Cloud backup is great for a one-man show when all you back up is a handful of files.

If you have more than a few employees and have to back up terabytes of data and have custom applications which require a day or two minimum to install and configure and data in multiple places, and downtime costs you hundreds, thousands, or more per hour, cloud backup services quickly become an epic fail - plus you need to worry about bandwidth caps with crappy ISPs.

Other backup solutions become more important - for low-budget IT a handful of large external hard drives swapped out daily and taken off-site is a workable (if not ideal) solution, but the best solution is still a tape drive - and replace the tapes after a few rotations. Remember when downtime costs you significant money, having full backups with a rapid restore times becomes critical.

Wait a minute. Let's follow legal reasoning.

Corporations are people, right? When a person lives and works overseas, even though the money is earned overseas, they're still supposed to file a return and pay taxes on those earnings, right? How can Microsoft claim legal personhood, and then neglect to pay taxes on their offshore earnings?

> The reason 9/11 worked out was because people were used to other kinds of plane hijackings. Hijackers that steal a plane, fly it somewhere, then demand something to be fulfilled before returning plane and passengers.

Exactly. It has always been an opportunity to visit places Americans are prohibited from traveling to, such as Cuba. 9/11 was a game-changer which results in passengers subduing would-be hijackers. Hell, I'd love to see passengers permanently maim and disfigure one of those fuckers and maybe force feed them pork as the ultimate insult.

Purple is my favorite color, you insensitive clod!

So far I don't - I am the only one in my family who does not need glasses. To put off reading glasses as long as possible I exercise my eyes; I get close to a window with a screen, and keep shifting focus between the screen and a distant object. I can still focus clearly on objects about 6 inches away. Closer is difficult but sometimes doable with practice. I can clearly discern the pixels on my smartphone (4.99" 1080p display) and huge pixels on my desktop monitors (1080p) drive me nuts. I'm hoping Asus gets their 1440p 120Hz (3D capable!) monitors out soon. :-)

One thing I have noticed is the last couple of years when I get over-tired I cannot focus clearly on anything so there is that.

Secondly, the colorblindness test they do as part of a normal eye exam is rather poor for detecting mild colorblindness. You see a faint and indistinct "5" in the dots, and you're lumped together with everyone who sees a clear and unambiguous "5".

A person with tetrachromatic vision will see a faint, indistinct but discernable 5 in those tests because their eyes are better at discerning slight hue differences.

Do you pass or fail color blindness tests? You might be tetrachromatic in one eye. Another thing that can cause it is if one light is receiving more light than the other (your eyes will rarely both receive the same amount of light) so one retina will be bleached a little more in the color spectrum of the bright object you are looking at. There are also other reasons each eye might respond differently to color (such as one eye has more or less of a type of cone cell than the other).

If you are tetrachromatic though, it can be advantageous, such as acing online hue sorting tests such as http://www.xrite.com/online-co...

> You have fined European banks billions and let your own banks off the hook for pennies.

Correction: our government has fined European banks and handed many domestic banks billions. o.O

...but only if Samsung proved its viability first ;)

On a system that isn't a tablet, I DO NOT WANT A TOUCH INTERFACE, or even a hint of it unless I get a touch sensitive monitor and explicitly turn it on (a prompt asking me if I want to would be fine, too). For desktops and laptops, Windows 7's start menu is absolute perfection.

Don't try to improve perfection. I don't want to see any trace of the formerly-known-as-metro style interfaces anywhere on a desktop OS. Don't try to sell me a Windows tablet and think that shoving a touch interface in my face on the desktop is going to get me to buy. Android is where it's at for tablets. Trying to force that crappy UI on me will make me not even consider Windows tablets even IF you make it far superior to Android.

All you've done is alienate customers with Windows 8, and you're still trying to shove that loathed (loathed isn't even the word for it) abortion of a UI in people's faces. I'm going to be buying a bunch of Windows 7 licenses while it's still available because Windows 9's isn't shaping to be much better than Windows 8. If I have to run 9, I'll be installing classic shell on it, like I do on Windows Server when I have to work on Windows servers (who the FUCK thought it was a good idea to put a tablet UI on a server OS anyhow?!)

Oh, and while you're at it bring back glass. Knock it off with that Windows '80s flat look.

> Let's start at $10000 per infraction.

That is just the cost of doing business to someone like Qualcomm. Let's start at 10% of the annual gross revenue, based on the average gross revenue of the previous three years, PLUS 10% of the revenue of the current year to date. Keep in mind we are talking per infraction, so in this case (>100 githubs) this fraud would cost Qualcomm over ten years' worth of gross revenue.

> plus the added chemicals, such as the aromatics (which is largely benzene group) that were formed when that beef was put over the fire

I eat steak rare (just walk it by the fire please!), you insensitive clod! Putting fire to it more than a few seconds ruins it. >_

> You don't distribute electricity like data,

Sure, I'll buy that.

> it's much harder and you end up losing a LOT of it in the process.

You just contradicted yourself. I mean, it IS like data, and MCI is the grid operator? ;)

He probably only graduated the sixth grade because his mommy sued the school, citing the hurting of precious snowflake's self esteem. Frankly, I'm surprised he can manage to spell those two-syllable words. Maybe his mommy helped him.

Well, whatever the cause, thank modern American education and the dumbing down of America. :(