But what if the meltdown occurs in the middle of an ice-age and the ambient temperature is low enough to keep the plug from melting??

We have all see The Day After Tomorrow and know that this is a definite scientific possibility.

My solution is mirroring data from the computer to a NAS with RAID, then a harddrive I take offsite with all the impossible/hard to replace data.

Ironically a Harddrive in my NAS died two days ago, so I have had to do a rebuild and as a result bought a new external hard drive that is big enough for all the data, even the easy to replace data. So currently my NAS, which rebuilt the array successfully is copying all of its data to a new external harddrive.

Google could set up a system like what was used at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Tickets could be resold only through the VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee) online system. You could ask any price you wanted, however when it sold VANOC got 10% of the asking price. This was they allowed for people to make money scalping tickets and they were able to recover some money was well.

In a recent Wired article, Feb issue perhaps, there was a short one page feature on how across history the geniuses that made major strides came in clusters. The analysis was that great strides in a field are made when there is a focus and priority put on it, which we appear to be missing in the Engineering disciplines right now.

The final observation was that we are fostering a huge nation of geniuses, they just happen to be geniuses in sports.

The response I got from my MP was obviously a form letter however it was very well written. Since my MP is in the opposition they were of course opposing the bill, however I was pleased to see that my MP was not opposing the entire Bill, just certain portions of it, largely the same portions that I object to.

I always thought it was the DOJ that had ties to Microsoft.

Yes, the problem is most people think on Mennonite as in Amish. However the Amish are just a very small subset of the entire Mennonite denomination. Out here in Western Canada there are a lot of Mennonite churches that are more progressive then the Baptist churches in regard to their embracing of modern technology.

I know a lot of Christian churches, baptist, Mennonite, and others that don't even require you to go to church to give them money. They setup up a direct debit from your bank account.

Ah I haven't read that blog post yet. Thanks for the clarification.

Unfortunately Microsoft is likely to make UEFI a requirement for Windows 8 machines. This means a 5 year old PC won't run Windows 8 at all.

Then we will be one step closer to psychohistory!!

Thank goodness I am not the only one who has nightmares about Backup Exec.

A few years ago I took over IT duties at a small company that was using Backup Exec. I was assured that everything had been tested with restores and was working correctly, and technically it was. However when we had a two disk crash in the RAID 5 array Backup Exec was useless because it took so long to index the backup archives before a recovery that we were managed to get our RAID array remounted in read-only and pull all the data, 4+TB, off of it before Backup Exec was able to do anything.

We were able to use Backup Exec to recover most of the files that had gotten corrupted with the disk crashes, but it should not take a week to get to the state where your backups are usable. And Symantec's tech support was next to useless.

Fortunately I am no longer at that company and someone else can deal with the mess that they refuse to pay to fix.

Actually within Canada, at least in BC, there are overtime pay exempt positions. Included in the category that cannot be payed overtime is High Tech professional. "The hours of work provisions of the Act, including those governing meal breaks, split shifts", minimum daily pay and hours free from work each week, as well as the overtime and statutory holiday provisions, do not apply to “high technology professionals." Labour BC

You should go read the follow up post on the Building Windows 8 blog. It covers a lot of the probabilities assuming 1, 2, 5, or 10 points of interest in a pictures.