Credit cards companies take a cut out of what merchants later get, and it's normally a percentage, but it is not unusual for there to also be a minimum transaction fee. So, small credit card transactions aren't good for retailers, since the lose an unusually high amount of money to the credit card company. ... in fact, in the states, July 2010's Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act recently legalized businesses setting a "minimum purchase with credit card" of up to $10.

I believe what they're trying to say is that it's more akin to the Windows world of things - "Hey, this apache-thing is trying to bind to port 80... do you want to let it through the firewall?"

Not really; listening in on the radio signals sent between the phone and the tower would not be difficult, and the encryption for it is a joke.

No one went for the mildly insulting tag "Chinasaurus Rex"? Dissapointing.

In other news, approximately 50% of people are of lower-than-average intelligence :-)

Tattooed onto Cowboy Neal.

Three whole gigabytes? My word, what would one do with all that space. Perhaps store half a DVD? What absolute nonsense.

This is not a privacy issue; there is little expectation of privacy in a workplace when using company property anyway. I personally feel this would be a nice help; imagine working for a government contractor and having having software automatically raise flags when someone copies documents with "DO NOT COPY" or "CONFIDENTIAL" in the OCR text. This is somewhat useful.

See, you can say this like it's a bad thing, but the concept of phone numbers is /retarded/. Why should you have to know some arcane, difficult to remember internal routing ID of a phone subscriber just to call them? It's like, instead of having DNS, you have to put in every IP address manually for any server/website you wish to visit. Sure, you can have a phone book, but this is like just putting an entry in /etc/hosts; it's definitely a horrible solution to a now-solved problem. If the Senate had banned phone numbers, that would have forced the phone companies to create something better. A kind of Telephone Name Service of sorts.

I've seen a lot of promising college-aged open source devs that seem to have an overwhelming reverence and awe towards the kernel, thinking it far too complicated for them to work on with their own programming abilities. In reality, most of them could pick up the kernel and figure it out quite quickly, but they'll never convince themselves of that.

I'm waiting till they start to allow acronyms, so that we geeks can win with our multitude of TLAs.

That is one Intrepid Ibex for sure. Maybe they spliced in some penguin DNA? *wink*

You know you're old if you remember that your copy of 25th Anniversary came with a video demo for Fury :-)

>> Linux groups would be a good bet for meeting more geeks.
>> Something that help me get out of my shell...
>_>

You should check out what you're missing - I hear they ported Linux to it :-)