Backup, admins, storage are going to be required no matter what you're running--even if you're only running postfix and courier. I'll grant the cost of the server license, but that too is fairly cheap (around $700 last I looked). Amortized it across a user base of any reasonable size, and it's at most a couple of bucks a user per year. If it's more than this, your userbase is so small that you should probably be looking at a hosted solution, anyway.

In either case, "horribly expensive" is a gross overstatement at best.

Exchange costs about $60-70 per user for a CAL. Even if you're constantly upgrading to the latest version of Exchange, that's a hair over $20 a year. You and I have different definitions of "horribly expensive." Compared to the cost of a full time employee, $20 is noise.

I find that to be an indefensible position. Just because Google has my data on their servers does NOT mean that the government has the right to access that data (or at least, according to a simple reading of the 4th amendment, SHOULD not mean so). Things are different if Google decides to give my data to the government--the government didn't violate my privacy, Google did, and my remedy here is limited to suing Google for breaching my privacy in this way.

The obvious next step down the slippery slope here is Google agreeing to supply all of my data to the government (in return for some consideration) but I would argue that, at this point, they are functioning as agents of the government, and the 4th amendment again applies.

I don't believe case law backs my interpretation--but then again, case law says that growing wheat and eating it is "interstate commerce" so YMMV...

I will be charitable, and assume you are misinformed. Otherwise, you're either talking out of your ass, or just plain knowingly lying.

The NRA was incorporated after the end of the Civil War by former Union general officers to improve the general level of marksmanship among the population--because, as Ambrose Burnside put it, "Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn." It's mission is TRAINING the same and effective use of firearms. Hunting had exactly nothing to do with the purpose of the organization--though, of course, the NRA DOES support hunting, since it is one of the shooting sports.

As for your comment about the 1986 ban on machine guns, the NRA most certainly did NOT help draft that legislation. The ban was attached to legislation that the NRA DID help draft, the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which undid some of the worst parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968. After the amendment was adopted, the thinking was that the ban on machine guns, while not desirable, was worth getting the rest of the bill enacted into law.

Sounds like short term thinking to me--EMC makes some short term cash, but now their brand is associated with low end NAS devices instead (or at least in addition to) top tier back end storage? This sounds like when Cisco bought Linksys, and rebranded some of the products, with rather predictable results. What idiot wants a low end product associated with a premium brand name?

I agree with you 100%, and am also disheartened by the lack of attention paid to the 9th and 10th amendments. I was merely being pedantic.

"Congress shall make no law," "shall not be infringed," "excessive bail shall not be required," etc, sure sound like restrictions to me.

People called Romanes they go the house?

Speaking as someone who went to Brooklyn Tech, I have a high respect for Bronx Science and find your description of it as "as good as, maybe better than any suburban school," to border on insulting. The specialized schools in NYC are some of the best in the country, hands down. That said, this in no way invalidates the point the GP was making--that suburban schools are, typically, of higher quality than large city schools. Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant are places where the entire school is in the "gifted program" and do not reflect the quality of city schools overall.

Apologies on one point, I misread part of your post, so my coming off as correcting you just looks dickish. That said, while I agree in principle that retroactive cuts are bullshit, I disagree that the cause of the problem was financial mismanagement. The real root cause is that the compensation packages were not viable from day one.

While on the high end for public sector employees, "Public Safety" pensions in California most certainly do not fall into your rant above. They are, frankly, obscene and are indeed a large part of why many municipalities have financial problems. A police officer or firefighter can retire at 50 with 90% of their base pay (which is usually considerable--a CHP officer earns between $68-84k per year not including overtime pay (which is $48-61 per hour). Their pension is calculated based on the 3 highest earning years.

Please note that the above numbers are BASE pay, and they can (and do) earn significantly more. See here for details. I would assume that CHP officers are probably paid more than a local sheriff's deputy, but my understanding is that many municipalities in CA are competitive with this structure.

To sum up: While the devil is in the details, it quite easy to make the statement the OP did and NOT be full of shit.

Because Henry Ford was a well known organizer of unions, and all...

Bank of America vs EA:

1. Cratered the economy? ehhhh...
2. Botched launch of a time waster game? GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS!

Or we could, you know, borrow $100,000,000 less every year. I know that's outside the box thinking and all, but where the hell has this dichotomy come from where, when we have a spending problem, we always hear, "Well, it's better than spending $VALUE on $INITIATIVE?" Military and social spending BOTH have to come down, and revenue (somehow) has to come UP if we're to get out of the mess we're in. I'm all for basic research (as someone else up thread noted, nothing in history has paid dividends like it) but the barrel has a bottom, we have a crisis of unprecedented historical proportions, and no one in government seems to give a fuck about fixing it.

...and once an expert builds out the program for the tool, any idiot can load it and run it.