OP starts with: "I am the sole sysadmin for nearly 50 servers (win/linux) across several contracts. ..."

This implies that he's paid hourly. Contracts implies that he's a consultant. If there's anything that a consultant craves, it's billable hours...

I'm guessing you're heterosexual then?

Please point out the part of the US Constitution that says the Federal Government can't spy on foreign countries, then justify Snowden's leaking of intelligence methods and sources that had nothing whatsoever to do with American domestic civil liberties.

Put his actions before a jury of his peers, like the numerous whistle-blowers who came before him, none of whom fled to hostile countries? Restrict his leaks to pertinent information, rather than dumping EVERYTHING? Attempt to work within the system before trying to blow it up? Leak the information without outing yourself, remaining anonymous like Deep Throat did?

You'd probably have a different perspective on that if you lived in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Finland, Georgia, or any of the Central Asian Republics.

It'd make more sense to play the realpolitik game: "Put Mr. Snowden on a flight to New York and we'll quietly acquiesce to your annexation of Crimea."

Unfortunately realpolitik is not something the current administration is very good at. They're very good at making promises they can't keep, and threats they won't follow up on, but making cold calculations to further American interests in a dangerous world? Not so much.

The US president is a Spokesmodel.

The last vestiges of Presidential authority as actual executive were blown out of JFK's skull, 50 years ago. The real rulers have allowed the cosmetic changes of politics, without substantial challenge to policy or imperative.

That's why you can argue successfully to let fags into the imperial legions, but not if such legions should be withdrawn from the globe and disbanded.

False conservatism, false progressive/liberalism. Everybody in the US takes a hot shower and drives to the mall, on the burnt bodies and broken future of a million dead babies - hidden in Congo and Yemen and Indonesia and...

I cancelled my subscription to another Linux magazine when they dropped paper. I figure I get fresher news from my RSS feeds and more up-to-date and more detailed technical info from blogs and project websites.

I truly do love my tablet for reading fiction and even the occasional reference manual, but the ability to randomly flip through a dead-tree magazine and idly learn about something that may someday become important is something I treasure and an e-reader just doesn't do it for me.

Larry wanted it to do something Sun never did - make a profit so he could build another yacht. He's been hoping to do that with other open-source acquisitions as well.

Unfortunately, people don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on open-source platforms, apps, and tools.

Poor Larry.

I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.

But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.

On the whole, I'm inclined to say that when you've gotten to the point that only 100% original Excel can do the job, you've probably reached the point where you shouldn't be doing the job in Excel anyway.

This. Absolutely, 100% this.

As I've alluded to in my other posts, as soon as I graduated from cowboy sysadmin to a "proper" sysadmin that files change requests and writes project documentation, I've come to love change managers for precisely the reasons above. Change managers are under continual bombardment from non-technical project managers and developers that might well have deep, deep insight into a certain area but can't see past the end of their nose. A good change manager will often trot up to us sysadmins and say "So-and-so has submitted this change but doesn't think it needs approvals from you guys, can you take a gander?" to be met with either a "yeah that's fine" or a "Holy crappingon what-the-fuck in a god-buggered handbasket NO!". Good sysadmins in a constructive environment see a bigger picture than the project managers and the developers and, as far as CAB is concerned, submit better change requests as a result - because risk analysis is such an innate part of our job that most of us don't even realise we're doing it. But change managers see a bigger picture still because they're exposed to the sysadmins, network admins, security admins, user admins, mail admins, storage admins, admin admins, admin users, sysadmin networks, bread, eggs and breaded eggs.

Change managers exist to protect the business. Sysadmins exist to run the business' IT. Change managers realise that sysadmins are often asked to do dangerous or even outright impossible things by powerful people with only an inkling of what consequences such an action might have; it's a change manager's job to communicate with and understand the sysadmin (and everyone else) in such repsects, just as it's the sysadmins' responsibility to communicate to the business why change X is crucial or dangerous. In a properly functioning IT dept, sysadmins and change managers protect both each other and the business from stupidity, mis-co-ordination and lack of oversight. As a sysadmin, change managers are almost always on your side - either pushing for that change that's so essential, or holding you back where there's a risk. They're a highly valuable ally. When something goes to shit, they're the first people to step in and say "no, the sysadmins had nothing to do with this incident".

I'm MrNemesis and in the last three years I've learned to love my change managers.

Well, if more people like you stopped saying "it's impossible" maybe some of your countrymen would stop thinking it was. Some might even start thinking about how to change it.

I've noticed many Americans seem to have a strange habit of dismissing or often completely ignoring (as you just did) anything that happens outside of the US. Clearly representative democracy must invariably result in two parties with an unshakeable grip on power! Except that most of the time it doesn't. Just in the USA.

Do what people in other places in the world have done. Get off your ass, stop saying it's impossible, and work for change. Go find a third party you can support and volunteer for them. Or run yourself. Sure you'll lose, today. Maybe not tomorrow.

No.

There have been several studies of tidally-locked planets around M-dwarfs which refute this.
Simulations of the Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Conditions for Atmospheric Collapse and the Implications for Habitability, M. M. Joshi, R. M. Haberle, and R. T. Reynolds , Icarus (1997)
A Reappraisal of The Habitability of Planets around M Dwarf Stars, Tarter et al. (2007), Astrobiology,

Basically atmosphere and ocean circulation transfer the heat, and you get a relatively habitable earthlike environment.

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/04/16/0221210/study-finds-us-is-an-oligarchy-not-a-democracy

No report of a Macdonalds franchise yet.