Well, there is that.

But if your test of support is "boot livecd or similar image off usb flash drive adn see if it all works" then it would appear to work. Only when you go to actually modify/delete/create partitions on the hard drive is when this particular nastiness seemed to show up... and while you may find an understanding blue shirt that will let you boot with unknown media as a pre-purchase test good luck finding one that will let you actually install before you buy.

and I would demand that the person use their corporate account, not some yahoo/gmail/hotmail/whatever address that happens to match spelling on the user part ...

Well, with name based virtual hosts you certainly need some sort of name to send the request to, whether provided by DNS or /etc/hosts or whatever.

And yes, running your own DNS is trivial. IF your provider isn't blocking requests out that aren't headed to their own servers, much like smtp and port 25....

Indeed. I was willing to pay $40 for a Raspberry Pi kit to run DNS on my home network and spoof many of the common advertising domains, pointing to a webserver on the Pi that simply serves up a 404.

Well, to be fair, to the other 7 billion people on this planet *you* are "the other guy". Why shouldn't the presence of possibly billions of billions of alien life change that?

Besides - this just means there might be some sort of giant super mirror out there. Cool either because, well, aliens right? But I would imagine also that the astrophysics folks would get some serious geek out moments from it...

To be fair, some of us click the links within a VM just to see what kind of nastiness is hiding on the other end.

As for the status bar simple javascript can keep it covered with something else... or do you not remember the scrolling ticker tape status bars on the pages of the late 90s and early 00s?

Numbers are easy, until marketing and/or legal gets involved.

Porsche numbered their cars based on project number. So the iconic 356 is the 356th project that Porsche Engineering undertook.

Except Ferry didn't want his first customer to think they were the first... so the first project was #7, so the 356 is actually project number 349 (this is where marketing kicked in for him).

This carried on with sub assemblies - the 744 transmission, etc.

Then the 901 was introduced. And after they made 34 cars, Peugeot called their legal department and it was decided that they had an issue with any other car maker making a car and badging wtih a 3 digit number where the middle number is a 0. And so overnight the 901 became the 911.... of course, one of those first 34 cars with the 901 badging are VERY collectible, even over and above any other early 911...

Is slashdot and the corporate overlord of the year a "media company" ? Sure, most of the slashvertisements point to other "news" sites, but there is also the ask slashdot, the ability to post from a journal, etc. Is that just providing a platform to us plebes to comment on "news" "articles" with a nifty rating system that gives us some sort of social gratification?

To heck with both data and bandwidth then.

How about Unlimited Use. AT&T/whoever figures out how many megabytes they are willing for me to transfer per month. After each day of service, compute how much data I have left and divide by time remaining in month, and set the speed cap to that. Repeat daily. Set a minimum guaranteed so things like maps or basic browsing work even if I've turned my phone into a hotspot for 12 people streaming netflix and have blown my bandwidth for the month.

Well, unless you are giving out binaries of your code then you don't need to worry. GPLv2 doesn't care about who receives the output of the code, just if you distribute the code or a binary compiled from that code.

GPL3

Affero GPL licensed stuff though, if you run a server with it and I get the output, I can ask for the code.

Eh, just get your own VPS and run fingerd

All the time, as disposable media. Give some data to someone, don't care if you get the disc back.

Depends on what was covered in the degree program. The Comp Sci Engineering degree at UF has *one* programming class (Java). Here at "the other college" in Gainesville someone who graduated last spring would've had the chance to experience C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, both iOS and Android app, and now with our BAS degree we are covering UML and a few other things. But nothing about say Python or Ruby. So if I were looking for a job and there was lots fo work for people who had experience with Python, doing a boot camp on top of my degree (BS, BAS, or AS) would make sense.

Not sure about VB6, but I used VB4 and 5 as a "scripting language" on Windows to do stuff to text files. Wrote a few things that basically did file format transformation so other people could do it. I was allowed to install VB/Visual Studio stuff but not anything else extra from the default image. Of course, this was in the late 90s and there wasn't really much else there.

Mowing the lawn? I put on the headphones, grab a cold "lawn mower beer" (Amber Bock or similar "lighter" beer compared to what I normally drink), and mow away. Sure it takes me 3 hours to do my acre and a half on a riding mower, and I'm not good for much else when I'm done due to my BAC levels, but at least it isn't mind numbingly boring.

One of my friends from high school got a job on a lawn crew - Fridays were "LSD Days" - drop a tab and get to work... too hard core for me.