Yeah, but that creates a huge problem if the device is no longer responsive. Makes servicing any kind of major failure pretty much impossible.

Let me make this short and sweet. George Lucas isn't a filmmaker. A real filmmaker has an appreciation for his creation and its significance within our culture. He treats it with respect. Lucas, OTOH, has taken every opportunity he can to take the original trilogy, rip them apart, stuff them with cheap special effects, repackage them, and sell them yet again. That behavior, as reprehensible as it is, can almost be forgiven if he had the decency to keep the original versions--the ones we all remember from our childhood--available. But NO, he refuses to do that. He is essentially spitting in the face of every Star Wars fan out there by denying them the opportunity to watch the unaltered, un-bastardized versions of the films they love and denying them the opportunity to show their children these cinematic gems. No, this man is not a true filmmaker with an appreciation of his creations and respect for the millions who enjoy those films; he's a shameless, money-grubbing hack who has made a mockery of his films and has essentially given their fans the finger.

I will not buy this man's dreck. I have downloaded rips of the old laserdiscs and burned those to disc. The quality is pretty awful, but at least they're the original films, and these are the ones I plan to show to my kids, and when they ask me why the quality is so bad, I'll tell them what George Lucas did and use it as an object lesson as to why unbridled greed and hubris are bad things.

Does anyone else remember with wonder those extended TV broadcasts where they spent all night on prime-time network TV to show off the latest incoming photos? And they even interviewed actual scientists about what the data meant.

It's amazing and truly sad how far we've fallen since then.

No, seriously, can anyone explain to me why some people insist on capitalizing every letter in their e-mails and/or comments? I've been wondering about this for years, and I've never been able to figure it out. I seriously doubt these folks write in all caps when they use a pen (or do they???), so why do they do it on a computer? What is their "logic" for this?

I don't think this will have much of an impact on Android. First, the folks who really want an iPhone will have already gotten one. Also, I don't think that people chose Android as a "poor man's iPhone". In fact, I think that many folks who get Android do it because they don't want the iPhone. And people are viewing this from a U.S. perspective, as if the iPhone and Android are only sold here. If you want to see how this may all play out, look overseas, where the iPhone is often sold by multiple carriers in a single country. In those places, Android is doing just fine.

But, on a side note, if Verizon does get the iPhone, I think a lot of people are going to be schooled on the incompatibility of different carriers' networks when they try to take their AT&T iPhones to be activated on Verizon and learn that they'll need to buy another handset. Mark my words, people are going to freak out, and this will definitely make it onto the tech section of CNN's Web site.

While I think there are more important things that Congress ought to be doing, the advertisers have only themselves to blame. They've known for decades that loud commercials piss people off, they've been told over and over that they should stop this practice, yet they've ignored all of this.

And some of the blame can also be laid at the feet of the local TV stations and cable systems, whose commercials can air at much higher volume than the network feed they're inserted into because someone is too lazy to adjust the fucking levels properly. Is it so damn hard to fix your equipment so that, when I have the volume set to enjoy "Mythbusters" at a moderate sound level, the ad for Billy Bob's Gently Used Washing Machine Emporium doesn't set off car alarms three blocks away?

And, while we're at it, can we do something about businesses that insist on using little kids in their ads, apparently in the belief that cute kids drive up sales? There's a local furniture store here that uses the owner's kids in every single ad. Those kids should sue the guy for child exploitation. And does anyone else find this practice as nausiating as I do? If you're going to show me an ad, just cut to the chase and tell me about how much I can buy a decent couch for and leave your kids at home where they belong.

I got a friend request once from some generic profile, supposedly for an organization related to where I'm located. Looked at it, and I couldn't tell who they were or how they might have been related to me in any way. Did these clowns think I was going to friend them? Hell, I don't want some of the friends I already have, so I'm certainly not going to add more that I can't even identify.

I had wondered about the ownership of these companies. I pretty much suspected that Etisalat was either state-owned or at least owned by people closely connected to the state, but I wasn't sure about Du. They seem to be a bit more progressive than Etisalat, so I had wondered if they were under different ownership. Not so much, I suppose.

Just my opinion, but I think that, at some point, telecom will need to be liberalized or economic development is going to stall. People in Europe, Asia, and North America can make international calls for next to nothing now, and I think that this cheap calling has come to be expected, and if the UAE wants to more closely integrate into that trade arena, the cost of calling and getting Internet access has got to come down. I can certainly understand the current structure if the federal government gets much of its cash from telecom, but maybe that funding needs to change. Not that I can speak authoritatively on this, since the United States has some really terrible funding disparities, especially when you get down to the state and local level. Still, basing a federal budget on telecom seems like a bad idea, especially when having low phone and data rates seems to be a prerequisite for a modern economy.

Does that trick work with Skype's site?

From personal experience trying to help a friend who lives in Dubai, I think that more effort goes into blocking VoIP, and that's because Etisilat and du know that they couldn't charge the rates they do for international calling if people had VoIP as an alternative. We can argue all day about the morality of blocking porn and that maybe a better solution is to allow parents to police content by offering them filtering software that they can choose to install, but, with VoIP, it's all about the money. The UAE has a modern telecom infrastructure with lots of expats who want to call home, and Etisilat and du can make boatloads of money if they offered reasonable rates. Instead, they play this game, which forces people to spend money on VPN's so they can call out. And I'll bet that many do it just to stick it to the telecoms that make their lives so hard.

Coming from someone who had responsibility for a small corporate network in a former job, I have to agree. Yes, we had an Internet use policy. It was pretty broad, and I knew that people violated it every single day. But, you know what? I had my hands full making sure the computers and network didn't melt down on a daily basis, so, as long as no one was doing anything that made my job harder, I didn't care. Sure, I had to do an e-mail investigation once to determine if a staff member was doing something inappropriate, and I was asked by a supervisor if there was anything set up to monitor whether an employee was surfing FB excessively, and I responded appropriately to both requests, but, as I said, as long as employees weren't doing anything that could either harm our infrastructure or get the organization in legal trouble, I left them alone.

I suspect the same is true in this case. The government wants porn blocked, so the IT guys block some porn. But they aren't stupid. They know damn well that it's ineffective, but, as long as they don't feel pressure to do more, why should they? No one wants to go out of their way to be more of an asshole than is demanded by their superiors (well, almost no one), and that's why these holes are there. Now, where you do see more extensive blocking is with VoIP traffic, and that's because Etisilat sees it as a direct threat to its profits. Blocking VoIP, I'd wager, is a lot higher on their priority list.

Look, you need to be practical here. There's a good reason control rooms like the one in 24 don't exist in the real world: they don't work. Forget the video wall and just make sure that your employees have access to what they need on their own workstations. You want this thing to be functional in a crisis situation, right? Then that means that the facility may need to run on backup power, and a bunch of huge monitors are going to use a lot of that power. Not to mention that that expensive video wall is going to quickly become a white elephant, and then something on it is going to fail. At that point, management is going to know the whole thing was pointless, and they aren't going to want to shell out more money to repair it.

If you want this to work, then focus more on getting your employees comfortable and functional furniture. Dual-monitor systems work well for displaying critical information, provided that you get desks big enough to accommodate them and other needed equipment. As for employee comfort, make sure they have an adequate break area that includes a large fridge, microwave, sink, water cooler, and table. If you don't want visitors to see it, just use partitions to hide it. And if you feel the need to make it look "cool", then get everything in black and/or stainless steel. And if you want to give them something fun to do, then throw in some old arcade games. If management is worried about these being a big time-waster, then make them run on tokens, and give each employee a certain number of them per day, week, etc.

The thing is, you want a facility that will actually be useful to you. Build that, and you will have made a good investment, and, believe me, clients will take more notice of that than of something that looks good but isn't functional.

No, but Darl claimed that he stole the whole dead/alive cat thing from SCO. Darl said that being either dead or alive is a binary concept, and since computers are binary devices, and since SCO writes computer software, then the whole concept of binary is their intellectual property, so Schrodinger owes them around $10 quadrillion. SCO is also suing every cat in the world, both living and dead, claiming that, as a result of Schrodinger's blatant IP violations, all cats are required to purchase licenses from SCO in order to exist. Darl also considered suing rats, mice, and other assorted vermin on the theory that SCO's IP umbrella extended to them because of their close predator-prey relationship with cats, but the whole thing fell apart when he realized that he fell into that category of vermin and therefore would be in the awkward position of suing himself. He wasn't opposed to doing this, but the lawyers weren't sure how they'd get paid, since Darl would be both the winner and loser in such a case, so they refused to go forward.

Oh, I know they had nothing, but there may be some incriminating evidence that shows they knew they had nothing, or maybe it would show that they were being sponsored by a large, well known software company that we can all name.