Nope, completely independent of your phone number. Each site you visit effectively has its own user identifier, unique to that site, which is generated from a combination of your master key and the website address. Unless you tell the web site some of your details all the site knows is that you are the same person as every other time you visited. Nothing stopping this being completely anonymous as long as the site does not demand personally identifiable info (eg a retail site would need your name, address and payment details or the login is pointless)

Part of the reason Olympus Mons is thought to be so big is the lack of plate tectonics on Mars. On Earth the plates are moving about so a hot spot slowly moves under the crust creating features like the Hawaiian line of volcanoes. On Mars the same hot spot is believed to have sat under Olympus Mons for billions of years - so even if it was relatively slow it had enough time to reach its great height.

Supplies, equipment and medical samples are coming back. Can't find any more specific details...

From http://www.spacex.com/webcast/ just now...

People who can't afford, don't have space for or just do not want a tablet AND a laptop AND a desktop. Many people who are perfectly happy with just a tablet and a laptop - a desktop would be better in certain cases but not enough for them to buy one as well. Some of them so rarely touch the laptop (perceived as old and slow) now that most stuff gets done on the tablet because of the convenience even if its far from the best tool for the job.

Exactly the same situation I'm in. We still have SBS2003 partly because it does everything we need but also partly because upgrading the licencing is a complex and expensive pain. Half our server licences are for 2008 (eopen) but we downgrade them all to 2003 because those are the user CAL's we have. Given the end of support for MS Server 2003 in April 2014 I've been looking at upgrading all the servers next year. Given we have virtualised most of our servers we then have to consider how many licences we need for the host hardware depending on how many VM's run on it - and you can't move the licence between hardware more frequently than every 90 days unless you also buy software assurance. Therefore you loose the benefit of moving VM's between hosts easily unless you buy extra licences so the destination hardware already has a licence.

We have already decided to move all our email to the cloud so with the local domain just being for local authentication and group policy this new version of Samba is seriously interesting to me. Will still need a few real MS servers for specific things that have to run on Windows (phone system, Sage accounts etc) but this would let us be far more flexible and have multiple domain controllers etc for far less cost and licencing complexity.

His plan is to replace time compression with "local hyperspace" to speed up travel in order for multiplayer to work.

Surely one of the main jobs this kind of program would encounter is retiring any satellite that it finds it cannot repair/refuel? Effectively just re-positioning into an orbit that intersects the atmosphere but given the problems of space junk I would have thought they would want to highlight this potential benefit especially as it increases the "R" count to 6.

While I agree with your basic point from the point of view of the users who have "shiney" at home and "rubbish" at work I'm still not too clear on what is wrong with Win XP and Office 2003 (for a Microsoft house). For your basic user who sends emails, writes word docs and pushes numbers arround in Excel what part of their job is suddenly a lot easier in Win7 / Office 2010? There are several improvements but nothing groundbreaking and when you compare the cost of new desktops against tight cash in the modern economy does the performance increase of giving 40 people new computers compare against a whole persons wage for a year? Maybe, maybe not depending on your circumstances.

Shiney new toys can have their uses (iPads look very good in presentations and might swing a few extra sales, smartphones can be great for people on the road to respond to emails quickly rather than waiting until they return to base and turn on their laptop etc) but generally end users will always want shiney - sometimes because its actually a much better idea, sometimes because its shiney and the person next to them has it. The tricky task for IT is to decide which is which and try to encourage that way.

Hopefully pretty soon we will move away from using passwords to something else like one of those RSA key fobs and OpenID. Then people can remember a single password which combined with the dual factor makes a very strong proof of identity. OpenID gives you the same login everywhere which removes the other issue with secure passwords and trying to remember all of them, After all its better to trust a company that bases its business of dual factor authentication than a pile of post-it notes stuck to your monitor. They will take securing their servers seriously. Oh wait....

Probably no point in having it work on XP itself from a corporate point of view - anyone with the authority to order replacement of all WinXP machines in a company will likely already have Windows 7 on their nice powerful new computer. Typically I'd also have expected the IT departments to have a good portion of Windows 7 machines as they will need to gain experience in it to support anyone in the rest of the company using windows 7. All the little "Go to control panel, add remove programs... what do you mean its not there?" issues which you need to be familiar with.

Or someone who has to follow rules like PCI DSS which requires you to change passwords at least every 90 days, be at least 7 char long, include numeric and alphabetic char, not be the same as any of the previous 4 passwords, auto lockout after 6 attempts for at least 30 minutes etc. Don't like that rule and the card companies don't want you handling card payments which makes business a bit hard.

Personally I'd prefer the option of teaching people to use a decent password and not change/share it but we do not have that option. As it is its a constant battle* with users forgetting their new password, using someone elses, writing it down so they remember it etc. Rapid complex password changes are viewed by many users as a problem which they try to workarround in order to get their job done.

* A battle we have pretty much won but needs constant vigilance to keep it that way which makes the IT people the bad guys.

I sure hope IPv4 does fade out. Setting up firewall rules for example requires concentration and checking (AKA time). If I need to set up one set of IPv6 rules and another set of IPv4 rules (with this old thing called NAT which can get confused when the other end is also using NAT) then it has just doubled the time required and probably increased the chances of me making a mistake and being vulnerable on one or the other versions. Once IPv6 is widely used there will be no benefit to hosting content on IPv4 and people will stop bothering.

Unfortunatly the problem is getting IPv6 "widely used" when every site currently supports IPv4. Until there are sites only on IPv6 there is no big benefit for anyone to upgrade their systems/service/settings to IPv6 however until almost everyone is on IPv6 content providers will still provide an IPv4 address. Until this is sorted both IPv4 and IPv6 can work well side by side just like most other new technologies - people did not throw out all their floppies the day that CD's became available.

Without a connection to the internet it would be harder to get software updates & virus protection updates. Do you think it would be more secure running WinXP SP1 and no internet connection? Fine until someone brings a memory stick or CD with a new set of settings for the centrifuge...

Oh yes, I can change my IP ranges to 192.168.2.x. Only two problems with this:

Firstly I manage about 15 servers with static IP's - changing all those IP address is not easy especially when you add in the firewall rules etc.

Secondly there is nothing stopping the next company I connect to using 192.168.2.x themselves. Or 192.168.1.x/24. By using an obscure 10.a.b.c subnet this is still potentially a problem but far less likely.

I use 10.a.b.c because almost nobody else uses it! When trying to create VPN tunnels to one of the several other companies I have to connect to I got fed up with them saying "Oh but we use 192.168.1.something for our [servers | LAN | DMZ ] etc. Can't you use something else?" By choosing an obscure 10. subnet for my network I have avoided these problems and can setup firewall to firewall VPN tunnels to the people supporting our database, phone system, network support, etc without worrying about routing.