If there's anything that a consultant craves, it's billable hours...

Not billable hours at the cost of doing a crappy job, and most certainly going to get blamed, when the customer blames his company; when the failures caused by consultant's CAB causes downtime.

OP starts with: "I am the sole sysadmin for nearly 50 servers (win/linux) across several contracts. ..."

This implies that he's paid hourly. Contracts implies that he's a consultant. If there's anything that a consultant craves, it's billable hours...

Archives of the document were on Guardian public servers when the password was mysteriously "leaked."

I recall something like that being the case for the Manning data.

I do not recall this being the case for the Snowden data. Do you have links or evidence to back this up?

As far as the difference between deflagration and detonation, you may find this helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Why do I say it's hoped that they will replace scramjets? Because aerospace and military engineers are spending millions of dollars working on trying to engineer them as a replacement for scramjets and hoping they succeed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

I was apparently mistaken about there not having ever been a PDE powered flight... looks like researchers flew one for 10 seconds at an altitude of 100 feet with engines that create detonations at a frequency of 80 Hz.

I imagine a power station that could harness the power of nitroglycerin. Nitro is cheap as hell to make and releases incredible power... I'd love to try and build a plant that's buried deep in bracing rock and uses a very dense inert metallic alloy as a hydraulic fluid to harness the incredible power of cheap organic explosives.

Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.

Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations

What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [Feb 2013]

I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.

You're missing something. Diesel engines are internal combustion engines.

That's why I posted...

"Yes men", or "enablers" as you call them, are the root cause of the out-of-control bureaucracy problem.

Management wants desperately to have processes that can be followed by minimum wage desperate people. They want to believe that they're incredibly smart and insightful, and that their knowledge of their business is so absolute and perfect that a process is easily applied to every situation. The enablers then create the real problems by saying "yes, we'll make this work," when they are actually lying. The problems then get worse, because the enablers also feel that every status report must be green, otherwise their process is not as perfect as they said it was.

The transparent lies breed more processes to control the mistakes that never seem to get fixed, despite the change review board processes. Nobody ever questions the process, because they'd be seen as a blocker. Change becomes impossible, because the middle-management process owners who have been lying "yes" will lose their jobs if their process is removed.

The process explosion reaches critical mass as each failed process begets two more to control it. The business goes into a death spiral of bloat and inefficiency.

Everything is painful. The smart middle managers flee early, leaving only the enablers behind, and they refuse to see or acknowledge any problems. The loyal people have their jobs turned into paperwork and outsourcing. With luck, the board will recognize the out of control costs, and bring in a lean outsider. An organization this bad off may need to fire 50%-90% of the people. Or the board may go the wrong direction, and outsource the whole damn mess, further eroding their ability to change.

This philosophy has caused more damage to business and productivity than any other idea, ever.

Avoiding this is simple, in theory. Tell the truth, and don't be afraid to change your mind if shown evidence that you're wrong.

That particular outage cost several million given what the server did.

The problem is not the admin actions it's "what the server did"

The application the business was dependant on to generate millions of dollars was designed in such a fragile way, that it could fail as a result of whatever happened to just one server....

You see... this is bad architecture. Servers are prone to failure, even when designed with redundant components.

It is improper for a business application that generates revenue to be sensitive to a single or double server failure. Critical applications should be architected with a level of robustness that reflects their level of importance.

The auditor does not care if the patch may cause a work stoppage, if they are not fully patched, they are not in compliance, if they are not in compliance they get written up

Sounds like they need to fire and hire new auditors.

like this will just make you look stupid and change averse to your employer.

No... it's obviously just aversity to excessive, unnecessary and crippling micromanagement. It's obviously some idiots in suits who are change averse and feel they need to justify their existence by "approving" or "disapproving" of each and every required security update or patch or system admin action.

Which involves real costs. With this kind of bullshit, they need to hire additional system admins for systems to approach proper management just to deal with the reduced time efficiency and increased waste caused by bureaucracy.

Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.

I enjoyed HL2 but found it incredibly linear in a way that even, say, the original Doom wasn't. I haven't tried ep1/ep2 but do plan to at some point.

I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming

Hmm. I really enjoyed Serious Sam 3 BFE which is pretty recent, albeit also a throwback to old school FPS. That you mentioned Quake 4 is surprising, I quite enjoyed that one too... but it wasn't generally well reviewed and I agree with some of the criticisms of it. Duke Forever also had its moments too if you like classic single player FPS, and even the strip club level, which i originally thought was beyond stupid... I've since gained a healthy appreciation for just how much of a parody that level is of similarly interruptive and pointless fetch-mission mechanics as-seen in other games -- that I now sincerely believe that the level's stupidity itself is deliberately intended as a commentary on the game mechanic itself.

To me, its a deceptively smart and cleverly crafted game wrapped in a veil of vulgarity and stupidity. Or maybe its just vulgar and stupid... but I don't think so.

The difference being the incredibly successful and well reviewed lego movie is backing the lego movie sets.

I'm not sure you can or should rely on kids not being interested in them the way perhaps the themes you mentioned. Both my kids want multiple Lego movie sets...

Play Pirates, it was fun in the original "boot up your XT with the floppy"

Yeah, that's the one I have a LOT of nostalgia for and why I expect to play it. :) I've read they've largely kept the original style of the game intact... right down to ship combat and the fencing. Looking forward to it.