Revision 9 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that if a party has reason to believe that evidence may be subpoenaed, the party must keep the data (or face sanction). It's a lose-lose situation either way, and this way Google doesn't look like a place that is trying to hide a crime.

I have also learned that there is something called "in camera" which means that during a trial, you can show your data to the judge in person (he can view it with his eyes) and then make a decision whether the data should become a part of the official record. So evidence can make a difference in a trial but still be kept private.

So, I agree with you. For these exact reasons, I'm not connecting my personal phone to the system, and I carry a company supplied BlackBerry with remote-wipe capability. However, there is a wrinkle.

Tax law in the USA is such that if you make personal phone calls on your company phone, then that (the subsidy that covers the cost) is considered income for you. It is absolutely insane, and every year I hear from the phone reps "Bill XYZ was introduced to remove phone calls from taxable income status." Don't know that the bills ever got passed, though.

So if your accounting department wants to keep it's nose clean with the IRS, having a company issued phone is a horrible records keeping nightmare. Every single phone call needs to be checked for business or personal. Gah! The answer? Have the employee get a personal phone, and supply a monthly stipend. Tax-accounting-wise, it is simple.

But yeah, as someone who needs to protect the company information assets, it is horrible. You're going to retire after 30 years of service? Here's a going away present: lose all the pictures of your grandkids you took on your personal phone. It truly sucks.

Heh.

I didn't hang out on Multiply at first. But once I did move over, I found it to be fine. In fact, I bought a premium membership, because I want them to succeed, and not have the pressure to sell out the way Facebook did.

Another vote for Multiply. I have found it to be pretty good, and really enjoy the company there.

Microsoft has a history of writing code to screw over customers of non-Microsoft products. It's a position you can take only if you are so big that fucking over a few small customers doesn't hurt you in the long run.

But some of us small customers still have long memories.

We just converted from Xiotech to NetApp, and the NetApp is crap. "High end" isn't how we would describe NetApp. And their sales people lied to us (er, said things that may technically be true but are about as honest as 'pigs CAN fly with sufficient initial velocity'). They also claimed that de-dupe would save us 50% storage space. Lies.

It was a huge mistake. If it weren't for the political loss of face of having spent so much money, we would scrap it all and start over with any vendor other than NetApp.

A sixteen year ROI is never worth it. In fifteen years, the technology to replace it will be FAR advanced, and cheaper, and you will still have another year left to break even on this sucker.

The only saving grace to blowing this sort of money on a project, is that you are funding R&D for the company to develop it - assuming that the NEXT consumer gets a price break because the development has already been paid for. Otherwise, you are just lining the pockets of the Friends Of Bureaucrats.

I've used "Navigate to (name of store or gas station brand)" many times (probably more than a hundred, and I'm no road warrior). It is amazingly good at this three word task. Speaking home addresses is less successful, but that is partly because your average street address in another city is six terms, and pauses in speaking are interpreted as a 'finished' signal. With a person over the phone, the practice is to pause after the street, so the person digests it before you move on to the town. The machine wants to get on with it, and does.

I agree with you - it is nice to see the manufacturer design it in (and supposedly figure out how to extend the design in a way that makes computing pervasive within the cabin). However, I would prefer some sort of docking station for my Droid / iPod. My Droid will soon be a MiFi, and is already a super GPS. And speech-to-SMS box. And car radio. And law-enforcement-style video recorder. And eventually, a Hulu streamer.

My point is that with a dock for a general purpose device, I could do far more, and, not be locked into a monthly fee for a service my general purpose device (will soon) already provide.

I need a dock that provides a charging station without clumsy cables, line of sight to the GPS, a place where I can see the on-screen map, provide aux-in to the stereo, and an unobstructed view out the front windshield, and cooling. If you want to route an HDMI cable to the back passenger media station(s), that's a good idea too.

I mention cooling because in GPS mode my device tends to run hot. It is doing a lot, so this makes sense. I don't think it needs refrigeration, per se, but a fan might be nice. It is probably overheating due to the car mount, which wraps around the box and traps heat.

That may be what he did; I don't know. In my old NetWare days, I disliked adding another disk spindle because it adds to the brittleness. But with a SAN, I suppose there is so much redundancy built in that the likelihood of failure is near zero.

We are putting in a new SAN now, and that sort of replication is supposed to be something we can do. However all I hear from the guys involved with the project is a lot of angst that we picked the wrong vendor. There have been a TON of "oh by the way"'s that make us want to reverse our decision to buy from them. Had they told us these things before we wrote the check, we never would have bought from them. We would probably junk the whole project and just start fresh next year if it weren't for the political fallout.

But as bad as it is, they do have command-line tools that you can use from an SSH session. Undercover. ;-)

Humor is pain, purposely inflicted, when everyone understands it's a joke. Obviously, there is an element of the recipients point of view. If everyone recognizes that the pain was not meant to be taken seriously, then the joke is funny. However, there are some personality types that enjoy inflicting pain and then try to pass it off as 'hey, I was just making a joke'.

So, not all "jokes" are funny. It is a question of whether the intent was hateful. Sorry I had not gotten that explanation to you earlier.