Looks like it boils down to Non-technical people making technical decisions.

This is more directed to managers, VP's, and C-Levels. Before you agree to a contract for technical services, you really should have a skilled technical person read it and tell you where you are about to get screwed.

I have seen contracts to outsource L1 and L2 where it stated "Any ticket that can not be handled by L1 or L2 support personal will be forwarded L3 personal provided by XXXXXXXXX." Where XXXXX was the name of the company that was outsourcing the jobs to India. Sounds good tell you find out that the Indian company hired 1 guy to do both L1 and L2. He had no computer knowledge and simple passed all tickets to L3 with the comment "Do the needful" The Indian company always met their SLA's because it was a ticket that could not be handled by the guy they hired. (Note: That one was for 1500 servers)

Another contract I was shown listed a guaranteed uptime of 96%. When I questioned it, my VP replied "There management did not understand anything technical. 4% down time was sold to them as reasonable. So don't worry about it, we will always make our SLA's" (Note to managers: 99.99% uptime is reasonable, 99.999% uptime is what you want!)

My favorite was one that stated that the customer was responsible for all documentation and procedures on servers, access, and support. That one was a huge pile of steaming fecal mater which suddenly leapt into the air oscillating device when they were SOX audited. The company they were outsourced to met the SLA's and could not be held liable because it was in the contract that the customer was responsible for the documentation.

So, take it from someone with over 20 years in IT. When you outsource technical functions you need to have your technical people vet the contract and you need to keep them to monitor and make sure that the company, you are outsourcing to, does their job.

I would guess that the intent is not to make it to court.

The intent is probably to run lots of discovery and waist time tell the guy runs out of money and eventually agrees to settle by giving them the domain.

This is the kind of thing I would love to see the EFF grab and do pro-bona.

In May 1862, Abraham Lincoln overturned an order issued by General David Hunter that would have freed every slave across vast swaths of the southern Atlantic coast.

That was after he was made president and 1 year into the civil war.

He is not the man you think he is and revising history to make him some grand savior is BS.

You may want to read up on the subject. The Civil was did not start because of slavery and was not because of slavery.

Enemy oppressor?

Every slave ship sailing from Africa to the USA sailed under the US flag.
For over 100 years of slavery, it was all done under the US flag.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, His name was not even on the ballot in 10 states. There were only 33 states at the time so close to 1/3 of the states did not have him on the ballot and he still won. That was the key that started the whole civil war! An election that even today would cause riots, to have a candidate win when he was not even on the ballot in 1/3 of the states!

Yes racial tensions were high and yes the south decided to make slavery a key point of there cause, but when the Civil war broke out it was not all about slavery. Abraham Lincoln himself was "Anti-Slavery" meaning against slavery's expansion, however he was not calling for immediate emancipation.

"I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists, because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so." -- Abraham Lincoln September 17, 1859: Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio

You must be a young kid. Im guessing you dont remember when Ma-Bell ran all the phones in the US and you paid $0.25 a min to call someone that was less than 30 miles away.

Tell me, how much does it cost to call someone 30, 50, or 100 miles away now? Oh wait, it is $0 a min. All from regulating Ma-Bell and having the markets opened.

Kind of killed Phreaking with $0 a min long distance. lol

Slahdot Censored by IMAX!

Take 2 tbl spoons of that bacon fat and put it in a pot. Heat it up and add dry rice to it then stir and cook tell the rice goes from white to a kind of translucent.

Add the water, bring to a boil, drop to a simmer, and simmer for 20 min.

Rice turns out flaky and perfect with a hint of bacon flavor. Personally I love it for breakfast. 1cup of the rice and two eggs over easy on top. Great bacon flavor with my eggs and a whole lot less fat and calories.
 

You may want to re-think your position.

The FCC redefined common Carrier to INCLUDE ISP's.

ISP's are defined as "an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet."

I am sure Google and Google mail qualify under that definition, as would Facebook and Twitter.

Government: Crap, we got hacked again. How are we supposed to protect our lists of security clearances and employee records? Its so confusing.

IT people of the wold collectively reply: ID10T Errors, you have to solve them first! Then you can protect your data.

You really think a small fraction of executives have IT Skills?

If there is a small fraction then it is so small as to be non-existent. The last executive I met who claimed IT skills kept coming down to the IT department and asking us to answer lists of questions, sometimes it was "Can I get someone to write a C++ program to do XYZ?" where XYZ had nothing to do with the job. Come to find out, he was working on a degree in CS and was having the IT group do his homework.

25 years in the field and I have yet to meet an executive with anything more than the basic windows user skills. The bulk of them consider dual core systems with 2gig of ram and 500g of hard drive space as "Top of the line Desktops"

I remember that memo

"MEMO: Politicians should only be trusted as far as you can comfortably spit out a dead rat."

Im doing it on the enc28j60. It does not contain the tcp stack on the unit, you have to handle it in the CPU.

The current code uses 27,626 bytes (89%) of program storage space and 1,543 bytes (75%) of dynamic memory.

Handles web interfacing for the switch, network config, rebooting the unit, and offers a json API call for pulling current state.

That is a wired connection version. I am also working on one that uses the ESP8266 wifi unit which does have the TCP stack on it. That one is much smaller code.

32k, Im working on an Arduino (328p) with 2k of SRAM and 32k of flash storage.

So far, I have a webserver running on it that controls a light switch up to 10A.

Someone should read history.

Drug laws in the US are less than 100 years old. It was the late 1930's for most of them. I would suggest you read the arguments in congress while debating the law. It seems that the group FOR the law was arguing that these substances empowered the lesser races. (Im making it polite and not using the slang they used)

Drug laws in the US had more to due with racial control than they did with helping the addicts.

Just to make a point stoners are considered "lazy, irresponsible, thieves, untrustworthy, etc" All the same stereotypes used to describe blacks in the 30's, 40's, and 50's.