You know the NHS in the UK uses exchange, right? That's a pretty sizable organisation. The message loss there is zero, and it's trusted to send some pretty important (i.e. potentially life and death) information.
Oh, and turnaround is pretty much seconds too.. Not a Microsoft fan here, but it really does sound like your exchange admins didn't have a clue. If you had admins, and it wasn't a company that let some 'external' entity set up a bodge job on the cheap, and just let it run unattended because "they didn't see the point in having anyone look after a machine that just sends email"..

Education is the root of all change. If you don't have people who really 'get' how to do things, and are competitive, you'll end up with everything else failing (as the people who are in the positions of power aren't educated sufficiently to really 'get' how things link together, thus they'll mess up all the rest).
An interesting thing happening in the UK now is a greater and greater acceptance of an International Baccalaureate; that means an end to the "We're getting better marks" brigade that constantly said that exam results were improving, but not taking into account that exams were getting easier. By being compared directly to an international paper, it forces a far more competitive environment (and wider recognition of the achievements).

For those that have even a fragment of history, you'll remember that the middle east used to be a center of learning and science.
In the days of the crusades, their scientific knowledge far outstripped that of Europe (there's a reason the numerals we use today are called "arabic numerals".
So, what happened to change that? Did Europe suddenly invest massively in science to go toe to toe? Alas not. Religious zealots got in places of power, and started to dictate that the progress of science was "against the will of god" (as the priesthood didn't understand it, so it scared them, and anything that scares a religious zealot is "against the will of god"). The role of religion in Europe started to lessen, allowing scientific method to progress apace and advancement to occur.

There's a reason ethics committees exist for scientific projects; the lay-people on them are a voice for the average person: They force the people doing pure science to think carefully about ramifications of performing experimentation in a particular fashion (is the experiment ethical? Can the way it's performed in a different way, not affecting the core of the theory, that is ethical?). The professionals are there to ensure the science is actually valid and to pick out the ones sloppily created that are mathematically wrong, or are unable by structure to draw the conclusions they're looking for from the experiments performed.

I'm vaguely hopeful that this incursion of zealotry into the workings of scientific progress can be rooted out and cast aside, but from the path that the US has been following towards a combination between a corporate feudalism headed by a close to a theocracy (what are the chances of an atheist being elected president these days, since the pledge of allegiance was altered in 1954 to include the "under god" segment; no, for you younger ones, that wasn't part of the original, and was tagged on for political ends), it's not a certainty. That's somewhat worrying really.

$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem.
You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day.
There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.

Actually, on the 'always on', the legitimate players hate it too.. And those of us that have been gaming since the early 80s (hell, the late '70s), we've seen companies come and go, so there's no expectation that they'll still be hosting a game you may just want to play in another 30 or so years (there are still ones that I'll pull out and play after nearly 20 years, just for the nostalgia trip and the fun of rediscovering forgotten stories).

There's network outages, routing problems, straight denial of service attacks (or compromises of the login servers creating mayhem), playing on a train, a plane, or even in a campsite (I actually enjoy camping; gets me to some very strange places, and a laptop is great for the rainy days; usually used for on site photo manipulation of the shots I take out and about).
Online only, for most games, is an artifical single point of failure. It'll mess up a product you paid for with no warning, and possibly irrevocably, all out of your control, with you having absolutely no recourse. That, to me, is an incredibly bad deal. If it's a bad game, then people will be less likely to buy from them again (exacerbated by the online only issues, meaning an even smaller available market, possibly making the difference between surviving as a company and going under). You don't care about the longevity, but you're left with a bad taste.
If it's a great one, then it's not going to be around for the nostalgia trip. When gaming lines are shut down by an active company, then players will be more wary still.
For all the 'big business' groups, thinking that this solves all their piracy woes, they'll be meeting the laws of unintended consequences, where games that don't follow this will have the exposure, thus the following (maybe not immediately, but eventually).. The following generates the sales. The sales bring in the cash, and cash is the lifeblood of a company.
Best analogy of the companies following this route is "Emo". It's very much an "I'll cut myself because I don't like a few people". Not the hard core self harmers who are actually ill, but the ones who'll do it for attention and because they think it'll make them edgy, or gain an advantage, whereas in the long run, it'll likely turn out to be self defeating, pointless and rather embarrassing.

Some of my favorites as a kid: The Mad Scientists' Club, The Great Brain,
Homer Price, Henry Reed, Bruno & Boots.

You're speaking of hard sci-fi, my own preference, but there is softer, less tecnologically speculative sci-fi.

Amazon is being particularly uncool about this. When I submitted a ticket this weekend I got a message back a day later thanking me for my suggestion that they add support for Android, when the point was thay it had already been supported!

Fortunately(?) streaming is working on my desktop with FF17 under Lucid Lynx (the previous LTS).

It was a camera malfunction, according to the fanzine.. The fanfic of the time had Avon surviving.. And I think Villa too..

Still got the fanzines from the original run.. Hopefully this time, they won't get a camera malfunction for the last scene in the whole series!

Right, I said the ight to bear arms was granted to protect other rights as a matter of last resort.
That does not make it natural or intrinsic. By the logic that any potential means of self-defense
must be permitted, regardless of repurcussions and efforts to limit those, one has a right to
possess an M-28 Davy Crockett. That is of course ridiculous, and I acknowledge thay where one
draws the line with regards to what weaponry is reasonable to permit is a sticky one, but I
maintain that does not have a right to any and all forms of them simply by virtue of genus.

Thank you for the reasoned response though.

Natural rights are unabridgable, like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness*.
Your right to a handheld explosive-powered projectile launcher is not natural.
It is a right, but it does not come directly from being a human. However it is
granted to you in the recognition that it may be necessary to exercise it as a
last resto to defend other rights e.g; home invasion or tyrranical regime.
However guns are not the end all be all of anything.

* or liberty, equality, brotherhood; or whichever set of similar principles one cherishes.

Yes, I understand Capitalism fairly well.
Communism, in its truest sense, is the utopia form of society, being very inclusive. The biggest problem with it is human nature, which pretty much ensures that it'll be subverted and exploited. It's what we should be working towards as a species (until something better can be formulated, which it probably will at some point).
Capitalism is confrontational and warlike, and very exclusive. It's an evolution of the strongest (not necessarily the optimum) under certain constraints, many of which are part of the system itself. It's quite destructive in many ways, doesn't often hit the optimum strategies for the species wide constraints, but is very much in tune with current human behaviour (we're still a pretty primitive, warlike species).
In the wider scale, at the moment, I'd choose Capitalism over Communism, simply because it works, right now. However, I'm hopeful that someday we'll be better than that.

The problem being that many of the people invoking it, and not having a real understanding of it, manage to get other people in court and charged with offenses anyway.

Why do you think Citrix did so well, and the whole application virtualisation stack? RDP and VNC are ok for some things, but they simply lack the power, elegance and utility of network transparency.