I know which host and to which announcement this refers. All this is is a suspension of fully automated patching during the holiday season. If you want patching performed anyway, jut contact your support team. They prefer to make patching opt-in during this period to avoid site outages due to patching miscommunications.

Your post is like saying there is never a reason to rent a car because you should just buy one. Yes, yes, car analogy. IaaS is not intended to compete with static collocation for identical scenarios.

He's not talking about the OS running on the individual IaaS VMs, he's talking about the middleware that supports auth, scaling, provisioning, etc through APIs and applications or portals targeted at them. The case in point for Rackspace is Open Stack.

Your post reflects a complete misunderstanding of their business model. If anything Rackspace is all about value-adds. In fact, value adds are the entire point of the commoditization of hosting. Rackspace 's "traditional" dedicated hosting business is a premium one, charging higher prices for a higher level of support. The company aims to do something similar with cloud hosting. This is the opposite of a race to the bottom. An ecosystem with a commoditized baseline forces companies to compete on "value adds" like support and extended capabilities. Sure, it's in Rackspace's business interests as a company that has bet on the "open cloud" through Open Stack, but the rest of your post makes little sense.

Sigh.

UID > 2mil spreading FUD about /. "corporate masters".

Seriously though, people are missing your point mainly because it's a fairly weak point to begin with. It's obvious from context that the poster meant "at no additional, post-sale cost", and anyone with a modicum of experience has to give a least a little respect to the Microsoft update machine.

Why is this a question?

Between faculty, students and staff, my University had something like 60,000 people on campus each day. It makes sense to have a police force with ties to that community and an understanding of the unique nature of campus policing. The University police force performed just like any other city police force, for our "city" of 60,000. Doesn't have anything to do with a crime problem, other than the particular balance of crimes that any college sees (i.e. more drunken parties, fewer murders).

Computer Crime falls under US SS jurisdiction.

Replying to undo mis-mod.

I must have missed the part where buying the laptop is required in order to obtain an education. You must have missed the part where financial assistance is available if you need to for the laptop, and where loaners are available for those that don't want to participate at all.

That's also completely untrue, and just a story drill sergeants tell. There is nothing at all outlawing the use of .50 BMG against personnel.

Definitely. That's not how we've done things in any of my units, and honestly I don't understand how those actions could ever have passed muster. You know how when you are given an award, they always say "...reflects great credit upon yourself, your unit, and the United States Army"? This kind of thing does the exact opposite.

Your random diatribe notwithstanding, if the helos had reports of small arms fire, and saw something they thought may be a group of men with possible weapons, there was a "situation" to be investigating. It should have been investigated by the dismounts.

30mm, just like .50 cal, is fine as anti-personnel.

So I've spent about two and a half years deployed to Iraq, and seen my share of combat. I've served in several different infantry positions, both as a dismount and as a gunner in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (the "Brad" mentioned in the video). I am always skeptical of these sorts of videos, because they lack context. As a third party, one never knows the full tactical situation, the histories of individuals and groups in the area, the mission and orders of the soldiers involved. So everything I say must be understood to be the view of a third party observer, one with a fair amount of boots-on-the-ground experience, but a third party nonetheless. Based solely on what appears in the video, it doesn't look like the gunner(s) had sufficient justification to fire. Simple possession of an AK-47 is legal in Iraq, and having it on the street isn't always enough to warrant immediate termination, and certainly not when the target is standing in a crowd of unarmed personnel. The "RPG" was poorly identified, and didn't appear to be of significant threat to the Crazyhorse element. It does sound like there had been recent combat in the area, so that may be why there was a minimum standard of ID used prior to engaging the targets. One thing to remember is that Bushmaster element can't always see everything that Crazyhorse does; they rely to some degree on the helos' info to inform their commands. If nothing else, this looked like a textbook situation for dismounted troops with air cover. It sounds like they had Bradleys and dismounts nearby, and they probably should have been sent in to deal with the situation. Dismounts have an infinitely superior view of what exactly is happening on the ground, and when combined with top-down info from the birds, they can properly assess a situation. If these RPGs and AKs were really cameras as reported by the site, then that would have been obvious to dismounts. Firing on the van completely blew my mind. This looks like a series of tactical mistakes combined with an overeager air element, combined with total disregard for the normal RoE (and again, I don't know if they were operating on some kind of modified Rules of Engagement). U.S. soldiers, in my experience, go to great lengths to prevent civilian casualties. Maybe things are different in the air, but those of us working on the ground have to look at everything we do, up close and personal. Don't paint U.S. forces with a broad brush based on the actions and mistakes of a few individuals. Also, remember that it's not the line troops that are performing coverups. Talk to your government about that.