
First it's Threshold, then Foothold, and finally Stranglehold?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_(TV_series)#Planned_storylines
274 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2008
Absent our continued propping-up of certain Floridian families (who were allegedly more important to President Clinton than spending time with his mistress), the US would be buying much of its sugar from Brazil, not Australia. Also, a good amount of sugar currently being bought in Canada would be bought in the US instead—those sugar quotas and tariffs have been causing the US to hemorrhage food-production jobs.
What I'd want to see from a hypothetical trade treaty that wasn't just a giveaway to the MAFIAA: ditch the Jones Act, Buy America Act, and Fly America Act; eliminate the aforementioned sugar supports; give states the choice between allowing gambling and banning it (not, say, allowing a state-run lottery but no private-sector gaming); freedom of movement; and maybe even burying FACTA. Sadly, to get these things, we'd apparently need to actually exercise the option of ejecting the entire House and one-third of the Senate in an even-year election, which never seems to happen no matter how crappy our representation in DC is.
Getting work based on friend$hip with politicians works just great. You get twice as much money as a private-sector organization would pay for similar work, then come the overruns. By the time you've finished, the government has paid ten times and you've delivered maybe half. As long as you don't do anything that causes your facility security clearance to be pulled (such as inviting a delegation from the Russian embassy over to the data center for a weed-fueled orgy), you can keep lowballing bids and billing the government $150/hr for people who aren't even worth minimum wage until the cows come home.
Oh, wait... maybe you were thinking about how it doesn't work at all for the taxpayer? Nobody signing the cheques gives a flying frak about them; they're just wallets on legs.
Perhaps UK train lines should work on offerings more directly related to their business. Like, y'know, actually having trains 365 days a year, rather than sleeping in until noon and cutting frequency on Sundays.
My coat's the one with a Thuraya handset in the pocket.
It's not that difficult to remove Norton software with the right equipment.
http://www.jaybeehammermills.com/products.html
The DIY solution: KMnO4 + Fe2O3 + Al (with a strip of Mg for the fuse)
Or let the pros from 36th Civil Engineering Squadron do it their way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_xt-0fLhKI
Icon added in case you're not sure which solution I endorse.
SMTP only broadcasts passwords in the clear if the system administrators can't find their own asses with both hands in a small, well-lit room. Sadly, this description probably applies to the contractors they're using. (CSC? HP? Almost certainly a company whose core competency involves procurement lawyers, not technology.)
I haven't noticed any reduction in drivers with permanently-attached phones, on either coast or in between. I did see an idiot make an illegal turn with a marked police car right behind—I couldn't see whether the driver needed their phone to be removed from the ear and inserted somewhere else, but I can certainly guess.
Free is speech, not beer. We do have to be fair to Windows, so let's overengineer a ROFLscale Asterisk PBX for comparison's sake.
First, a Digium-supported Asterisk installation at $11k for a three-year term. Since that's a five-server support agreement, we'll make this a three-system cluster just because we can. And since we're doing the support-contract route, that's three entitlements for RHEL at $800/ea/year ($7200 for three years). Buy the hardware; tart up some R720s with crazy RAM and call that $6k each. Add a nice switch (heck, add two!), firewall, and we're still at $35kish. I'll call that a draw based on the infamous parity exchange-rate concept; if you disagree, throw in training for your PBX guy and some one-on-one time with Digium's people until the prices balance out.
Oh, wait a second... we didn't buy Windows. That'll cost you $2k for those three machines (Windows Server 2012 Standard). Whoops, now the Windows software alone is more expensive than the Linux hardware and software.
My coat? It's an OpenBSD fireman's jacket.
If you're happy with 8GB of RAM, the 13" Air has substantially longer battery life in addition to being cheaper and lighter. As in, you can take a weekend trip without the charger. I certainly wouldn't do 4GB, RAM compression or no; why risk needing a forklift upgrade on a $1500+ computer?[1]
(Also, dropping down to 8GB RAM allows in the competition: Dell XPS 13, Sony Vaio Pro 13, etc. But dammit, I want to be able to have a million VMs open locally.)
[1] Counterargument: don't buy one of the soldered-on-RAM computers. While my wallet would support this course of action, my L5-S1 just wants the thin-and-light.
NetApp has a nice vCenter plugin that handles snapshots on the filer. It does require some extra licenses that you may not already have purchased to use all the features (notably, single-file restore).
My choice of the icon should be obvious to anyone who's dealt with NetApp or Brocade licensing. Especially Brocade. Bugger port-based licensing with a bloody spear.
I should've mentioned that I'm looking for 2 kg maximum weight, so the gaming/desktop-replacement laptops need not apply.
Your comment about budget airlines is why I flew traditional carriers whenever I could when living in the UK—it wasn't even much more expensive when you fully account for the checked-bag fee, boarding-pass fee, ticket-buying fee, fee-paying fee, and Helvetica fee.
Coat because I always took a filled-to-near-breaking SCOTTEVEST jacket on Sleazyjet/Ryanair and never ran into your gate agent attempting to close that loophole. (Perhaps they've changed their tariff conditions since 2010.)
Dell announced the Latitude 14 7000 series two months ago with rather nice specs, but they're still only selling stripped-down versions—only 4GB RAM, no smart-card reader, only 768p display. If I'm going to upgrade my 2010 MBP (which my L5-S1 disc has been advocating), I'll damn well want to take full advantage of Haswell. That means 16GB RAM and at least an HD 5000 GPU. The Clevo W740SU (System76 galu1) would be great if its keyboard didn't make the PCjr's look good.)
Please ship some of this rather than just announcing it, Dell. I'd love to leave Apple, but if they're the only ones bothering to ship ass-kicking Haswell laptops, I can't very well do that, can I?
Hopefully this new process won't take resources away from conventional medical device review, which seems to be slipping recently. Of course, if TPTB really wanted to improve access to medical equipment and pharmaceuticals without reducing patient safety, they wouldn't insist on separate FDA facility approvals for plants that have already been approved by the EU... oh, wait, we'd get rid of all those medicine shortages. Can't have that, now, can we?
I wasn't sure whether the facepalm or the mushroom cloud was more appropriate, but had to pick one or the other.
Ohio only has four full-service casinos—two run by Caesars and two by Penn National. The remaining facilities on that list only have video lottery terminals. You could certainly call them slot parlors, but using the term "casino" is false advertising. (Unless every pub in the UK is now a casino.)
Alternatively, the legislature could have solved the problem of illegal casinos by eliminating their current cap of four casino licenses. While that option has many reasons to recommend it, there is one drawback — if legislators weren't intimately involved in deciding who may open a gaming establishment, the opportunity for graft would be greatly reduced. In the eyes of a politician, that's one thing that can never be allowed.
Because SCIENCE!
Why XM/Sirius specifically won't work: there are four XM vehicles at 115W and 85W, three Sirius vehicles in elliptical orbits covering the western hemisphere, and one geosynchronous vehicle that serves both systems. None of these satellites are visible from Europe.
As for why existing satellite radio services won't work in your car: the American services (two now merged into one) use S-band, and receiving that in your car is easy if the bird is visible. The European satellite radio services transmit in the Ku band; a car-mounted antenna would need to be electronically-steered. ESA has done research into such antennas and built prototypes, but they're not yet commercially available (at least at a price you'd want to pay).
Beer, because two-line ephemerides make me thirsty.
A three-phase chainsaw would work if you can't find the traditional bloody spear. Wielded by a robot, though — wouldn't want to get too close. You never know what bloodborne pathogens you could catch that way.
My coat would be the one with pockets containing a mix of dental tools and construction implements.
Wouldn't medical information be better off kept out of email entirely? I'd think just a link to an ERM/EHR system would work, and do a much better job of restricting access to those with a need-to-know.
Black helicopters, because presumably they're the DPA Police's vehicle of choice.
"[T]he old HP" was spun off a long time ago; to the extent it still exists it's now part of Agilent and/or Philips. What little remained (calculators) was killed off. Their servers aren't as horrible as their desktops[1], but HP has entered a Brocade-style level of brain-hurting stupid. Sure, they'll sell you an OOB management card — but you wanted to actually use it? That'll be extra. Pay for a RAID card, and again for a license code to actually turn it on. If I want to be nickeled-and-dimed to death (by cats or otherwise), I'll talk to Michael O'Leary.
Then there's Enterprise Services, which survives only by finding executives dumb enough to outsource their IT so that they can be dragged to the ATM by their genitals for a multi-billion-dollar withdrawal. Sure, there's always a nice stable of fat and stupid government customers — HP is still getting business after NMCI, so how could they possibly lose? — but on the gripping hand, what happens if the US government starts blacklisting contractors with a habit of nondelivery? Goodbye, easy money. (Okay, you can laugh at that now... but stranger things have happened.)
[1] I have a sneaking suspicion that their desktop power supplies are designed by crack-addled monkeys somewhere in Hebei, to say nothing of the clusterfrak that is their BIOS.
The IT-outsourcing business model can be summed up as "find a gullible board, promise the moon, and hold their business hostage." As such, it doesn't matter whether Capita can fulfill their contracts because the customer is too incompetent to notice — remember, they sacked all the people who know anything about IT when they decided to outsource, and the customer's non-IT employees are running around like crazy building their own parallel IT department because that's the only way they can get work done. The worst that can happen to them is that the contract will go to Fujitsu, HP (the company that brought you NMCI), CSC... see a pattern here?
Oh, and you're not going to work for the end user because you don't have a good-enough razzle-dazzle routine. The only option for sanity in IT is to find an employer (such as Intel) with sufficient clue to have a policy banning all non-employees from having root access. Or make the killer pay package as a VP-of-amorality for one of the outsourcers, of course.