And if we were talking middle school arithmetic, that would be correct indeed. But we're talking about running a company, made up of several disparate organisational units, competing for resources allocated from a central pool. Therefore profits are not a simple x+y=z equation.

In this case, we have the revenue from sales, as our input, correct. But we also have grants, interest on capital, loans, payments from loans we put out, royalties, donations, and a million other income streams. Then we have your broadly categorized "expenses", which must be further split into advertising expenses, salaries, bonuses, insurance, payments on loans we took out, royalties, grants, fines, bribes, whatnot, including IT. And then to enable just resource allocation, we need to look at contributions by department: track how advertising affected sales and at what cost; how legal affected sales, how much we paid out in bribes, how many fines we avoided through legal, how much settlement money litigation brought in; etc, and somewhere in that gigantic spreadsheet, there's a row for IT: how much money it cost to run our website, our servers, our employee computers, how much it cost us to develop DRM for our gizmo, and how much money our DRM litigation enabled, how much ad revenue we got, how much did we save by using Word instead of pen and paper, etc. This number might be in black, but in the end, it's not income, it's a reduction in expense. And the two are not the same, no matter how much it looks like.

If it walks like duck, and quacks like a duck, it ... might just be a very good replica.

I understand your point, but you seem to fail to grasp mine. IT as a whole is indeed a savings center, but those savings materialize elsewhere, the IT department as such is a cost center. It may save more for other departments than its own costs, making a net profit, but that is only a "virtual" profit, not a "real" one, because unless your company is a tech company, IT itself generates no revenue, and as such, no profit. The real profit comes from the revenue of marketeers (or Sales, as someone pointed out, quite rightly), which is augmented by the savings IT makes for everyone, but themselves.

So in the end, IT itself is a sink, whose costs materialize as savings elsewhere (multipliers may vary by department).

I did not treat IT staff as if "they don't belong to the company", although I may have overstated when I said they are not making money [at all]. Let's make it into an example from the military: marketeers are the front-line soldiers, the ones doing the fighting; while IT is the logistic chain and the medics all rolled into one, not fighting as such, but still being indispensable if the war is to be won. But let's face it, while logistics is a force multiplier, an enabler, no war has ever been won with supply lines alone, if there wasn't an army to utilize those supplies. In the same vein, IT is important, but not as important as you think - it makes the others' jobs easier, or even possible in the first place, but you have to face the fact: an IT department alone is as good as dead, it desperately needs every other department to do the actual moneymaking. Even if many of those departments are just as equally dead without IT-support.

I didn't mean going around Helpdesk, like you make it out to be, I meant the part about being specific in my requests. How could I be specific if all I can see, as an average office worker, that whenever I try to print to PDF, Word pops up the red X and spits out 123 screens of code on the level of the Voynich Manuscript, completely unreadable to the uninitiated.
Conversely, the secretary does have all the necessary information at her disposal, she just has to present it, and the reverse also applies when the boss is asking her to make an appointment.

Not really the right counter-examples, but you did give a good breakdown on a completely separate problem from what I presented.

From someone who's more of a user than a sysadmin: and what about unreasonable requests and lack of knowledge?

In fact, who defines what constitutes a reasonable request, and what's an abuse of power, however slight or ambiguous that abuse may be (say, banning Facebook: sure, employees shouldn't waste company time, but what about downtime when they are between projects or tasks, and have nothing to do)?

What about cases where the user can simply not elaborate on their problem? For all they know, Word is just "not working right", and they know nothing about DLLs, dependencies, and such, so they can't be more specific, like "xyz.dll somehow got removed, and now module abc in Word is throwing an exception whenever I try to print to a PDF. Could you restore it from a backup?"

Also let's not forget that sysadmins themselves, or most of the IT staff (in a non-technological company, at least), are not making money - they are spending it and drawing it. They are there to make sure the accountants, marketeers, and others who can make money for the company can do their jobs. Indispensable as they are to this, they are a cog in the machine (or a transistor to go higher tech), and one that's not in the engine.

If we ask the question: "for how many days in a year is a specific browser/application vulnerable to an unpatched exploit?", then we get awful numbers. There are plenty of applications used by millions of people where that number is more than half of the year.

The 7 day limit is probably a compromise between trying to get the vendor to fix the vulnerability that is actively being exploited and disclosing the information and thus increasing the pool of people who'd use the exploit.

For vulnerabilities where there is no known active exploitation, we should assume that there is. 30/60day delays are unforgivable.

What the previous responder said, basically. Psychological attention is different from psychiatric: the latter comes when the former fails or is not present, and takes the form of chill pills, Valium, and other exotic sedatives and anti-psychotics, while the former takes the form of a couch and an attentive ear (sometimes with a persuasive voice added).

As drinkypoo put it, take care VS "take care".

1) Not "extra-screwed", but "given extra attention", in both senses of the phrase: a soldier's job deserves extra compensation and benefits, not just to them, but their next-of-kin as well; however, by its very nature, it also merits extra scrutiny so his access to automatic weapons and other lethal implements doesn't lead to any sort of incident, simply because such an incident, owing to his superior training and equipment, is much more dangerous than any rampage by a civilian.

2) By the same logic, your death ten seconds after reading this reply (if you ever will) would be equally inconsequential. Yet I'm sure you and your loved ones would disagree with that. No loss of life is inconsequential, not even from a political standpoint.

3) Yes, we get rapid access to a lot more information than, say, 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. Your point is...?
I would say that rational people can filter out what's a danger to them and what's not, as well as the degree of danger posed. A terror attack in the US won't mean much to me, yet, being European, one in the UK, France, or Germany will make me start worrying due to the greater proximity and ease of movement in the EU.

4) Like I pointed out, I'm not American. And anyway, generalization never leads to anything good...

5) Most of your post had nothing to do with my quote. Your point was...?

I never said all veterans are violent, nor that he committed violence. And it's also true that there are those who get sick of violence during their tour. But it's also true that military training is geared towards desensitizing towards violence and heightening aggression, in preparation for combat situations, as well as imparting knowledge of guerrilla warfare, insurgency, basic demolitions, etc. for operation in enemy territory. Should a person prepared in such a way exhibit radical views, the stage is set for ugly things to happen, basically he becomes a powder keg waiting for the right moment to act, unless psychological attention (and not necessarily psychiatric) is given.

That... doesn't have anything to do with my point, although I do agree, to an extent.

On the one hand, such an operation can be justified in that persons with military training and radical political views make for a volatile and dangerous group: heightened aggression coupled with access to weapons and knowledge of weapon use, explosives, and demolition can lead to nasty results.

On the other hand, there are very few excuses the denying due process, and proactive observation is certainly not one of them.

"Treeborgs: trees, plus technology!"

As the sample set's size tends to infinity, so does the computational power and/or the time required for effective mining (ceteris paribus, of course).

Not one hour straight away, but if you scan it down, find it says "Reaching the end of its life" (0-4 hours remaining), then come back about three hours later and it's still there, you can be pretty sure it only has one hour left of its life.

What Dyinobal said: the server cluster employs time dilation to cope with the load of many characters present in one system or constellation (one level up from systems in the three-tier location system) - the greater the load, the greater the slowdown (which, by the way, is only indicated to players by a small dial on the screen, not an actual slowdown). In extreme cases, such as the 1000+-ship Battle of Asakai, the system or constellation may be moved to a separate server node to avoid crashing the entire cluster the game runs on.