Oi. You've been around long enough to know the rules. Knowledgeable, informed posts are contrary to the T&C. Go back to your porch. Sheesh. It's geezers like you that give whippersnappers like me a bad name. I'll be getting off your lawn now.

Weight. Unless you're building from scratch, with a hefty engineering budget, putting heavy shit higher than the foundation level means lots of load-bearing components. That means losing lots of space in the floors below, due to the greater size and/or density of pillars, and also increases significantly the cost of the floors that must take this weight.

If your DC is in the basement, or whichever floor is closest to the foundations, you've got the in-built load-bearing functionality of the whole planet, and it's free. Justifying the extra construction cost for an above-ground-level DC is hard unless the purpose of the building is to act as a DC. Consider how much a full rack weighs (a rack full of fully-loaded Sun Thumper systems is over a tonne), and then think about what's involved in engineering to carry that load many times over. Even if you only top out at a half-tonne per rack, that's still a significant load in a small footprint. It's not hard to engineer to deal with that, but it is expensive.

Come again on that one? If you have access to the hardware you can set the password to anything you want. You don't need the old password.

That's all fine and dandy if the configuration of the devices is stored in non-volatile memory, and/or you have full documentation that will allow you to rebuild the network configuration in a reasonable (this was the FC network for a major city's government, so "reasonable" is probably a couple of days at most) time.
In this case there was no certainty that the configurations were saved to NV memory (I think I read that they were actually known to have not been saved permanently), and certainly no documentation that could've had the network rebuilt inside a period of weeks. Password recovery on Cisco boxes, where it's even possible (new versions of IOS allow it to be disabled), requires reboots. Reboots lose unsaved configuration. Where you are unsure that the configuration has been written to storage and lack documentation of the network configuration, you cannot safely undertake password recovery.

Physical access has limits where you are dealing with systems that don't automatically write all configuration changes to non-volatile storage.

Their "whining", as you put it, is exactly right. The aid organisations have millions of dollars to spend on rebuilding Haiti, and that money is, according to fundamental principles of humanitarian aid, best spent in the local community. That means spending it with local businesses to procure goods and services for use in the aid effort. That means, in this case, paying local ISPs for service. It's not whining at all, it's an observation that there's local capacity that's not being used, or, in the cases where it is being used it's being used without payment. Donating services to the aid effort at the outset is being a good citizen, but it very quickly becomes unfair for the aid organisations to use those services and continue to not pay. The money is there, it is meant to be used.

I guess the story is about greedy ISPs

What's greedy about it? A fundamental principle of international aid (and given that within the past six weeks I've been in the Solomon Islands, and on stand-by to go to Haiti, the Cook Islands and Tonga, to help with disaster relief I think I've got some clue on the topic) is that you try and spend aid money in the affected community. The people who live there and the businesses that operate there must remain viable once the relief effort is over, and that means keeping businesses alive until the locals are in a position to earn and spend money themselves.

Donating services is nice if the locals cannot immediately furnish your requirements, but as soon as there's local capability available for utilisation it is a failure of the aid system if that capability goes unused. It is not a good use of aid money to use donated services in place of local ones when carrying out relief work.

Not necessarily. Diplomatic privilege only occurs when a person's diplomatic status is recognised by the receiving nation. The Wikipedia article on diplomatic immunity is pretty good at explaining things.

A good example is diplomatic couriers, who have diplomatic passports but are still subject to the ordinary treatment. What is not searched is the diplomatic pouch. The document says as much, and says that the pouch must be in the courier's line of sight at all times while the courier is being processed.

Although heads-of-state are automatically entitled to a diplomatic passport, per the Vienna Convention, because they aren't technically an accredited diplomat with the receiving nation they aren't automatically entitled to the protections of diplomatic status. It's a courtesy, not a requirement of the Convention, hence the specific TSA exception.

What the heck is the security justification for heads of state, or their families to be exempt?

Two words: Diplomatic Passport. Followed by another two words: Diplomatic Incident.

We know that the US doesn't have much regard for the rights of plebes but, since the generally-accepted retaliation for mistreating foreigners with diplomatic status is other countries mistreating your persons of diplomatic status, they're going to try and avoid messing with heads-of-state if possible. It just gets ugly.
Also, the family members exemption (and yes, I have read the document) is pretty specific. It's not a blanket exception, but applies only when they're accompanied by the head-of-state in question.

umm, what? 19.5%+7.4%=26.4%. 17.1%+9.9%=27%. A bit shy of 30%, but not enormously. Your comprehension skills are pretty shocking.

Market cap means diddly, really. What matters is revenue and market share if you're talking about the size of a company. Market cap measures value as perceived by shareholders, not influence and sales. Nokia's 2008 revenue, in Euros, was higher than Apple's revenue in US dollars. And I doubt that even a worshipper of the iJobs would argue that Nokia is the unquestionable master of the cellphone world.

As much as anything AAPL is valuable because it's fashionable. It's visible, it has a brand, people want a piece of that brand. Nokia isn't fashionable, it's functional. There's no hype, there's no cult of Nokia, it's just there. Comparing the market cap of Nokia and Apple is a very desperate attempt to pretend that Apple isn't being taken to the cleaners by a company that does only communications equipment (vs computers, phones, media downloads...) and sells more of it than Apple does.

Oblig: you must be new here.

Yeah, coz the US is the only country in the OECD with "capable neonatal intensive care"? Get the fuck over yourselves! If you want to compare the figures with, say, the Philippines or Turkey on that basis, then go ahead. You'll be wrong, because infant mortality is recorded as a rate per 1,000 live births, but you can try and pretend all the same. However, don't try and pretend that your system is in any way superior to Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Japan... The simple truth is that your system is broken, and no amount of massaging of statistics will change that. You lead the world on cost, unquestionably, but the outcomes that are bought with that money are worse than the outcomes bought by all those nasty, socialist healthcare systems in other countries.

The mythical free market does not work when people have no choice but to participate. If non-participation is not an option, there goes your free market. It's not free, because you have no choice. Basic free market economics also requires perfectly rational, informed players, but as soon as a person's health is at stake they cannot, pretty much by definition, be rational. Medicine is a field where, unless you happen to be a specialist in a particular area, you will struggle to be perfectly informed. Even other doctors don't quality as perfectly informed about specialist areas, and once you get into advanced research it's likely that only some specialists could be considered to be perfectly informed. Information asymmetry kills the free market dead, and medicine is one of the most asymmetric fields of knowledge in existence.

There's also the small matter of a lack of interchangeability of products. If you have $5k and need a heart transplant, well, good luck with that. Nobody who can supply what you need is going to meet your purchasing power, and what you can afford isn't a replacement for what you need. That means that healthcare providers are price setters, not price takers, and the market has to come to meet them because they are supplying unique goods that come with a very high barrier to entry for competition - you can't just hang out a sign and advertise cheap heart transplants.

If you want to argue in favour of the utility of the free market, at least understand why it cannot work for healthcare. Free markets require behaviours and attributes of the players that are not available to the healthcare market.

Actually, injucted is valid. I've heard it used more than once by law lecturers while studying commercial law, which I figure is as much validation as anything.
And if you want even further confirmation, check out Google

No, it's not. Patent trolling is where your business model is entirely predicated on patenting the bleeding obvious and then suing companies that infringe your over-broad patent. The i4i case at least involved a company that had a relationship with MS and felt that their patent was being abused. They worked with MS, to develop a product, and then MS shafted them. That's totally inconsistent with the modus operandi of patent trolls.

Should the patent have been granted? No, probably not. But it was, and it wasn't applied for just so that the applicant could go and sue other companies.