Eve Online has this trait - you are partly your "character", and partly the ship you happen to be flying.

Ah, so it's doing things against the public will that we're after. Glad that we cleared that up.

Uh, anyone that has a netbook that they use for absolutely nothing but web browsing? Which, if everyone else is as disappointed with their netbooks as I am, should be a lot of people. Basically, if you have a computer that you do nothing but web browsing on - Chrome OS is for you.

Yeah right. I fell for the netbook craze. It is the Nintendo Wii of computers. An over-hyped paper weight.

Actually, hamburgers are significantly better than fishing poles.

Yes. Why do the iPhone and netbook people not get this. Every time an ebook story comes out I have to hear the same ill advice about how sitting in a hammock with an LCD screen that I can't read outside is a better alternative.

How exactly would you make a device that electrocutes you into submission more humanitarian? Of all the things an unhinged cop might want to do to someone, getting tasered is probably one of the safest. Getting bonked on the head with a nightstick is certainly no picnic.

Can I get a shark/laser joke here?

Bullshit.

I have been the full time sysadmin responsible for the mail server. I have had the job of keeping the mail service up. It's not cheap. You need redundant networking, redundant servers, redundant storage, redundant staff, and the glue to make sure it all works. For anyone spending less than a couple hundred thousand a year on IT, it's damn near impossible to beat Google's uptime for hosted mail.

As for your other concern about getting the data out of Gmail - you use the same protocols the rest of the Internet uses - IMAP/POP and SMTP. Not rocket science.

No problem.

Hi Boss -

I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year. We used to pay a full time sysadmin to manage the mail server and would average about 12-20 hours of total downtime per year (maintenance, outages, etc.).

Obviously, the switch to Google has been much better for the corporate bottom line. Not to mention that we also get calendaring, wiki/sites, docs, and chat for the same price.

Ah, I'm glad you understand. You have a nice evening too.

That was dumb. I have handed over our email because it's more reliable than hosting locally. This was the first time we've been affected in over a year and it was for a little more than an hour. That's an order of magnitude better uptime than we had before.

Can you beat Google's uptime? I doubt it. Sure, it's not impossible, but you won't be doing it for less than $50/user?

Uh. Words did not fail you. In fact, about halfway through I was wishing they did.

The real question is: Can I get this as a killstreak in Call of Duty 6?

I'm not so sure. How motivated could you possibly be about *anything* if the scenario you're proposing we plan for is that almost all of us die?

"Gentlemen, the Earth is going to be utterly annihilated in 2 years."
"Well then, for the love of Pete, let's put a handful of people on the moon!!!"