I took so long because it has ADHD and went off on a mortgage and load tangent... See this bit in Details:

Cold-calling limited-impact businesses in the mortgage and loan sectors, I’m focusing on a script that adapts based on unique responses. This strategy is underpinned by a commitment to targeted, strategic outreach.

It is a rather meaningless number in the end of the day. In general, it doesn't take a scale to judge one's health, relative obeseness, etc. Weighing yourself isn't always that useful.

So, when you have someone you wish to track, you take their MAC address and run it through the one-way hash. Boom, tracking acquired!

WOAH. Are you serious about the tethered helium balloon?

I HAVE to try this. I shall be angry if I discover I've been trolled :)

You gotta be kidding, if one of my vendor's gave me their root certificate to install on my machine, so I could securely connect to their site, I'd tell them to take a flying leap and get a real certificate. If I'm understanding right, your friend now has the ability to MITM his customers' SSL connections. We can argue about whether the root certificates preinstalled can be trusted, but I'm confident they're safer than the local Dunder Mifflin.

Use normal ol' turbo-fans built into the longer wings for take off and landing in the "wide" orientation.

Then, once at about Mach .9 or so, you spin into the "narrow" orientation, where Ramjets built into the shorter wings take over and accelerate the whole mess to Mach 3, 4, 5, 6...

Pacifists were reported to be protesting the product, but the White House insists its intention is to reduce blood shed...

Wow, I never knew that. I'm gonna hack and crash my coworkers comp*** CARRIER LOST

I'd give you the good rating. You used the service in a sane manner that exploited the strengths of the system and avoided the weaknesses.

I suspect many users of EC2 actually end up with less reliability than they'd get with a server in a closet, as they don't realize the true effort it takes to have an effective solution like you do.

Reddit's downtime has been a bit of a running joke for a while now, which most (all?) of it being blamed on Amazon.

The way they implemented things is one of the big issues. For example, things like setting up RAID volumes across multiple EBS volumes. They just magnified their exposure to any issues in the cloud. Any one machine goes down the system gets hosed and needs recovery. They also are constrained to a single availability zone in order to get the performance they need from their setup. (This is not intended to be a factual statement. ie, I didn't confirm the details, but I believe it captures the essence of the issue.)

To get the most from the "cloud" you need to build your infrastructure accordingly. You can't take old systems and throw them in the cloud and expect it to scale. Neither can you take all the old ideas, new tools will require new techniques which the industry will learn as things mature.

Typically your computer asks your firewall/router for a DNS lookup. It relays that to your ISP's DNS server. Your ISP looks up the DNS server responsible for the domain and contacts that server and sends your original request. That request doesn't include your IP however, so Akamai's DNS servers are returning regional specific servers based on your ISP's DNS server IP/geo-location. That's usually perfectly acceptable, since presumably your ISP's DNS server would be located on a good route with a low ping.

So if you replace your ISP's DNS server with those of OpenDNS, google or whatever else, it is that server which determines your location when Akamai's DNS servers decide which IPs to give you.

You should be able to replace your DNS server with your own locally hosted one as well. ie, you contact the root-servers, hunt down the responsible server, then contact it directly for the IP. I'm not sure what the implications of that is though. The intent of the typical setup is that the ISP DNS servers can cache things and reduce the load on the central root servers.

If 50% more battery life only adds 10% to the overall weight, the current battery must be less than 20% of the iPad 2's overall weight. I kinda doubt that, though I could be wrong.

Leave it with Skype if your time has ANY value whatsoever....

I love VOIP stuff, but it can be a real time waster, especially if you enjoy these tinkering with these kinds of things :)

Plus, that's only if you're actually paying for power.

Not many in India do... http://www.travel-images.com/pht/india128.jpg

I don't see how that has anything to do with it.

They've never blinked selling your hypothetical CPU as a 4-core CPU, not should they. They never had a problem selling a CPU with a lower rated MHz rating either, should that copy not perform stable at higher speeds.