I swear to God, there is like 20 straight minutes of nothing but Wookiee language being spoken.

I was stoned when I saw it, and I think that made it even worse.

There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.

Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.

I don't know of a single IT department that hasn't been helped by virtualization of servers. It makes more efficient use of purchased hardware, keeps businesses from some of the manipulations to which their hardware and OS vendors can subject them, and is (in the long term) cheaper to operate than a traditional datacenter. IT departments have wondered for a long time: "if I have all this processing power, memory, and storage, why can't I use all of it?" Virtualization answers that question, and does it in an elegant way, so I don't consider it snake oil.

20 extra years? Try five, if she's lucky. Artificial heart recipients typically don't last long. Heck, even recipients of a genuine human heart don't always last very long.

Many religious and philosophical systems were invented because of the situation you're in. It's not a technician problem, it's a human problem, and it's pervasive (OK, maybe more pervasive with IT people). I promise you, no matter how you present this problem to your managers or try to alter the behavior of your end-users, it will not help. Only fixing yourself can help. My sincerest suggestion to you would be to learn how to meditate. The technique known as Anapanasati seems to work wonders for calming me down and keeping me focused.

1. Sit down. Sit straight up. Close your eyes.
2. Briefly do a mental check of all parts of your body to make sure there's no unnecessary muscle tension anywhere.
3. Take a few deep breaths.
4. Start breathing naturally, without trying, into your abdomen. Breathe the same way you would if you were sleeping. This takes patience.
5. When your breathing has gone on auto-pilot, move the focus of your mind to the rims of your nostrils, where you can feel the breath moving in and out. Just keep 100% of your attention on that feeling. You should only be thinking "breath moving in" and "breath moving out."
6. When your mind starts to wander, think to yourself, "hmm, I got distracted and started thinking about Scarlett Johannson" and return your attention to your breath.
7. When it's time to stop, don't just snap out of it. Slowly bring yourself out of it and open your eyes gradually.

Do this for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It may sound tedious, and I know this might sound nuts, but I guarantee that you will be calmer and thinking more clearly by the time you're done. I've been doing it for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure I would have probably punched someone in the face by now if I didn't find some way to calm myself.

I wouldn't say that having Gov. Bobby Jindal on our side is necessarily "good news."

It's not just their telephony products - in fact, those are moving to a virtualization-supported model anyway. Cisco sells all kinds of application servers that they have to buy from HP and IBM that cover all kinds of things: wireless management & security come to mind immediately. This puts them in business for themselves instead of handing money over to companies who compete with them (especially HP).

Bang? Bebinged?

This thread is starting to sound like a Blue Man Group concert.

I realized just now that if some other company had started up and created a new search engine called "Bing" I would probably find it really charming. But when Microsoft does it, it just seems like The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The human subconscious is a player-hater.

Really? Because I'm looking at my local newspaper right now. Here's what they appear to deliver:

1) Rehashings and 8th-grade-level analysis of events anyone can see for themselves - this includes: city council meeting minutes, sports homilies rife with latent homoeroticism, summaries of government press releases with a few quotes, clumsy write-ups of things seen on TV...

2) Items cribbed from wire services, which are equally stupid or worse...

3) Editorials, in which the writer presents himself or herself as the voice of sanity, whereas their readers are drunk retarded children...

4) Sales inserts...

5) Garfield

Now, don't get me wrong. I really like Garfield, but it's really just a few square inches of pen art, and I can get that for free elsewhere.