Old electronics are generally worthless, and nonprofits are ill-equipped to dispose of them properly. Take them to a legit electronics recycler to keep them out of the landfill (best case) or out of some illegal dump in the 3rd world where some poor wretch is smelting plastic to harvest the copper.

The only time IT reporting to the CFO makes sense is where the company's IT needs are very tightly definable. An HVAC company doesn't need extensive IT, and the CFO is generally a cheapskate who will keep the costs down.

Most orgs need IT to be operations-facing. IMO, it should report to an operations executive or a dedicated "CIO" type if the company is large or relies heavily on technology.

Many high-end printers have pretty intense manpower requirements. One we purchased a few years ago contractually required you to have certified operators, as well as a resident vendor engineer at least 2-3 days/week.

I disagree.

I think the open and obvious manipulation of scientific data to market and sell products is what has empowered the modern evangelical idiocy in the United States. If you want to see the credibility of science rendered impotent, read some patent drug marketing materials. Another great example is baby rearing advice. Compare the scientifically derived advice given by doctors for infant care today. Then talk to someone with a 10 year old. Then talk to your mom.

You're confusing liability for the incident with the testimony given in congressional hearings supposedly intended to find out what happened.

Reality has a nasty habit of ruining plans. Amazon.com suffered an outage a few weeks ago due to a car accident that interrupted street power. An implementation error for the system that switched over to the alternate power source basically shut the data center down.

Does that mean that Amazon data center IT doesn't understand "concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery"? No, clearly it doesn't. It means that someone screwed up some aspect of the installation of the power system.

I've been burnt by things like this in the past. My employer spent millions on a super-redundant, high-performance, high-availability storage solution -- which failed when a vendor technician replaced a bad disk. (a problem that should never happen) We tested that procedure dozens of times, tested back-out strategies, and still ended up stymied by a firmware error made by some faceless engineer somewhere.

I don't know the details of what happened enough to condemn BP for the failure. The company previously had a good safety record, and I presume that the crew on the rig wouldn't make a decision that ran a risk of killing some/all of them. (Which it did)

Mozilla is dumb. I can have Hawaiian flower patterns, but I cannot control when patches are released in my enterprise.

The Apple 2 wasn't an open source device. Yes, you could hack together peripherals and write stuff in basic.

But other than that, there isn't some big philosophical shift in Apple's model in 1983 and today. In 2010 you need to use the app store to distribute stuff. In 1983 you have to buy dev tools and get retail shelf space. In 2010 you have DRM. In 1983 the computers weren't good enough to use DRM, so you had to use code wheels, lookup the word on page 161, line 6, word 12 in the manual and hard to photocopy code sheets. (Remember Sim City 1?)

I disagree.

Facebook is more than willing to violate your privacy and share your information and social networks with advertisers, yet they stonewall a criminal investigation. They certainly deserve whatever negative publicity they receive relating to this matter.

You should be very happy with the status quo. The bottom tier of people pay a negative tax, the middle class pays something in the middle, and the wealthy pay alot of taxes. Most of the "tax loopholes" that people bitch about are things like government debt, which is tax-free, and various investment vehicles.

The people who talk about "flat" taxes and the "fair" tax generally get politely ignored, because the biggest beneficiaries of tax deductions are the middle class, who get exemptions for children, deduct mortgage interest and property taxes.

The republicans and democrats are very similar, differing only in very subtle ways.

Your statement isn't looking deeper at the issue. People in positions of power unfortunately need to lie to others sometimes, it's just a requirement of the job. If you are in charge of a serious group of people on a daily basis, you have to deal with a variety of things that demand secrecy/discretion, which in turn demands that you occasionally lie about things to others. In my opinion, reducing the impact of lying is a defensive tool that our brains are wired with.

What happens when an employee is accused of a crime or career-ending misconduct? Serious accusations must be investigated, but are often completely untrue... so you are going to be forced to lie to others point-blank if they hear rumors and ask you about it. Otherwise the rumor machine kicks in.

What happens when the company is in trouble and you need to seriously evaluate all sorts of different options, including laying off most of the staff? Again, you have to be careful to keep those sorts of discussions close to the vest, and that may require lying.

Studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrate that in certain contexts, otherwise normal people will become monsters capable of incredible evil. This is true, but it doesn't mean that we all need to curl up in the fetal position and cry. You have to have controls -- checks and balances to ensure that the powerful don't turn tyrannical. Those checks include training, delegated authority, evaluation with consequences and debriefings. Disasters like Enron, the My Lai massacre, and countless others are egregious examples of what happens when individuals invested with unchecked power are unleashed.

No, but many vendors will roll additional equipment into existing service contracts if you buy their FRUs. The cost of accounting for third-party parts usually exceeds any savings when you buy in bulk.

Because the states control the disbursement of education funding, and the teacher's unions control the state legislatures. If you threw more money at schools, you'd see more ridiculous and expensive initiatives like handing out computers and iPods to every student and very little substance. The unions fought long and hard for very generous employment terms and the current status quo, and will not give them up easily.

That level of formality usually applies to large-scale purchases that involve technical and financial evaluation. (ie. If you put out an RFP for an ERP system.) Usually there is a dollar threshold under which you can purchase things from state commodity contracts or GSA contracts, etc.

If you were buying a commodity product like memory, specifying "Brand X" would generally not be acceptable. The justification would come in if you have a "Brand X" server, and for warranty reasons, buying "Brand X" memory was a requirement. Software isn't classified as a commodity like memory. You may have multiple resellers for Windows licenses, but there isn't a category "Software - Operating System" that puts Red Hat, Solaris and Windows up as equivalent products.

IMO, that's a good thing. Would you take the same position if you needed to buy Red Hat support agreements to expand your existing MySQL database cluster, and some procurement rule forced a competitive bid between Red Hat, Solaris & Windows?