While you keep voting the same type of people into office then I would yes you are going to keep having this song and dance every year.

Well if you want the cell companies to be able to handle 100,000 people starting a phone conversation at once from any random place because of some random event then you better be prepared to pay a lot more for your service.

and only when it serves the interests of the powerful corporations.

There, fixed that for you.

What you do is give them your Facebook password and when your manager is away at a meeting and leaves the computer unlocked you sign into your account and post some hate speech or something else obscene. When the police or Facebook comes calling get them to find out what computer it came from. After all it was new behaviour and you just had to give your password away.

Why do people insist on using only one technology for all situations? There are no silver bullets that will magically solve all of our energy problems. Solar power may work great in Spain or Northern Africa but it isn't going to be very effective in Iceland.

Iceland is doing wonders with geothermal energy but not everywhere in the world is suited for it. Places near the equator that receive mostly sunny weather are great for solar with energy storage to provide power during the night. Put up wind towers where it's windy, use hydroelectric power, and other renewable sources. And if you can't meet the needs in an economic manner then find a way to reduce the demand and supplement with non-renewable sources of electricity as a last resort.

Choose the appropriate tool for the job.

So, you did co-ordinate with other groups, run a trial to see what would happen when DFS gets shut down, don't verify that your backups actually work (instead you just check to see if any errors happen in the logs), and you aren't checking your hardware for errors (or at least your hardware group isn't if it's a different group). I really don't think you can say that can say that you have made sure that there are many good processes in place. I mean you didn't even realize your backups were failing because they were too large!
At a minimum you want someone to try to restore a couple of random files from a weekly backup. Your monthly backup should be tested more thoroughly as in a full restore on a test machine.
A backup that you can't restore from is NOT a backup!
If this happened in my company not only would ass be kicked but jobs would be lost.

1 - Backup often
2 - Verify that you can restore from your backup often
3 - See Rules 1 & 2, often


Most people and businesses don't do Rule 2. Just because the the log didn't report any errors for the backup doesn't mean that you can restore from the backups.

I wonder how much of the energy being used in data centres is being wasted. And not just as in heat. I worked in one centre and we had one rack of blade servers that wasn't being used for anything but was constantly being left on. I would turn them off and next time I looked they would be turned on again. And they put out a lot of heat into the room. We had another two full racks of blades from another provider that were in constant use and they put out less heat than the one rack sitting idle.

Hopefully that has been changed there but I'm sure that it isn't the only place in which there are unused servers sitting turned on and left to idle 24/7.

when it has to be destroyed is to drop it into a volcano. Works for rings.

There is also the option that the Twitter could be responsible for handing over the records of tweets that originated from an IP address in France since the tweet would be committing a crime there. So if someone in the US made an anti-Semitic comment and the French courts wanted the user details then Twitter can tell them to get lost. But if the tweet was made in France then they should comply because the local law was broken.
Now the article mentions that the French judge said that the French Internet users should be subject to tighter laws. So I don't know if this means French people sending tweets or French people seeing the tweets. Also Twitter is using the US First Amendment of free speech to refuse to comply with the French judicial system but removed the tweets anyways. If they were so bad that the tweets had to be taken down then why refuse to co-operate?

Any news on the use of cluster bombs by Syria other than that from Human Rights Watch? They came out with a report four or five days ago stating that Syria has used them 156 times in 119 locations but that seems to be the only news about it. How reputable is Human Rights Watch?

It's not the distance you are from the CO it's the length of the wire from your place to the CO. There's nothing to say that it takes a straight line.

what the CO2 output of the US would have been if they had not of exported their manufacturing over to China.

Yes, removing the whole tops of mountains is certainly a great way of getting coal out of the ground. /s

The other year the city politicians were all happy to announce that they turned off all of the unnecessary lights for earth hour. I felt like calling them up and asking them why the heck were the lights on in the first place if it wasn't necessary for them to be on! I'm in Ontario so on Saturday night it's probably base load of nuclear or hydroelectric so there's no CO2 anyways. But from a taxpayer perspective I want those lights off every night no matter what the source of the electricity is.