

...rather than suing companies which pick up its slack. I've tried on-and-off for several years to get support from Oracle on my Solaris machines. I'm even offering to pay for the support contracts which abruptly ended when Sun was bought out. It wouldn't have been such a problem if Oracle hadn't pay-walled the Recommended updates for Solaris. I'm having to move away from the venerable old operating system because of Oracle's neglect.

That stench in the air is the SCO disease.

Took along my TI-99/4A with about 150 cartridges and an MBX system to Christmas with my family. My two nephews, 7 and 13, got neat new electronica, including a Nintendo DS. They spent most of the day on the TI playing "Championship Baseball" and "Frogger," amongst other games in the collection. They really thought the speech recognition of the MBX was cool, though not perfect.

Why not start them with what you started with, and explain to them your evolution? Maybe even demonstrate it if you can: I have my TI, my Commodore 64, and my Amiga which I can show to them. I can even show them early Macs and Ataris (8-bit and ST) like I got to use in school. It believe it's helpful for them to know from where the technology they use today came.

While I lament that the card-swappers of today don't know so much about the chip-swapping I did (though things like the Arduino and BASIC Stamp certainly help,) I am sure that some of my own elders lament that I never knew what it was like to solder a diode into a CPU to create a new instruction.

It was on some show. It was distributed as a game involving getting pink Frisbee-like objects into purple articulating horns which emanated from holes in plane which extended off into the distance. Seems like it might be quite addictive.

Other companies wouldn't have to provide Solaris support if Oracle would provide it. Oracle's support sales team is in the witness protection program.

"This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark"

Maybe that was the event to put his life back on track.

Definitely a good read. I thought this right away. As rescuers sift through the rubble of what once was the research lab at Ludwig Maximilian University, they will uncover a journal with the sentence

"Algernon bit me today."

...over this bullshit? How many times do we have to hammer into managers and security teams alike that this shit is serious? When do we just start replacing ineptitude with people who give a shit?

This addresses part of my question below. Thank you.

Are all TV transmitters in England government-run? The problem I see arising from this plan is privately-operated TV stations become a critical infrastructure and eventually fall under government control for integrity and safety purposes. If a TV transmitter shuts down for whatever reason, planned or other-wise, then that part of the air traffic system could fail or operate under reduced capacity. If required for air traffic control, would TV stations then become "too important to fail?"

*sigh* Guess I have to go RTFA.

"Password vaults are likely to become more widely used out of necessity."

A long time ago I memorized my passwords. They started with simple six character passwords to more complex 10 characters. Later as complexity requirements became more disparate between systems, including aging and having to retire otherwise good passwords, I gave up and started saving them, instead.

I use the built-in password saver in Firefox with a master password and FIPS enabled (http://luxsci.com/blog/master-password-encryption-in-firefox-and-thunderbird.html) and with my user profile encrypted by Windows EFS. I use apg (http://www.adel.nursat.kz/apg/) to generate random passwords as long as 48 characters and with character sets dependent upon site requirements.

To my aggravation many web sites do not allow me to save my password. To mitigate this I have a bookmark button with Javascript code to strip all autocomplete=off from the forms. I get more aggravated with sites which have maximum lengths or do not allow certain special characters. So far as I know, if you hash what you get from the user it should not matter what is used for the password,assuming it meets complexity requirements.

Sure, I could get a third party password utility, but I feel that I should be allowed to use the built-in utilities available to me. While my way does have its weaknesses, and I know not everyone manages passwords much worse, the situation is no less aggravating.

20.0a1 here. Without actually reading TFA, I wonder if this is the last version.

If only I had mod points. I've been using the nightly x64 builds now for a while. I'll echo OP's statement on not easily finding the 64-bit nightly builds. I'm running a lot of 64-bit software on my XP x64 system (will be 7 x64 when I get around to it) simply because I have noticed performance increases in Firefox (with a butt-load of add-ons) and The Gimp in 64-bit. AutoCAD and Revit in x64 run like dreams, too (aside from the standard bugs.) Anyway, I'm disappointed I'll not be seeing more nightly builds. Even though every once in a while I have to go back a date because something got broken the night before, that's the gamble with using beta software. It was also pretty neat to see features folded in before they made it main-stream (though I suppose there's 32-bit builds to do the same?)

Without delving into the technicals presented in above threads on developing in a 64-bit environment, I'll just note that in 2012 (soon to be 2013,) with x64 Windows OS pretty much the standard I see no real reason why we don't have x64 software as the standard. My best guess is once developers drop XP, and maybe Vista support as well, perhaps we'll see more.

I posit that the car analogy is valid for the part of his question in which he denigrates RackSpace for charging for immediate service. In the sense that returning his web site (car) to a usable state (repair service) which would have normally incurred a nominal cost (insurance) but instead he addressed it after the DDoS (wreck) and wanted the mitigation to happen at a lower rate (paying the body shop for next-day service out-of-pocket versus letting the insurance cover it and pay for a rental.)

I like your pick-up on the effects on other customers and the wreck blocking the road. In terms of municipal services, the emergency responders are generally paid for by local taxes but services such as removal, repair of damage to public property, clean-up, and subsequent storage of the vehicle (if necessary) are all often billed to the party at fault.