The actual answer is (as always) to have backups of anything you feel is important. If the data is important enough, you make multiple backups to different kinds of media and store them in different places.

And, with any backup solution, one must plan for contingencies. Now that MU is offline, and the other personal file uploading sites are in danger of the same scrutiny/takedown, maybe it's time to roll your own private cloud with friends and family as storage nodes. They host your files, you host theirs. Model it after a weird hybrid bittorrent/RAID setup. That whole Storage Spaces thing from Microsoft would be a good model if it can be scaled to the network layer. The loss of any node would not bring down the entire storage pool and would allow itself enough time to re-balance the load among the remaining nodes.

Obviously, there are some logistics concerns with this method. However, a private cloud like this would certainly survive the antics of a jilted media conglomerate (or a cabal of them). And, as it would be a backup solution to data you are already keeping elsewhere (right?), it wouldn't be the only copy of the data in the event the cloud goes down.

Look - the brain teaser questions really only do a few things in an interview and they're just one tool in an arsenal to determine if, as an interviewer, you have a good candidate on your hands.

First, it throws a question at an interviewee that s/he cannot possibly prepare and rehearse an answer for. As a result, you get to see how they think through (or not) something spontaneous. Also, sensing how the interviewee approaches the questions and, ultimately, how they answer can give a great amount of insight into how they might handle stressful situations.

Second, it opens the door of conversation to (possibly) something beyond the traditional job description, salary requirements, and hours discussion. It helps the interviewer form a more complete picture of a candidate. This can work well if you, as an interviewer, need a candidate to work well with an established team or if you want a specific personality type working for/with you.

However, as an interviewer, you need to ask the right kinds of brain teaser question to get the results you're looking for. Unless you've got a specific reason for asking them, and you'll usually want the true motive to be obscured from the interviewee, they really only hinder the interview process. The interview process is a bit of a dance and asking random brain teaser questions for the sake of themselves is akin to throwing some slam-dancing moves when the music calls for a slow walz.

In other words, have a reason for asking them. And if you're relying on brain teasers alone to make a hiring decision, you're doing it wrong.

I'm likely commenting too deeply for the person that asked the original question, but my advice seems to fit best here. What the company needs is an IT manager, whether hired directly or outsourced.

Firstly, assess the corporate attitude towards hiring (competent) staff directly and buying or leasing hardware directly vs. purchasing outsourced services. Once you know where that conversation leads, you'll have a better idea of how to address the larger problems that only a bunch of time (and usually money) can solve.

If the former, start the interviewing process ASAP. What you're looking for is self-starters that really do know their stuff. Take a handful of real-world scenarios, change some of the minor details a bit, and ask candidates what they'd do in that situation (or if they've encountered something like it before). Don't take them at their word, ask them to back it up with details of their own. Also, since you're going to wind up spending money on staff, you're probably going to be spending money on tools like new systems, software, and basic architecture hardware. Use an appropriate procurement process (and make sure it's followed) to meet your specific needs.

If the latter, like I and many others here suspect it is, be sure to negotiate favorable contract terms with this in mind - everything is about money. You might be able to get a better rate on some services if you limit support to 8x5 instead of going 24x7, for instance. Is remote support acceptable or do you want someone on-site when you have to make that call? What is the response time to various levels of service calls? Do you want to host hardware on-site or have that done elsewhere? Things like that should be priced out and assessed against the needs of the business.

Lastly, an important bit regardless of how the company wants to do it, the goal is to streamline operations which includes any support that's required when systems are not operating properly. Identify the weak subsystems and put them on a roadmap to be replaced with something more robust. It's a boring exercise in IT management that involves budgets and change control procedures but it does pay off in the long-run. If you need to get approval for spending, it helps to show what the current cost is, what the cost could be if things go wrong, and what costs could be if replaced with the more robust system. As long as you speak to your management in terms of money, they should listen.

An interesting factoid (I'm told it's true, anyway): Fidel Castro once attended tryouts as a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins at their spring training camp in FL. He didn't make the cut, obviously. The world would be a very different place today had he done so.

It's been a VERY long time since I was told that and my memory isn't what it used to (or should) be so take it with the appropriate amount of NaCl.

Regardless of whether or not one views support contracts as a crutch to prop up lazy admins, the fact is that many businesses will make that decision as a simple budget matter. There are numerous cases where buying a support contract makes sense, particularly where the company's business is primarily not involved in providing IT-related products or services and, as a result, have no internal IT staff. To those companies, the support contract is often a fixed-cost addition to any technology purchase and is easy to fit into the budget.

To the OP - if your CIO says he doesn't believe in support contracts and has put the kibosh on them, I'd let that issue rest while documenting the heck out of any support issues that come up (hours spent, parts purchased, etc. - anything that costs the company money). When it comes time to run this exercise again, bring out your supporting documentation on the money the company spent by supporting it themselves vs. buying a support contract. If it's cheaper to get the support contact, say so and present your evidence. If not, then it does make sense to support it in-house and you should say that, too, also presenting the evidence you've collected. Basically, since the CIO is looking at support contracts as a value proposition (he seems to think they're worthless), it is your job to communicate to him in those terms. He may play solitaire on his laptop all day (or maybe that's just my former CIOs, I dunno), but he didn't get to be a CIO by blowing budgets left and right. Speak to him in terms of money and have actual data to back up your points.

If he still refuses service contracts after being presented with solid data, I recommend looking for a new job. A C-level exec that makes decisions DESPITE hard evidence typically has ulterior motives and is usually only looking out for himself (or someone else). You won't win any arguments and it's only a matter of time before you're at the pointy end of his bad decision-making.

Good luck!

Las Vegas casinos have better security than what we (collectively) put on election systems. There's a good reason for that as Las Vegas casinos need to be vigilant about their income else they risk violating a bunch of laws under which they operate. After all, they need to pay taxes on that money. The more money they bring in, the better for them and the better for their community. There are cameras that watch the entire flow of money coming in and going back out to make sure that nobody is trying to beat their system.

There is certainly as much motivation to tinker with election results as it would be to get a little more money out of a casino. Why we aren't putting better security measures in place for elections than what already exists completely baffles me. How can I trust that my vote actually counts as I cast it? How can I trust our government at all if they don't value our votes as much as a casino values their money? And the only thing I trust about casinos is that they're legally and openly screwing their customers while filming it to ensure they're doing it properly and it doesn't violate any rules. That should tell you how much I trust our government, regardless of which way the political winds blow - but that's a story for another time.

At this point, I am so dismayed that we (collectively) can't get this crap figured out. It's not difficult. It's not terribly more expensive than what we already have (which amounts to nearly nothing). Either let's get it done or tear it out and start over.

I'll be back over here shaking my fist at the kids on my lawn, now...

You hit the nail on the head. Usage such as that IS legal and constitutional. I would go so far as to encourage the municipality to use technology in similar ways throughout the city as they are being more efficient in the discharge of their duties. More 'bang' for the tax buck, so to speak.

Storing all the plates that were scanned along with some location data so someone can be tracked to a specific location is, arguably, a violation of 4th amendment rights, particularly when that data is being shared with other agencies.

The hypocrisy is outlandish, really. As tax-paying citizens, we grant our governments (federal, state, county, city, etc) limited, special rights to act on our behalf and in the best interests of the collective citizenry - rights that the ordinary citizen may not or should not be granted. In exchange, those with those rights should be held to the highest standards and should be punished if that power is misused or abused.

The intentions may be well-placed - the article quotes the MA state police spokesman, "What about the rights of someone who is already a victim to have their assailant brought to justice? There’s a freedom to being able to live your life not worried about being the victim of crime that’s also a freedom worth protecting." The plan they propose might mean more accurate and timely arrests. I'm not doubting that fact one bit. But tracking the entire populace is akin to assuming everyone is a criminal or a suspect before a crime is even committed. Not only is this constitutionally problematic, but the open sharing of the collected data with other agencies is a violation of privacy rights, as well. The potential for abuse is enormous, even with strong internal privacy policies in place.

Ultimately, at best, the police appear to be trampling citizen privacy in an effort to be more efficient in discharging their duties. At worst, this is a whole state police department that is too lazy to want to do actual police work. The truth, as usual, is most likely somewhere in the middle.

I am certainly not a lawyer, nor have I ever played one on TV. I have, however, casually studied my own rights on a regular basis. I am also a *#&@ing human being and know right from wrong. As a result, you should probably take all of what I wrote above with a huge amount of table salt.

The part that bothers me about this is the unreasonable double-standard. Law enforcement typically keeps records of their phone calls and radio traffic for between about 1 to 2 years, which is usually driven by statues of limitations. After that, the records are gone. The reason is simple - they often need to keep that data for liability issues such as when someone sues the police for misconduct. They purge that data after that retention period for exactly the same reasons the ISPs do not want to hang onto it - having it means they become responsible for it and becomes more of a problem than the data is worth.

As a public agency, law enforcement agencies have clear retention period policies, as well as policies outlining exactly who can and cannot access that data, in order to serve the public. As private entities, why should the ISPs be held to some arbitrary standard outlined by an outside party? Honestly, if an ISP wants to purge that data after 6 months (or even less) to serve *their* public - their paying customers - let them! The convenience store down the street isn't required to keep a minimum amount of surveillance video in case someone does something shady in the bathroom. They keep that video to protect themselves and their business from people that want to do harm. When police are called, the video is shared voluntarily because it's in their best interests to do so.

The only thing I would be in favor of is requiring ISPs to simply define a data retention policy and make it public to everyone, including the law enforcement community. The ISPs can then live and die by the policy they set for themselves and law enforcement will know exactly how long they have before that information is purged. I would also suggest that once an ISP is made aware that a warrant for certain information is coming, the ISP should retain the relevant data regardless of the policy. They don't necessarily have to share it until they receive the warrant, but the request alone should trigger a temporary hold on the data for a set period of, say, 60 days. This is no different than how law enforcement handles their data retention when a request is made of them, so ISPs should be treated the same way.

I'm not sure what I would want the penalties to be if any of the data retention policies were violated (purged early or accessed inappropriately), but it should fit the severity and scope of the violation and be defined in actual law.

Put your tin-foil hat on for this 'cause it's CRAZY...

Perhaps Comcast (et al) are really telling the truth. They, themselves, are not blocking access to TPB. But, what if (and this is a huge 'what if') they got someone to block it further upstream? They would be telling the truth in the strictest sense and still getting what they want. I'm sure Comcast has enough resources to try something like that.

But then, there's probably a more likely explanation like a certain web server pool having problems at the source end (which appears to be the case).

You bring up a good point, but I'm going to address this to the OP.

As previously noted by the other commenter, Powershell is useful if your environment is full of Vista computers or newer or if you have more control over the environment so Powershell can be installed (there is an XP installer). It's major draw is the usefulness to systems admins that want to do real-time execution.

Otherwise, you're looking at VBScript or batch scripts. Neither are nowhere near as elegant or smooth as some other languages, but tapping WMI and other Windows objects is actually really simple using VBScript. There are loads of examples here. Also, a Google search in the form of "vbscript %thing%" will usually get you pointed in the right direction.

Do yourself a huge favor, though - get a decent editor. While Windows has a simple notepad app, there is no context highlighting, in-line completion, or other helpful tools for looking at script code. Personally, I prefer PrimalScript because it's useful for other things like SQL, C, Perl, etc (including PowerShell). It also has a built-in debugging engine. However, that app can be expensive. One good free alternative is Notepad++ with the appropriate plug-ins for the files you want to create/edit. There are plenty of others out there, so grab whatever you feel works best for you.

If you're planning on using a database and are familiar with MySQL, you should feel nearly at home with Microsoft's version of SQL. There are some minor syntax differences (for example, the update query is slightly different, if my memory is correct) but it shouldn't take long to get used to them.

Lastly, ideally, you're going to want to an account that is a local administrator on all of the systems you will be touching. Yes, you can do some serious damage with such an account and is typically not the way of things in the *nix world, but many aspects of a Windows system are inaccessible unless you have an Administrator level account - especially remote access to certain things like the registry and WMI. If getting a local administrator account on all the systems you're responsible for isn't an option, have someone that does have one (or a domain admin account) on speed-dial in case your scripts fail due to permissions errors.

Good luck!