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Comment Re:Just a job (Score 1) 572

Ho many of them are called up at 3am in the morning on a day off?

I don't have raw numbers, but I can guarantee that it's at least as many if not much more than IT people called up at 3AM in the evening day off and day on put together.

Comment Re:Other side of the coin (Score 1) 572

If you consider "IT" to mean "any computers at all" then outside of a lemonade stand, I can't think of a business that can compete without "IT".

I think kids these days would text their parents when they were running low on sugar, cups and lemons so IT by your definition is critical to the supply chain of even the modern lemonade stand ;-)

Comment Re:Time is... limited (Score 1) 572

This is a giant waste of time as opposed to you spending 2 minutes writing the ticket, taking a screen shot and attaching it.

Pretty please, copy and paste the error message, don't send a screen shot of a dialog box with a text error message displayed in it.

1) You might actually read the error message and it might tell you exactly what to do to fix it.

2) If I don't know what the problem is from seeing the error, I'll copy paste it into google and that solves the problem a fair fraction of the time. Sometimes less time than it takes to type in the text I'm reading off of an image.

3) You waste time taking the screen shot and attaching it. You waste my time opening an attachment and retranslating text back into a useable format. Plus the wasted storage and network resources.

Unless your complaint is about visual design/layout etc. a screenshot is almost always the wrong thing to do.

This PSA brought to you by a former employee of a technical company whose client services department would routinely embed screenshots in word documents and attach them to tickets when one sentence in the body of the ticket was all that was necessary and *wasn't even captured in the image*.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then don't use a picture when 10 words will do.

Comment Re:Piracy much eh? (Score 1) 364

For any objection presented for some course of action it is demonstrable that it is the outcome and not the action itself which presents a moral problem. So if the outcome is good, the action is good.

You failed to account for unintended consequences among other things.
1/10. Third grade level work.

Comment Re:Piracy much eh? (Score 1) 364

Laws don't change because "me and all my friends want them to change", unless you and all your friends are an oligarchy.

Just dead fucking opposite.

There is no excuse in America to outlaw gay marriage. There is no justification for it.

It's exactly the same situation with pot. The constitution is written on hemp, and prohibition requires a constitutional amendment. They just decided not to bother when they switched the target.

It doesn't matter what most people want because the people who wrote the Constitution went out of their way to make sure that this is not a Democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic.

Just because we have a long history of not being as good as our ideals doesn't mean we aren't expected to live up to them.

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Data Storage

NSA Building $860 Million Data Center In Maryland 177

1sockchuck writes "As its current data collection makes headlines, the National Security Agency is continuing to expand its data storage and processing capabilities. The agency recently broke ground on an $860 million data center at Fort Meade, Maryland that will span more than 600,000 square feet. The project will provide additional IT capacity beyond the NSA's controversial Utah data center. The new facility will be supported by 60 megawatts of power and use both air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment."

Comment Re:In laymans terms (since I'm a layman) (Score 1) 85

Panspermia [wikipedia.org] (I always thought that term a tad chauvinistic)

No, it makes perfect sense.

You have big planet that's been sitting there developing a fertile environment.

Then out of millions of tiny bits of organic matter navigating a hostile environment one lodges in the fertile environment and using her resources his contribution helps create new life.

So, nope, not chauvinistic. It only works that way as an analogy of human reproduction.

Plus, what, Paneggia? Panovia?
That last one sounds like a crappy car name. Sometimes you just have to go with what's catchy.
 

Comment Re: FTA (Score 1) 302

There have been many instances where innocent people have been injured or killed by drug gang violence.

I think you mean drug law violence.

It would be OK if gang violence effected only the gangs but it does not. It terrorizes entire neighborhoods.

Again, you mean the violence created by drug laws.

We did an experiment called prohibition. It conclusively demonstrated that those sorts of laws and the enforcement thereof are the root cause of increased gang violence and organized crime. Hell, that's why the name "Kennedy" even means anything to you.

Blaming the effect while ignoring the cause is a problem.

Comment Re:FTA (Score 2, Insightful) 302

Probably -- why risk wrecking the vehicle or attracting further attention once the pursuing police have fallen back?

Now I hate cops for the lying nazi fuckholes the vast majority are as much as any sane person, but I still think "possibly" would fit better than "probably".

My brother's car and the other cars at his apartment were broken into and robbed. We interrupted them and almost got shot. They left and we filed a police report. An hour later the police picked us up and drove us ~20 miles to where they (different cops obviously) had pulled over the people who did it. They were driving over 100 miles an hour in a stolen car with several unregistered guns in the car....20 miles from the scene of the crime. They would have gotten away clean if they acted in the rational manner you suggest.

Shit like that happens a lot.

Elaborate computer crimes or Ocean's 11 type shit takes some serious brain power. Most run of the mill crime just takes balls and often a lack of intelligence rather than an overabundance.

Microsoft

Paul Thurrot Predicts November Debut, $500 Tag For Xbox 720 232

New submitter inkribbon writes that Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott has now predicted that Microsoft's Xbox 720 console will actually hit the market this November. Thurrott offers a mix of what he considers cold, known facts and "clearly identified conjecture" about the upcoming device. Important to users is this confidently offered claim about the price: "Microsoft will initially offer two pricing models for the console: a standalone version for $499 and a $299 version that requires a two-year Xbox LIVE Gold commitment at an expected price of $10 per month."

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