I don't think you know what SPF is or how it works.
SPF specifies, by leveraging the DNS, which servers are allowed to send you mail from that domain. The problem it addresses is "spoofing" - I send an email to your servers claiming to be from you. If you have a SPF record, you can say servers x,y,z,a-c are allowed to send email claiming to be from foo.com.
There's three possibilities: 1) No SPF record - process normally 2) SPF record, sent from valid host - generally downweight spam score, since verifiably the server that sent the email was in that organization 3) SPF record, sent from invalid host - the subject of this Ask Slashdot. It should be "always bad" but Incompetent admins set up SPF, then get it wrong or don't update it and mail bounces. Hence the problems discussed here.
"sender was sending all his email through a local MTA because his ISP doesn't have an externally accessible MTA" - no problem if the SPF record is correct. Or if you can't be bothered to do that, just get rid of it.
Filtering on missing SPF records is stupid. Filtering on bad (i.e., sending host was marked as disallowed) SPF records should be 0% false positives, were it not for idiot admins - again, the subject of this AS
Funny you're uncomfortable moving to OSX, since it is (essentially) a BSD. Though I suppose that means if you were forced to give up BSDs, you'd therefore be forced to give up OSX...
Why do you think garbage collection is related to "keeping track of what was done by who, when"? All it does is clean up files that are no longer part of the commit tree; that is, unreachable and "garbage". A way to create such a file is to 'git add' a file (which puts that specific version in the repo, for later commit) and then make another change. Since it's a different file than it was, you have to re-'git add' it, which creates an entirely new object that is referenced by the eventual commit. Hence, the dangling useless object is garbage and should be cleaned up.
People have been complaining about rebasing for a long time, and there's some valid criticism of it, but given the above I'm not convinced your problems with it are properly understood.
Clearly it had "computer" in it, which is scary enough to involve the Feds.
Assuming everybody was acting in good faith, they probably would've gotten involved because of the Jstor angle, and then dropped it after Jstor was satisfied with their restitution.
It sounds like the prosecutor went like 10 steps over the line on this one, I agree. But the crime he committed against Jstor is a federal offense, mostly out of necessity (otherwise you could avoid charges by just making sure the target was in another state)
To be fair, I don't think it was "OK" for the phreakers either, but they just didn't get caught much. It's pretty much the same today.
From Wiki: "In fact, Bell responded fairly quickly, but in a more targeted fashion. Looking on local records for inordinately long calls to directory service or other hints that phreakers were using a particular switch, filters could then be installed to block efforts at that end office. Many phreakers were forced to use pay telephones as the telephone company technicians regularly tracked long-distance toll free calls in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. AT&T instead turned to the law for help, and a number of phreaks were caught by the government."
I've only been there on college tours, to be honest, so you probably know better than I.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the rules had changed, even at MIT. The network is "mission-critical" now in a way it wasn't even 15 years ago. Putting myself in a network admin's shoes, I would get a complaint about some abuse and block the machine when I found no record of it. And then when - instead of notifying the NOC of what he was doing and asking permission - he circumvented it, I would put in effect a better block (maybe he didn't get the message?). But he took it further than that, and that's when I consider him an intruder or an attacker, since I told him (with my blocks) that I wanted him to cut it out, and start escalating it up. Which since he wasn't a student meant the cops.
Look, I think the prosecutor overreacted. But he was not permitted to access it! He broke into a wiring closet using a disguise, and kept circumventing their increasingly-specific bans. Not only was he not permitted to access it, but he *knew* he was not permitted to access it. I mean, I get the whole MIT hacker thing, but at some point you have to say "ok they mean it" and back off. If I did what he did at my school, whose network folks are no less liberal than MIT's, I'd get sent to student conduct so fast it'd make your head spin and I'd have to do some serious 'splanin about what exactly I thought gave me any right to deny access to the other twenty five thousand people at my school who were trying to use the resource they had paid good money (in the form of tuition) to use. Don't forget, in order to stop his actions, they ended up blocking MIT's entire class A because he kept jumping IPs.
But he didn't even go to MIT! So he was just some guy coming in and fucking with their network and fucking up their students and faculty's access. What do you do as a network admin? Once your "get the message" bans keep getting circumvented and you can't call OSC on him, you call the cops. He would've been lucky to walk away with a trespassing conviction and a restraining order, plus whatever Jstor wanted as the primary injured party.
Now, I don't know why the feds got involved. It doesn't sound like MIT did that (though maybe didn't discourage it strongly enough), and it sounds like Jstor tried to call them off. The prosecutor was clearly out of line here, but let's not pretend he was just goofing around. And let's CERTAINLY not pretend he was "permitted to access" it. He might have been (I don't know if he had an account) until they BLOCKED HIS ACCESS due to his actions that they didn't like, and at that point he lost his "permission". In any case he certainly was not "permitted to access" a locked wiring closet to stash a laptop in. It's not 1985 any more, and you can't just break in and screw around with someone's network without any problems. Even at places like MIT.
I'd say this is a troll, but I suspect you're serious. So I'll address your points individually:
The question today that needs to be answered is what is Amateur radio for, and what is it for 10 years from now?
Amateur radio isn't "for" anything. It's for experimentation, recreation, practice, etc. Those never go away.
This isn't silly because a large portion of the "social" aspect of HAM radio has moved to the Internet.
A lot of people looking to avoid paying phone bills to chat overseas have moved to the internet. The hobby is arguably better off without people who wanted to achieve some specific task, as opposed to experiment with radio more generally.
I don't see much of a movement to keep it alive, either. There is a very small community out there and it is shrinking.
Wrong. With the elimination of the code requirements, there's been a sharp uptick in the number of people getting licensed
It is true that historically the FCC HAM regulations were designed to keep operators from stepping on each other and from stepping on commercial and government users of the spectrum. What I suspect is most feared by today's HAM operators is the CB-ification of Amateur radio - elimination of licensing in favor of commercially regulated gear. While a lot of today's users would be OK with that, it would change the entire definition and purpose - which brings us back to the original question.
What? Ignoring the fact that there's treaties requiring licensing to use ham spectrum, there's a lot of hobbyists tweaking their radios or building their own outright (look up QRP on wikipedia). It's the only radio service where that's allowed, and it's not going anywhere.
I don't see the FCC signing on to the Open Source Radio Support Act as proposed. Continuing to regulate by content type is silly and it may be silly to try to regulate by modulation type. It is a nice idea to say that transmissions have to universally decodable, but without a lot of standards and regulation to back them up this isn't going to be all that achievable - specifically reception of a bitstream without any definition is going to be pretty much inpenetratable. Just as today if I give you a binary file without any self-defining header and without identification like a file extension it could be pretty much anything and while it could be coded in a publically defined way without knowing which of thousands it could be renders it unreadable. This is similar to saying that an unknown compression scheme is the same as encryption.
Sure, of course. But that's not really the point - it's to prevent the use of anything like encryption, which would just give the first taxi service to use encryption a free radio channel.
I think today's HAM operators need to have a more compelling case why they are going to continue to exist. The home-brew gear of yesteryear is nearly gone and the "experimentation" envisioned with digitial communications might be nice to authorize but unlikely to ever produce anything of value. I would certainly like to see an openness dedicated to satellite communications, but again who is it for and what would it be used for?
This is so off the mark I'm not sure where to start. A big history of emergency communications probably justifies the amateur service on its own. Homebrew gear isn't going anywhere. The experimentation with digital communications has created many things of value if you wanted to look them up. Not sure what you're saying about satellites.
I think this all comes back to the first thing - the mistaken notion that ham (not HAM) radio has a "point". The "point" is that it's the only radio service for hobbyists, experimenters, etc to use precisely because there's no "point".
The VCR clock was required to set up a scheduled recording, so hardly pointless. People wanted to be able to do that, but couldn't because they couldn't figure it out. I think the gp's example holds
I once ran the computer help desk at my university. It was in the dorm's computer lab, and we had a binder where we'd keep notes about the condition of the lab, how much paper was there for the printer, whether all the computers were working, etc.
That $0.99 binder was stolen 4 times before we screwed it to the desk. My university cost $50k/yr to go to all told, so $0.99 is literally a rounding error for everybody there. There was a CVS less than 4 minutes away that sold them, so it wasn't a time issue either.
It taught me an important lesson - there's a lot of people out there who just steal compulsively. If it's at all possible for them to steal something, no matter how worthless, they'll do it as long as it's easy and they probably won't get caught. Once we took the simple step of screwing it to the desk, the thefts stopped. It would have taken 30 seconds with a screwdriver to release it, but they didn't actually want the binder... they just wanted to take it. There are literally people out there that will steal anything that's not nailed (screwed) down.
No, copyright infringement is not theft. But beware that a substantial fraction of copyright infringers, especially those trying to justify it, just like taking things for free because they can.
The alternative to keeping a close watch on a convicted paedophile and restricting his freedom is simply to chuck him in prison and throw away the key.
Well, despite the fact that there's evidence that most sex offenders do not re-offend (as above), and are thus not particularly dangerous to children, wouldn't they be better off in jail than living like this? That's the kind of "restricting his freedom" you are talking about.
I'm all for keeping kids safe and obviously think that sex offenses against children are despicable (and isn't it sad I have to say that?). But either they need to be able to serve their punishment and be done with it, or we should just kill them outright. After all, these pervasive time-unlimited punishments are basically saying they can't be rehabilitated, right?
Well, I know that if I eat too many potatoes, I find that the input impedance ends up significantly lower than the output impedance and I get lots of damaging signal reflection at the output of the feedline...
The shooter was a PARENT of one of the kids at the school? Seriously?
No, not seriously. His mom was a kindergarten teacher. He went in and shot her and the majority (if not all) of her class, as well as several administrators and faculty.
The answer to that was in the part you quoted. "so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around." Presumably, he didn't mean "while I'm sitting in my house". And NAT is a bitch for something like that.
Sure, but then most of the transit is in cities, and it's either more expensive or slower to build outside. It's a tradeoff, to be sure.
Nobody's suggesting that it's impossible for a DC in NYC to weather the scenario that ended up happening, but it's into the diminishing returns so it's a lot more expensive. Even if the claim could be made that the DC made mistakes, they weren't trivially stupid mistakes - which is what the GP was implying.
Oops, the basement is completely underwater and the fuel tanks are flooded. What do you do now?
Oh, you put the fuel tanks up high? No you didn't, that's against the fire code (bad idea having flammable liquid above people's heads in a fire).
It's OK, your tanks didn't leak, and you were clever enough to put your generators up high. But the fuel pumps shorted out.
Alright, you got lucky and the pumps were fine. But now you're out of fuel, as is everyone else, and travel is difficult since tunnels are flooded so getting trucks in is a nontrivial task. How do you keep the generators running?
What does Mr. Anonymous Coward, Site Reliability Engineer Extrordinaire, do now? More importantly, did you think of it before this hundred-year storm?
The trick for the republicans is to find a way to whip the social conservatives up into a frenzy of support without also alienating the moderates.
Absolutely, which is why they're so f**ked now. It's impossible to do any sort of compromise between the "relatively moderate, boring" position and the current "right" of the GOP without both sides being seriously unhappy. Christ, you had serious candidates for office talking about how "women's bodies have ways of shutting [rape pregnancy] down" in legitimate, so not only do we not have to do anything allowing for rape victims, but any woman who got pregnant must have secretly wanted it. I don't even know how far back you have to go to find that as an acceptable belief.
Even if Romney won the election, no matter his actual leaning, he'd have to spend 4 years trying to convince the right not to torpedo him come re-election. Honestly, that's what I was more afraid of than Romney himself - he seems like a mostly-reasonable man, but his hand would be forced to the right trying to reassure the nutters who were never going to believe him anyway.
And I've heard (maybe this is just a rumor) that the next version of Windows server is not going to have a GUI interface and will be completely command line driven; what sysadmin wants to sit there typing command after command into a Dos prompt.
Uh... most sysadmins do that all day on Linux. That is, people whose title is "sysadmin" (implying a big-league system), not "IT guy" (implying a small-medium business) pretty much use Linux for servers, and they manage just fine.
I seem to remember that the GUI would be an option, not unavailable, but even if it were unavailable a server is not something you administer at the console. It's something you manage remotely, and even if you need a GUI (which is fine for the smaller companies), RDP is a stupid way to do that compared to a desktop console.
However, not requiring a GUI means that everything is controllable by command line which is a MASSIVE boon for anybody doing serious administration, because it means everything is scriptable and repeatable.
Uh... what? Not only is the vast, vast majority of the "encryption trend" due to default encryption on new routers and the fact that all devices now support proper encryption, not legal fears, but when did cops start shutting down open WiFi? I'm sure I would've heard about that on Slashdot.
No, the wardriving sheriff sending letters doesn't count because there was no threat, just information. It turns out that having open WiFi is a bad idea for many reasons, regardless of how nice it is for everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you know what SPF is or how it works.
SPF specifies, by leveraging the DNS, which servers are allowed to send you mail from that domain. The problem it addresses is "spoofing" - I send an email to your servers claiming to be from you. If you have a SPF record, you can say servers x,y,z,a-c are allowed to send email claiming to be from foo.com.
There's three possibilities:
1) No SPF record - process normally
2) SPF record, sent from valid host - generally downweight spam score, since verifiably the server that sent the email was in that organization
3) SPF record, sent from invalid host - the subject of this Ask Slashdot. It should be "always bad" but Incompetent admins set up SPF, then get it wrong or don't update it and mail bounces. Hence the problems discussed here.
"sender was sending all his email through a local MTA because his ISP doesn't have an externally accessible MTA" - no problem if the SPF record is correct. Or if you can't be bothered to do that, just get rid of it.
Filtering on missing SPF records is stupid. Filtering on bad (i.e., sending host was marked as disallowed) SPF records should be 0% false positives, were it not for idiot admins - again, the subject of this AS
This other what-if actually addresses this pretty well: http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
Funny you're uncomfortable moving to OSX, since it is (essentially) a BSD. Though I suppose that means if you were forced to give up BSDs, you'd therefore be forced to give up OSX...
Why do you think garbage collection is related to "keeping track of what was done by who, when"? All it does is clean up files that are no longer part of the commit tree; that is, unreachable and "garbage". A way to create such a file is to 'git add' a file (which puts that specific version in the repo, for later commit) and then make another change. Since it's a different file than it was, you have to re-'git add' it, which creates an entirely new object that is referenced by the eventual commit. Hence, the dangling useless object is garbage and should be cleaned up.
People have been complaining about rebasing for a long time, and there's some valid criticism of it, but given the above I'm not convinced your problems with it are properly understood.
Clearly it had "computer" in it, which is scary enough to involve the Feds.
Assuming everybody was acting in good faith, they probably would've gotten involved because of the Jstor angle, and then dropped it after Jstor was satisfied with their restitution.
It sounds like the prosecutor went like 10 steps over the line on this one, I agree. But the crime he committed against Jstor is a federal offense, mostly out of necessity (otherwise you could avoid charges by just making sure the target was in another state)
To be fair, I don't think it was "OK" for the phreakers either, but they just didn't get caught much. It's pretty much the same today.
From Wiki: "In fact, Bell responded fairly quickly, but in a more targeted fashion. Looking on local records for inordinately long calls to directory service or other hints that phreakers were using a particular switch, filters could then be installed to block efforts at that end office. Many phreakers were forced to use pay telephones as the telephone company technicians regularly tracked long-distance toll free calls in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. AT&T instead turned to the law for help, and a number of phreaks were caught by the government."
I've only been there on college tours, to be honest, so you probably know better than I.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the rules had changed, even at MIT. The network is "mission-critical" now in a way it wasn't even 15 years ago. Putting myself in a network admin's shoes, I would get a complaint about some abuse and block the machine when I found no record of it. And then when - instead of notifying the NOC of what he was doing and asking permission - he circumvented it, I would put in effect a better block (maybe he didn't get the message?). But he took it further than that, and that's when I consider him an intruder or an attacker, since I told him (with my blocks) that I wanted him to cut it out, and start escalating it up. Which since he wasn't a student meant the cops.
You must not have been around for Reiser then. God that was 5 years ago...
Read this for fun: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/04/28/2243232/hans-reiser-guilty-of-first-degree-murder
I've kept in mind since then how easy it is to get caught up into a "everybody online agrees with me so I must be right" mindset.
Look, I think the prosecutor overreacted. But he was not permitted to access it! He broke into a wiring closet using a disguise, and kept circumventing their increasingly-specific bans. Not only was he not permitted to access it, but he *knew* he was not permitted to access it. I mean, I get the whole MIT hacker thing, but at some point you have to say "ok they mean it" and back off. If I did what he did at my school, whose network folks are no less liberal than MIT's, I'd get sent to student conduct so fast it'd make your head spin and I'd have to do some serious 'splanin about what exactly I thought gave me any right to deny access to the other twenty five thousand people at my school who were trying to use the resource they had paid good money (in the form of tuition) to use. Don't forget, in order to stop his actions, they ended up blocking MIT's entire class A because he kept jumping IPs.
But he didn't even go to MIT! So he was just some guy coming in and fucking with their network and fucking up their students and faculty's access. What do you do as a network admin? Once your "get the message" bans keep getting circumvented and you can't call OSC on him, you call the cops. He would've been lucky to walk away with a trespassing conviction and a restraining order, plus whatever Jstor wanted as the primary injured party.
Now, I don't know why the feds got involved. It doesn't sound like MIT did that (though maybe didn't discourage it strongly enough), and it sounds like Jstor tried to call them off. The prosecutor was clearly out of line here, but let's not pretend he was just goofing around. And let's CERTAINLY not pretend he was "permitted to access" it. He might have been (I don't know if he had an account) until they BLOCKED HIS ACCESS due to his actions that they didn't like, and at that point he lost his "permission". In any case he certainly was not "permitted to access" a locked wiring closet to stash a laptop in. It's not 1985 any more, and you can't just break in and screw around with someone's network without any problems. Even at places like MIT.
I'd say this is a troll, but I suspect you're serious. So I'll address your points individually:
The question today that needs to be answered is what is Amateur radio for, and what is it for 10 years from now?
Amateur radio isn't "for" anything. It's for experimentation, recreation, practice, etc. Those never go away.
This isn't silly because a large portion of the "social" aspect of HAM radio has moved to the Internet.
A lot of people looking to avoid paying phone bills to chat overseas have moved to the internet. The hobby is arguably better off without people who wanted to achieve some specific task, as opposed to experiment with radio more generally.
I don't see much of a movement to keep it alive, either. There is a very small community out there and it is shrinking.
Wrong. With the elimination of the code requirements, there's been a sharp uptick in the number of people getting licensed
It is true that historically the FCC HAM regulations were designed to keep operators from stepping on each other and from stepping on commercial and government users of the spectrum. What I suspect is most feared by today's HAM operators is the CB-ification of Amateur radio - elimination of licensing in favor of commercially regulated gear. While a lot of today's users would be OK with that, it would change the entire definition and purpose - which brings us back to the original question.
What? Ignoring the fact that there's treaties requiring licensing to use ham spectrum, there's a lot of hobbyists tweaking their radios or building their own outright (look up QRP on wikipedia). It's the only radio service where that's allowed, and it's not going anywhere.
I don't see the FCC signing on to the Open Source Radio Support Act as proposed. Continuing to regulate by content type is silly and it may be silly to try to regulate by modulation type. It is a nice idea to say that transmissions have to universally decodable, but without a lot of standards and regulation to back them up this isn't going to be all that achievable - specifically reception of a bitstream without any definition is going to be pretty much inpenetratable. Just as today if I give you a binary file without any self-defining header and without identification like a file extension it could be pretty much anything and while it could be coded in a publically defined way without knowing which of thousands it could be renders it unreadable. This is similar to saying that an unknown compression scheme is the same as encryption.
Sure, of course. But that's not really the point - it's to prevent the use of anything like encryption, which would just give the first taxi service to use encryption a free radio channel.
I think today's HAM operators need to have a more compelling case why they are going to continue to exist. The home-brew gear of yesteryear is nearly gone and the "experimentation" envisioned with digitial communications might be nice to authorize but unlikely to ever produce anything of value. I would certainly like to see an openness dedicated to satellite communications, but again who is it for and what would it be used for?
This is so off the mark I'm not sure where to start. A big history of emergency communications probably justifies the amateur service on its own. Homebrew gear isn't going anywhere. The experimentation with digital communications has created many things of value if you wanted to look them up. Not sure what you're saying about satellites.
I think this all comes back to the first thing - the mistaken notion that ham (not HAM) radio has a "point". The "point" is that it's the only radio service for hobbyists, experimenters, etc to use precisely because there's no "point".
73 de KC2YWE
The VCR clock was required to set up a scheduled recording, so hardly pointless. People wanted to be able to do that, but couldn't because they couldn't figure it out. I think the gp's example holds
I once ran the computer help desk at my university. It was in the dorm's computer lab, and we had a binder where we'd keep notes about the condition of the lab, how much paper was there for the printer, whether all the computers were working, etc.
That $0.99 binder was stolen 4 times before we screwed it to the desk. My university cost $50k/yr to go to all told, so $0.99 is literally a rounding error for everybody there. There was a CVS less than 4 minutes away that sold them, so it wasn't a time issue either.
It taught me an important lesson - there's a lot of people out there who just steal compulsively. If it's at all possible for them to steal something, no matter how worthless, they'll do it as long as it's easy and they probably won't get caught. Once we took the simple step of screwing it to the desk, the thefts stopped. It would have taken 30 seconds with a screwdriver to release it, but they didn't actually want the binder... they just wanted to take it. There are literally people out there that will steal anything that's not nailed (screwed) down.
No, copyright infringement is not theft. But beware that a substantial fraction of copyright infringers, especially those trying to justify it, just like taking things for free because they can.
I think you're confusing best technique with best art. The art wasn't the beauty of the actual strokes, it was the beauty of the idea and execution.
Unfortunately, some people by their previous actions have proved that they are a danger to others, and need to be monitored and controlled.
Despite the fact that sex offenders have the second-lowest recidivism rate around (after murder)?
The alternative to keeping a close watch on a convicted paedophile and restricting his freedom is simply to chuck him in prison and throw away the key.
Well, despite the fact that there's evidence that most sex offenders do not re-offend (as above), and are thus not particularly dangerous to children, wouldn't they be better off in jail than living like this? That's the kind of "restricting his freedom" you are talking about.
I'm all for keeping kids safe and obviously think that sex offenses against children are despicable (and isn't it sad I have to say that?). But either they need to be able to serve their punishment and be done with it, or we should just kill them outright. After all, these pervasive time-unlimited punishments are basically saying they can't be rehabilitated, right?
Well, I know that if I eat too many potatoes, I find that the input impedance ends up significantly lower than the output impedance and I get lots of damaging signal reflection at the output of the feedline...
The shooter was a PARENT of one of the kids at the school? Seriously?
No, not seriously. His mom was a kindergarten teacher. He went in and shot her and the majority (if not all) of her class, as well as several administrators and faculty.
Wrong. A taser will happily arc over several inches for precisely that reason
The answer to that was in the part you quoted. "so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around." Presumably, he didn't mean "while I'm sitting in my house". And NAT is a bitch for something like that.
Sure, but then most of the transit is in cities, and it's either more expensive or slower to build outside. It's a tradeoff, to be sure.
Nobody's suggesting that it's impossible for a DC in NYC to weather the scenario that ended up happening, but it's into the diminishing returns so it's a lot more expensive. Even if the claim could be made that the DC made mistakes, they weren't trivially stupid mistakes - which is what the GP was implying.
Oops, the basement is completely underwater and the fuel tanks are flooded. What do you do now?
Oh, you put the fuel tanks up high? No you didn't, that's against the fire code (bad idea having flammable liquid above people's heads in a fire).
It's OK, your tanks didn't leak, and you were clever enough to put your generators up high. But the fuel pumps shorted out.
Alright, you got lucky and the pumps were fine. But now you're out of fuel, as is everyone else, and travel is difficult since tunnels are flooded so getting trucks in is a nontrivial task. How do you keep the generators running?
What does Mr. Anonymous Coward, Site Reliability Engineer Extrordinaire, do now? More importantly, did you think of it before this hundred-year storm?
The trick for the republicans is to find a way to whip the social conservatives up into a frenzy of support without also alienating the moderates.
Absolutely, which is why they're so f**ked now. It's impossible to do any sort of compromise between the "relatively moderate, boring" position and the current "right" of the GOP without both sides being seriously unhappy. Christ, you had serious candidates for office talking about how "women's bodies have ways of shutting [rape pregnancy] down" in legitimate, so not only do we not have to do anything allowing for rape victims, but any woman who got pregnant must have secretly wanted it. I don't even know how far back you have to go to find that as an acceptable belief.
Even if Romney won the election, no matter his actual leaning, he'd have to spend 4 years trying to convince the right not to torpedo him come re-election. Honestly, that's what I was more afraid of than Romney himself - he seems like a mostly-reasonable man, but his hand would be forced to the right trying to reassure the nutters who were never going to believe him anyway.
And I've heard (maybe this is just a rumor) that the next version of Windows server is not going to have a GUI interface and will be completely command line driven; what sysadmin wants to sit there typing command after command into a Dos prompt.
Uh... most sysadmins do that all day on Linux. That is, people whose title is "sysadmin" (implying a big-league system), not "IT guy" (implying a small-medium business) pretty much use Linux for servers, and they manage just fine.
I seem to remember that the GUI would be an option, not unavailable, but even if it were unavailable a server is not something you administer at the console. It's something you manage remotely, and even if you need a GUI (which is fine for the smaller companies), RDP is a stupid way to do that compared to a desktop console.
However, not requiring a GUI means that everything is controllable by command line which is a MASSIVE boon for anybody doing serious administration, because it means everything is scriptable and repeatable.
Of course it's already compiled; they've had the OSX kernel and most of the userspace running on ARM since 2007 with the iPhone.
Uh... what? Not only is the vast, vast majority of the "encryption trend" due to default encryption on new routers and the fact that all devices now support proper encryption, not legal fears, but when did cops start shutting down open WiFi? I'm sure I would've heard about that on Slashdot.
No, the wardriving sheriff sending letters doesn't count because there was no threat, just information. It turns out that having open WiFi is a bad idea for many reasons, regardless of how nice it is for everybody else.
You know that little factoid is going to make your lives a world of pain when the trolls see it, right?