In the corporate world, after every merger or takeover I've seen, non essential employees are shown the door. If we can do without for a day, why not a week, why not a month, let's go for all year. The worst thing will be having to fondle yourself at the airport.

It's more likely it took a week before any staff members noticed students were doing "fun" things with iPads.

>>> They've not been called upon for 100 years, but yet they still do exist.

I consider the passengers and crew of United 93 to be a classic example of the militia being deployed. Granting we don't have a complete account, but an assembled group voted on taking action. While the government leadership of our nation migrated from one undisclosed location to another, this group denied the enemy their final objective. The heroes of United 93 are twenty first century Minutemen. They saw an attack on the nation and stood up at the cost of their lives.

Short of an actual man in the middle attack, with rifles and warrants, your information doesn't get mirrored to the NSA's data center. Being able to see your packet in transit means security.

Persistence: more stubborn than the problem. Combined with A creative laziness, and you've got someone who adds value.

RAD-50. My first civilian job was support a database using RAD-50 on PDPs. We marched customers from PDP to VAX to Alphaservers before the new management announced the SQL/IIS port. They took a company with over 50 percent market share (Realtor/Real Estate agent) desktops to 5 five percent in 10 years. One customer jumped from a PDP 11/84 straight to an Alphaserver 1000.

When you buy a rack mounted unit that does this, it's sometimes called a terminal server. You can provide network to serial access, enable unique passwords on each device and create access lists. When I managed customer equipment, I used to require a DECserver and modem/phone line for last ditch access. In this case, I had firewall, switch, router and console access. Much of this kit is can be found used or see Vnetek. I understand Cisco also makes comparable product. You can pair this with virtual comm port driver, letting you drive these units from a central location.

Answer number 2, you need to put a business risk into supporting antique systems. Cost of replacement, downtime to find part vs lost business. Consider stocking in house pre staged replacement systems.

At Coyote Road Services we specialize in creative uses for powerful magnets. Over the years, our company has coordinated many road closures and infrastructure upgrades. The skilled technicians and engineers use top rated ACME equipment in our projects. Coyote Road Services, call and one of our agents will take you to lunch and go over your project plan.

OpenVMS

Cool and Unhackable, with documented uptimes over a decade on single servers. If the business really cares about uptime it's probably still using VMS. Of course the support staff was laid off because no one ever need to work on that system and it hasn't been rebooted since the big power outage 6 or 7 years ago.

Well technically if you have marketing but no engineering then your ratio is infinite because you are dividing by zero.

That's the most efficient business model. Companies like HP for example are laying off or selling their research and development teams focusing on the spam and telemarketing. Senior management collects their bonus for making the company more effective. When perfected, you're left with an imaginary company.

Saturday deliveries are nice for people who travel during the week, or to get that DVD in from Netflix that hasn't made it to the streaming page. Also nice if you can time online orders for a day when you're going to be home. I'd rather give up a weekday, Tuesday makes a good choice. Drop home delivery one day a week, continue with business and PO Box deliveries. This also gets mail carriers out of peak traffic. I used to be a road warrior and signed up for a PO Box before identify theft became cool to avoid having mail pile up at the house. I've kept it for the same reason and really, I generally pick up mail when I'm expecting something, or pass by that direction. In practice, my wife doesn't care to let more than a week go without mail.

When this idea was first floated, I wrote the Postmaster General and asked him to consider keeping Saturday but dropping a mid-week day.

C. M. Kornbluth's estate called, they want credit or they'll file DMCA take down notices for infringement of The Marching Morons. Education vs intelligence vs training to use tools. How bright does anyone need to be when the Oracle at Google can answer most question?

Gave up caffeine, I lasted almost an hour . . . .

A patient or referring physician would hardly ever use that data. That might be given out on a CD. The original full data scan is never given to a patient.

I don't know what cut rate medical care you have, but's it's common to source the original images for review by when seeking a second opinion, at least in California. Images are generally burned to DVD, some services provide shared encrypted access to image servers. Archive graphics can be reloaded to the server by phone. Legally, there's a 7 year retention for adult records, copies must be made available to patients on request.

The American political system is designed to limit choices to a narrow range. There's little real difference. This year, the Republicans are providing an extremist example, but even if victorious they won't be very effective.

That said, I'm for the party with the open bar.