They forgot all of the companies they've bought and closed down, like Gizmo5

Oh wait, never mind.

So Pirate Bay goes around and getting new IPs and I assume releasing the old ones. Then what? Imagine getting a new netblock for your own stuff and finding out it used to be a PB IP. How do you go about getting that unblocked all around the world.

One of the MAIN reasons these ISP's are introducing tiered pricing is simply to avoid the costs of upgrading their infrastructure. Instead of modernizing their networks and equipment to handle today's higher demand for more and more bandwidth, they simply implement overage fees and/or tiered pricing to keep people's usage within the confines of what their infrastructure can handle.

Sorry, it's really the opposite. They have little economic incentive to expand capacity now. If they charge for overages, they'll have more incentive to entice you to use more bandwidth so they can increase revenue, and a great way to do that is making a faster pipe and encourage you to use services like Netflix to use it up.

Plus the pre-departure drinks that flight attendants serve in first class.

Haven't road up front with USAirways for a while I see... Out of seven flights in First Class to five different cities last year, not once did I get a pre-departure drink.

July 11, 2008 a barrel of oil topped out at $145.08, July 15th Bush lifts ban on offshore drilling and by December of 2008, oil was down to $37.71 a barrel... and that was nothing more than a threat.

Oh come on. Are you telling me that nothing else significant happened in the last half of 2008 that might have affected the supply and/or demand for oil?

Speaking of stamps (or lack thereof), that feature has me wondering. Immigration agents in other countries tend to thumb through passports looking at where you've been. My passport is going to end up having loads of visa stamps for other countries, but no re-entry stamps back into the U.S. I wonder if that will be looked at suspiciously by foreign countries.

I got Global Entry. My interview was touch-and-go. I got grilled pretty heavily and finally the agent said "Why are you nervous? Are you nervous?" and I was like "I wasn't nervous until now" and then he asked "are you on any medication?" I thought for sure I was going to get denied, but I passed.

We make fun of TSA a lot but they do do a background check on you, the interview is looking for certain tells, and even with the pre-check you never know when you'll go through the expedited line or express. I'm betting the agent that scans the BP can also look for tells and push you through the normal line even if the BP says you can go through the quick one.

Also, Global Entry really delivers on re-entry into the country, especially if you're sitting up front. I'm in my car 10 minutes after the door opens (I know where to park right outside the arrivals hall, which helps too)

Must have been some terrible training, since printing and copy/paste shortcuts remained unchanged from 2003 to 2007.

People get set in their ways so if they used to use the File and Edit menus to do those things and they disappear from view, then they get confused.

I'm not going to call them stupid because there's a lot of things they do in their own jobs that are simple to them but I wouldn't understand myself at all.

I can see the bitching from users already. I tried Win 8 myself and was immediately stuck on how to quit an open app or even how to run another one and switch between them. It's just not obvious, and that's going to be a problem.

When Office 2007 was rolled out at my org, even with loads of advanced notice and training, the phone was ringing for weeks "How do I print?" "How do I copy/paste?" etc, etc....

I have a better plan. Keep Windows 7 deployed for as long as XP was before upgrading users.

I should, however, be thankfully to Microsoft for all of the job security they provide.

I wrote the below review of Compuserve in June, 1982. It was emailed on a Burrough's 6900 mainframe to the sys admin I knew there. Read it and understand why this stuff didn't take off at the time. (the first paragraph is about an RCA dumb terminal I bought at the time).

btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN :-(

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site

This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).

The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.

I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!

I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).

The story of my quest:

After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.

Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.

This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".

All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!

It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month.

It was $5 PER HOUR off peak. Peak business hours were like $30/hour. And it was slow. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to start the CB radio chat program.

Got me, but if I had $50k in digital currency I think I'd spread my risk around and stash bits (no pun intended) across many servers at many different hosting sites and companies. The things are like $20/month, for pete's sake.

Thanks for the useful response. I'll look into them.

These things are popping up everywhere where I work and when I asked to get several for my staff, I was told no. Makes it a bit difficult to support, doesn't it? :(

1) Everyone has iPhones and iPads
2) They want to print - they demand to print
3) Find some AirPrint windows driver some guy wrote in his garage and load unknown code into your Windows server
4) Works well until iOS 5 comes out
5) Users update to iOS 5 on their own and they can't print and scream at IT.

That's just one scenario....

1) User gets great idea of hooking up an Apple TV to a presentation display so they can send their iPAD crap output to it
2) Scream bloody murder when someone "unauthorized" sends their screen to the display instead.

Or.....
1) Buy a bunch of iPADs, spend about 15 minutes unboxing them and turning them on.
2) Quickly realize what a hassle it is to manually install apps and settings on all of them and they have better things to do
3) Run to IT to install all the apps instead.

Or....

1) Buy a bunch of iPads for a classroom, set up an Apple ID, associate a credit card with it, buy needed apps for it, save password because it's a hassle to keep re-entering it
2) Scream bloody murder when one of the students decides to go to the app store and buy a few games to play using the instructor's account during class instead of doing classwork.

The way it should have worked was...

1) Identify a need (want tablets in a classroom setting that can do x,y,z)
2) Ask IT to identify a product that meets those needs securely and effectively
3) Wait for IT to figure out how to manage and deploy said devices (and if that takes too long, work with our management to identify appropriate priorities for us -- i.e., what doesn't get done in meantime

Bottom line, I understand IT is a service organization ... but I also understand we are overhead to the bottom line and understandably management wants to minimize the expense spent on IT as well as expect us to keep data secure. So we have to do horrible corporate things like try to control costs, and justify expenses towards the goal of improving productivity. I love my iPad. I think it's cool. But it's a personal, entertainment device. Repurposing it for business or educational use takes effort and time to figure out.