Not sure what all of the other people posting on this topic were thinking. Have any of you heard of ARP poisoning? Having a switched network offers little to no protection from MITM attacks unless you and your attacker are on separate L3 networks.

Why should C-level execs care about what model processor is used in their computers? Office users aren't looking for the absolute greatest performance, they're looking for reliability, manageability, and cost. I can guarantee that no typical* medium or large size business will make a decision on which vendor to use for office computers based on the performance benchmarks. Frankly, who gives a shit about the motherboard in a typical office user's computer. It doesn't matter, certainly not to upper management. Choose something that has a reasonable cost, a solid long term support contract, and is easy to manage in your existing environment. If anything, the support contract, expandability (adding dual monitors later, or adding more memory for heavy data analysts or future software upgrades), and the existing vendor relationships are far more important than performance benchmarks. *Assuming they're not using them to render lots of graphics or do other very specific, specialized tasks.

No...realistically it would be extremely difficult to use nuclear weapons as a response to anything other than a nuclear attack. This system would give us a conventional response that might deter more than just a nuclear attack.

Here in Indianapolis, I've never had to get a code to access Starbucks wifi via text message. Just sign in with the username/password that I've registered my card under. And while I've heard that its 2 hours per day of wifi (as long as you use a card every 3 months or something), I've never been kicked off after two hours.

Who doesn't let you create TXT records?? I've used DynDNS's Custom DNS service, Slicehost, and GoDaddy's DNS service and I've always been able to create TXT records. I'm not doubting you, but I for one would be royally pissed off if I signed up for a DNS service that didn't actually support all of the normal records.

Windows XP had _nothing_ in common with ME whatsoever.

Yeah, I guess that's true, but in that case it's not really MS being dicks, it's the carrier. That interesting about that Nextel phone, my Sprint Treo was not locked down (even before I upgraded to an unofficial WinMob 6 firmware), I wonder why Sprint/Nextel would choose to lock down some of their phones but not others. I have to say, I would have some very unpleasant words for a person who sold me a phone that does not allow me to install applications (of my choosing) on it.

This is not that big of a deal. I don't like someone else having control over my hardware, but unlike with Apple's phones, nobody is requiring you to get Windows Mobile apps from the Microsoft "marketplace". If you're worried about something like this, then just skip the app store and get the .cab installation file straight from whoever made the software. The great thing about Windows Mobile is that its not locked down like other mobile OS's. You don't have to jailbreak your own hardware just to use it. Hell, you can load up Visual Studio, make a little .NET app for you phone, and install it on your device yourself.

Definitely not an A-7, it only has one engine and the intake is in the nose. It might be a Tornado like someone else said, or a Jaguar (what I'm leaning towards - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPECAT_Jaguar)

Complying with this would *NOT* involve removing support for the Open XML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc). This is related to Custom XML, which is described as:

âoeCustom XML is the support for custom defined schemas. Itâ(TM)s that support that allows you truly integrate your documents with business processes and business data. You can define your data using XML Schema syntax, and then you can use that data in your Office documents. By opening up our formats with our reference schemas, and supporting your custom defined schemas, you get true interoperability of your documents.â

I've really been impressed with OpsView. Can't say how well it scales on huge networks (but there are options for having multiple servers). Its based on Nagios, but its a lot less of a pain to configure and has a pretty good web interface. The only thing I don't really like is its graphing functionality. I use Cacti for monitoring bandwidth/server load/etc. But for availability checking OpsView does a fantastic job. I'm using it to monitor maybe twenty devices, including Linux and Windows servers, and HP/Cisco network devices. I tried Zenoss as well, but it seemed awkward to work with. For instance, with Opsview/nagios it's easy to add a check to verify that a DNS server is correctly resolving a record in a particular zone. I remember it was going to be a pain to monitor some of the things I wanted to with Zenoss. Maybe I'm biased because I used plain old Nagios for a while before I tried OpsView and Zenoss.

Yes it is recurring, because you have to pay it every month to be able to listen to > 40 hours / month.

So they don't let you skip more than a few songs an hour even if you have the paid subscription?

What manufacturer only has a 1 year warranty on drives!? All the consumer drives that I've seen (on Newegg) have 3 year warranty's, and there's quite of few of the (theoretically) higher quality business drives with 5 year warranties. Man, there's no way I'd touch a HDD that the manufacturer could only offer a 1 year warranty on.

If you're using full disk encryption with BitLocker or TrueCrypt or something then I doubt this would be effective. With both BitLocker and TrueCrypt, the only things that can be loaded without decrypting the drive is the bootloader/BitLocker/TrueCrypt software that prompts for the password or key. Unless someone has found a vulnerability in the actual encryption software that's used, I don't think it would be vulnerable in that way.