I had a smoothwall box where the hard disk failed and we didn't notice for 6 months.

I got suspicious when PFY informed me that there hadn't been any updates for it in about 9 month, I checked the website and the other smoothwall box and found a few updates released in that time. Turns out it tried to download the list of available updates to the hard disk and then checked those against the list of updates installed. As it couldn't save the list it found nothing to install!

As it loaded all software into RAM upon boot, and the logging was buffered in memory (and we hadn't needed to check it as it was a backup anyway) everything just kept on running (Firewall rules, VPNs, everything, it just kept on running) until the PFY rebooted it and found it woudn't boot.

SgtWilko.

I'm a Very strong believer in self documenting code, I simply don't allow my team to create objects, variables, functions, etc that don't tell you what they do.

I'm also a strong believer in adding comments to code. Good, self documenting, code should tell you what it is doing without comments, but often the reason Why it needs to do things are is lost or cannot be conveyed in the code.

tl;dr:
Well written code tells you what it does.
Well documented code tells you why it does what it does.

Ahhh, thank goodness for that, three times screwed I can cope with.
At 450 times I was considering running a cable from over there... :-)

Do you have to pay tax on electricity?

All the houses I've lived in in the UK have 1 phase for the entire house and the three phases are used sequentially as you go along the road.

When some but not all of the phases go down and it's night, you can see the effect by looking down the street to see every third house either lit-up or off depending on it being one or two phases that are out.

0.083 cents?
0.083 cents(US) is about 0.05 pence (Sterling).
I pay around 23p (~ 37 cents(US)) for the first 720 kWh per year, then about 9p (~14 cents(US)) for the rest, or around 450 times more than your cost above...

All my prices include VAT, please tell me 0.083 cents is after tax???

I realise that my case may be atypical, like many geeks I like efficiency so most of our lights are either LED or compact fluorescent lamps. However we use about 8 kW a day in the summer (when not using the washing machine) and about 11 a day in the winter. Washing days push us up to about 12 to 15 kW a day.
Weekly consumption is between 55kWh and 70kWh for summer and up to 85+kWh in winter.
We would use less but my wife likes light fittings that look nice but require multiple lamps.

This is for a family of 3, and although we have a gas hob we do most of our cooking with a electric grill and oven.

So 28kWh could do us for 2 days, but you wouldn't be driving anywhere afterwards...

Which is something we probably all thought was the case.

This was particularly brought home to me when I discovered that a lot of the Optical Audio cables I've seen recently have suddenly started having gold plated connectors.
I mean really, Gold Plating on an Optical cable, does anyone with any intelligence fall for these stupid tricks?

Correct me if I'm wrong but, Yes, what you are saying is true for hashes without salt or systems that allow you to provide an already hashed password (why would you do such a thing?), but for these you do not need the collision the hash itself will do.

In a system that correctly applies the salt, your new input will not generate the same hash.
i.e.,
User sets Password, Password is hashed with the salt (e.g., passwordHash = hash(salt+password) )
You discover the resultant hash,
You find a collision that produces the same hash ( hash(collisionValue) == passwordHash )
You then try to use this collisionValue to gain access to the system, but because of the use of a salt the system will take your collisionValue and add the salt, this will produce a completely different resultant hash and will not match the stored password hash.

hash(salt+collisionValue) != passwordHash.

Unless you know of a side-channel attack, or have access to enough hashes where you already know the password in order to determine the salt (or format of the salt for a roaming salt) then your collision is not effective.

Yes you are correct the OP didn't use rainbow tables where salting helps to prevent attacks, but the tables produced were for 1-6 character passwords, without salt. Had he used a 16 character salt (128 extra bits as per bcrypt) then he would not have found a single one of these passwords in that amount of time.

Unless you know the salt and how it is being applied to the password (hash(salt+password), hash(password+salt), hash(hash(password)+salt), etc) you will find it very, very difficult to produce input, not to the hash, but to the authentication system, that can match the resultant password hash.