Well you did not have Bush and Cheney as head of the country did you? They are the ones that foisted DHS and TSA etc on America. They were the ones that came up with the color codes for terror alert. They fostered the idea of making everybody think that every one was a terrorist. If they had been ahead of your country you would have had the Patriot act stuffed down your throat. Essentially the two of them became the Joe McCarthy of our generation. I just wish we had someone that would have stood up to them.

There is not a valid reason in the world to give admin rights out of *ANY* server to developers. I do not care how big or small the company is. The environment on the developers servers should be the same as production. That way if there is an issue during development it will be caught before even going near a production environment. Far too often changes get implemented into production that open the world by "accident" (really just sloppy thinking). You might as well not change the default admin name or the password then see what happens. I do not want to be in your shoes if there is financial/personal/secret information on the server as you might as well kiss your job good by and look forward to spending time in prison. BTW if I were on the jury you would get the firing squad and or lethal injection (with some really painful poison).

IBM has done this sort of thing for years. A few years ago I challenged an IBMer on the issue. The patent (if I recall correctly) was how to handle lines of people (queuing).

IBM seems to have an internal policy of brownie points for the number of patents an employee gets. I do not know if it gets them more research or what exactly as I haven't asked.

IBM also withdraws a lot of patents when it becomes obvious that the patent is less than lets say patentable.

Well if its got a burger running around in a clown suit I guess I would agree.
On the other hand if there is a lot of thought put into it and the colors are business friendly, I do not see a reason why not. If anything it would raise the visibility of the group. Which hopefully is good already.

Anyone who thinks Jerry Louis was funny has some lame idea what funny is.

Sphealey spoke thusley: "I suspect I will have to disappoint you then: personally I think the verdict on the outcomes of W Bush's /policies and actions/ is already in, and those outcomes were, are, and will be for the (now shortened) lifespan of the United States colossally bad. However, whether Bush was inept or was actually very ept and wily in executing those bad policies is something that will only become clear after a long time and with the release of such records as may still exist"

I will have to agree with you but will add this: Bush (and Cheney) set back the world's opinion of the US by about 100 years and possibly more. I am still having to apologize to non US types about the treatment they are getting as a result of the both of them. One person was slugged by a border person because he got out of his car. No screaming no nothing and he was roughed up. I have friends in Europe that their hostility towards America is so bad they do not talk to me anymore.
The Patriot act was the most heinous bill ever enacted and we haven't seen the end of that monstrous piece of legislation yet.

My information is a bit dated and may not be pertinent to this story if so please ignore.

I had a friend who worked in the White House and employed by a third party (not political).
He was told to recover some emails that had "disappeared". This goes back a bit but he involved an organization that built the drives and with a major effort they were able to recover about 20 percent of the emails.

I cannot disclose the name of the company or the individuals name (although he is retired) as I was not there to "prove" went went on. The company is a major world wide company and its disk drives are considered the best in the world (bar none).

I did not ask (Nor would I have asked) for any specifics, I worked with him a little and I will say he is not prone to exaggerate or fabricate things and he has a spotless record though out his career and I believed what he told me (in confidence). I think its fare to say I still respect my promise to him not to repeat specifics.

crux said: "I call BS on you. Either you don't understand basic constitutional republicanism or you are from one of those democratic socialist states. In a democracy, the states business goes with the voters. In a republic, the state's business is to stick to the constitution/charter/etc. "

The bottom line on this whole discussion is GREED. Plain and simple It is evident at all levels of business and government. The issue is (as it always is) how much greed is acceptable?

re: "Personally, I think regulation has a place, but in moderation, where it makes sense. Unfortunately though, no regulation only works when people can regulate themselves, which doesn't appear to be reality."

Agreed but this only works when people are honest. Unfortunately there are quite a few lets say less than honest people around. You can mention almost any industry and you will have a fare share of people who are not honest.

In older times you could get away with a tic tac toe type game.

Now its a lot more sophisticated. I would suspect that you would get the best answers from teachers from third grade down.

Probably a game with fun animals that "speak"might be an option.

As others have indicated the report was less than complete and really had no specifics other than SETI.
I have been running SETI on my system for over 10 years. I have seen no real impact from running it.
It is not clear what the issues is was that he was told to take it off and he did not or was there some sort of other issue at work.
Well my opinion says if it doesn't hurt why the fuss? Sure there are side issues but there should be a way to sit down and loot to see if the issues are hiding other issues. The issue off the top of my head is that the school ordered small memory boards that are needed and that put the computers at risk for paging too much. There are answers to both sides (use BOINC with less memory) . The small foot print of HD space is small but not zero. Is that stealing resources? I guess I would have to disagree as the space used for BOINC is probably smaller than a say a windows tic tac toe program.
This really needs to be written about a little better so people can understand the whys a little better.

Just ask the 60+ year old grandmother in Texas about being tasered (and why).

You will get an answer you do not want to hear.

Agreed. The whole idea behind PAY TV (HBO and the like) was that you do not have to put up with commercials. Now you get the commercials and poor quality content. So why pay for poor quality?

Like wise Rupert Murdoch's (sp?) and his right wing trash I would be happy if they dropped off the net maybe they would finally get the idea and publish for the rest of the world not the right wing loonies.

Well they did do a "CHIA Obama" figurine.

That offended just about everyone except the makers apparently.
That was bad taste as well as racist.
I certainly agree it is bad taste (probably racist) to portray anyone as a monkey. Much as I do not like Bush (either one) I cannot recall of any such cartoons. I vaguely recall of one that showed Bush as a member of the KKK. While that is distasteful and should not have been published, I can see where it was reasonably a valid depiction. Again this was not against the wife of a president where the Michelle is. I believe (as of right now) she is not really a public figure. If she gets on a soap box and starts campaigning for her husband then she probably would be classified as a public person.

This is nothing new. I have been in the IT industry for about 40 years. I cannot tell you the number of times I have run into this in various installations. I can also tell you the horror stories that would leave you wondering what were they thinking.

For about 20-30 years IBM was pretty much in the same mode until user groups united and screamed at IBM to come up with a solution. Mind you it was not overnite that IBM (and their customers) came up with a pretty darn good solution. *IF* you followed the rules you could pretty much bring a new system in and reapply all the local modifications within (most of the time) with either a small amount of work or a reasonable amount of work to get the local modifications onto the new system in usually less than a weeks effort by one person. There are some exceptions I know but if you kept a orderly system and followed the rules you were pretty much a minor clerical work on local modifications to install a new release of the OS or a major OS upgrade. BUT everyone had to follow the rules (yes even IBM) the rules are quite easy and straightforward. No need to list them here as only a person with IBM OS background would understand them, but they are reasonably simple. Depending on how you chose the system type to be installed it was for the most part straight forward. It also took thumping of management heads to get into the mode of either complete replacement of the the OS or upgrading the OS with another release. Also, the fact that (currently) if I recall correctly IBM drops support every two years on their flag ship OS so you are on a treadmill (so to speak) of keeping everything reasonably current.