A good portion of my life I worked construction, specifically building stores in malls around the country. I would drive to one job, stay in a hotel until it was finished, then drive to the next. I would easily drive 50,000 miles a year, with the vast majority of it not being in the state that the car was registered in. So, under this system, if I was an Oregon resident, I would have to pay the mileage tax based on my total miles to Oregon to maintain their roads, which I hardly used, while also paying gas taxes in all of the other states that I am actually driving in to maintain their respective road systems. Gee, it's hard to see how I might think this idea is complete bull shit, even without thinking of the privacy aspect.

There is a room dedicated to installing and/or troubleshooting installs for the whole event. Of course there is the vendor area showing whatever wares they have. Mostly it is sessions covering a broad range of topics. I saw Monty Widenius talk about MySQL upcoming features and such a few years ago. There was a session about how red light cameras actually work from a software and hardware point of view last year. Developing for this or that, embedded platforms and such. Generally one session for either KDE or Gnome and why they are either good or bad. There is an electronics area where they are showing 3D printers, Lego Mindstorms and that sort of thing usually. A guy I know does a whole day session demonstrating the automated beer homebrewing system that he made which utilizes Linux. He also supplies the home made beer and soda for the after party. Jeopardy style game session that I think is called Alpha Nerd. Most of the sessions are someone showing something they created to "scratch their own itch," such as the git based backup system session I saw either last year or the year before. It seems like there are usually 20-30 different sessions at least scheduled throughout the day, and a raffle drawing at the end with some great prizes. Also, the culinary department of the school has a great lunch, usually salmon, steak sandwiches, or some vegetarian option I can't recall, for a very reasonable price.

You know, I think you intended to troll, but I was looking for anyone else whose first thought was thank god. I am so tired of listening to people whine about not being able to stream high def TV all day while torrenting several things and direct downloading a few ISO images and having all 3 kids and the wife streaming pandora without the ISP giving them a problem. No, I don't care about any pet theories about how convergence will play out and how that will dictate whatever bandwidth or any shit like that. I really miss the days before AOL, when virtually everything online was actually of value, instead of being petabytes of stupid fucking cat videos. /rant Goodbye karma. Nice knowing ya.

Just slightly more trouble than it is for the teenage boy walking by to unplug it after watching you walk inside, making you not able to get to work in the morning.

You have a point, and I am sure that is the case in a lot of situations, but why is it not acceptable to mandate that even though there are convenience and minor cost issues, these critical infrastructure systems a absolutely not allowed any outside network connections? No remote access, no checking /. or hotmail on break, nothing. Don't like it, tough shit, find another job that isn't part of a critical infrastructure.

Same reason I got "Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere." Still haven't read it...

Perhaps over a decade trying to reform schools in the Pacific Northwest and Texas through various programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with varying levels of success, has taught him a few things about the topic.

Assuming the attacker knew somehow that the password was exactly 7 letters, and that they were all lower case letters, which shouldn't be the case, it still shouldn't have been possible. 7 letters, 26 possible letters in each location means just over 8 billion possible combinations. If we assume upper and lower case letters plus numbers are tried in the brute force attack, that gives a bit over 5 trillion possibilities. Exactly how many failed attempts are allowed on their web logon before any sort of protection system kicks in. So, yes, I do think it is a design and implementation flaw by Microsoft.

Yes. That was a single example to show that people in rural areas aren't the only issue mass transit ideas face, and it applies not only there, but also in every other city in the midwest and northeast. Add to that the inverse issue of extreme heat in Houston for example, urban sprawl issues due to extremely high costs of living in city centers, and thousands of other issues that have stopped mass transit anywhere working on a scale anywhere near what would be necessary to eliminate the need for people to ever drive is a good enough reason to dismiss this idea out of hand. That is without mentioning a desire for vacations, hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, etc, where the entire premise is to get away from where everything is.

Minneapolis, the 16th largest metro are in the US, regularly has temperatures around -30F in the winter, without figuring in wind chill. Getting off a bus/train/whatever and walking the last 5-10 blocks is a potentially deadly health risk to the very young and very old at that point. There are plenty more problems than just living in the country that make all those "idiots complain that it won't work."

Actually, he was quoted in the NPR interview as saying: "'I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special,' he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. 'It never ends up being that.'" All of that money ends up in the studios pocket is how I understood that. In a matter of four days he has netted $200k on this deal. I do agree that it worked for him because he already had the necessary fan base though.

So you haven't experienced the DVDs that force you to sit through previews by disabling skip and fast forward functionality. How nice for you.

Thank you. Exactly what I was thinking. What is so wrong with keeping company "secrets" on paper only? Not everything needs to be, nor should be, emailed, blogged, and tweeted about. Technology can be good, but is not implicitly better just because it's newer. For example, I will never prefer an e-reader to a good old fashioned book. Oh well. An obligatory get off my lawn!

I was rather looking forward to shorting them.

According to supremecourt.gov: "The Court receives approximately 10,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari each year. The Court grants and hears oral argument in about 75-80 cases." So, roughly, just shy of 1%