As long as mid level execs feel that email is an instant, unlimited capacity communication channel that saves everything for ever but is still secure and reliable with 24/7 5-9's uptime, email will be around.

I've been waiting to kill email for years, and they won't let me do it.

I've worked for stupidly rich stupid people before. Generally it's all fun and games billing them for medium-business level IT for their homes for a year or 2, and ordering big-boy Cisco hardware when you aren't really qualified to do much more than patch their cables and set up a wireless network for them. Eventually (inevitably) they will ask for something retarded. In my case, he was worried that an ex was spying on him. He wanted the full counter-surveillance sweep, even after I priced him out something ridiculous (I was sub 6 figures, but just.) I contracted it out to the professionals, but that was just the start. Once you start to see some of the tinfoil hat levels of distrust most of the 1% have, you will quickly tire of billing them, and you will feel better when you are fired or when you get to hand them off to someone else. I am much happier 7 years later without the paranoid, entitled, out of touch with reality oligarch having my cell number on speed dial.

The president's specific travel itinerary has been considered a matter of secrecy for years. When the specific route of travel is generally known, bad things can happen (just ask Mr. Kennedy, oh, wait...) This is not odd at all. The tension in the middle east has been high for the last two thousand years, and does not dictate whether we know when our country's leader is flying or not. I actually find it reasonably comforting that this managed to stay "secret" for as long as it did.

Most of the Catholic-church-secret-agent ones are pretty fun to watch...

Sure. But was it actually Hotmail that was hacked, or the way more likely cause of a non-unique password or existing compromise on his pc? Hell, I know script kiddies who would SALIVATE at the chance to make Hotmail look bad for teh lulz...

We (private/public utility company) recently decided to implement a company wide application of the SCRUMM stuff our Dev department has been working with for the last 2 years. Mind you, this came down the pipe just before we decided that we were going to LEAN out our organization. So the top level guys are left trying to show off in director meetings as having met 2 sets of goals, the middle level guys are scheduling a crap-ton of meetings and have passed much of the PMO work down to the "foot troops" (most of us being Tier 4 or higher professionals) and we have to try to shoehorn our workflows (infrastructure, operations, even maintenance) into the SCRUMM mold. Seriously, I saw half a dozen engineers (the pipe laying kind, not the computer kind) in their standup last week, conforming to the expectations passed down from on top. Daily standups are awful for anyone outside of the traditional development group organization - they allow poor middle managers to micromanage and to offload large chunks of their responsibility. It's sad that in a reasonably sized organization (1200ish) there are people who can now justify their existence with a quarter's worth of daily meeting minutes and nothing else to show for it.

By 96, the 454 Towing Suburban upgraded. To leather and 11.5 MPG @ 5280 feet above sea level. And it just cracked 200k with no major engine or transmission service - and by that, I mean anything other than oil changes. Too bad the 2nd power steering rack is on it's way out. Big block gas engines are MUCH nicer tow vehicles in cities and suburbia. That, and they rarely belch black smoke from the 5 inch sewer exhaust the idiot driving them added (though, they will roll on 25" wheels more than I would like...)

I spend a few hours a day with my phone connected to the internet, RDP to damn near everything on it, and LOVE Verizon's service (and their customer support has gotten orders of magnitude better in recent years.) If you can't hack your Verizon phone, you don't deserve the features for free. Everybody RAVES about the "customizability" of other phones without realizing that Verizon basically requires you to do so.