"These attacks would not have happened unless something was going on that they found objectionable enough to kill over. "

many use the ancient writings of a madman in a holy book to use as their justification to kill.

If you took a photo of a person in a perfect camoflauge suit, they will stand out like a beacon with this camera mod.

It will work great for detecting non living organic things in camo easily.

I am a manager. I have a staff of about a dozen people that report to me. If one of my employees needs to involve IT for some aspect of their work then they should do that without wasting my time needlessly. If their request could or would impact something beyond their ability to do their own work then sure, come to me first. I expect them to know when something might have external ramifications. I'm fine if they consult me when they are unsure about something but I really do not want them wasting my time (or anyone elses) on issues where I would just have to refer them to IT anyway. I hired smart competent people and I expect them to be able to interact with other parts of our business without asking for permission first. If they need my involvement to make something complicated (and necessary) happen I'm happy to oblige. If I didn't trust them to make reasonable requests and handle issues with IT themselves then I hired the wrong person.

Both are cost centers very much like IT. In fact there is only one job (sales) that is not a cost center in any company. However that does not mean they contribute nothing to helping the company make money.

The job of marketing is the creation and maintenance of the perceptions of the relationship between potential and current customers and the company as well as its products. Marketing differs from sales because marketing is only indirectly concerned with the actual generation of sales. Without a positive perception of the company and its products, customers are unlikely to purchase anything unless they have no alternative. Done properly the return on investment for marketing can be and is measured. The effect of good marketing can be seen on the bottom line. You put $X into marketing and sales change by $Y is a key task for any marketing department. Sometimes the relationship between $X and $Y is easy to determine and sometimes it is more difficult.

As for accounting I can speak to that directly since I am an accountant. Accounting is a lot more than just paying the bills and depositing payments received. Accountants are intimately involved in quoting new business, cost reduction activities, production and budget planning, purchasing and more. Profitability comes from revenue minus costs. If you don't understand your costs, you are highly unlikely to be profitable. Accountants job is the help the company understand their costs and thus understand whether and how they are making money. Without accounting the company is quite literally operating blind.

Spoken well and truly like someone who knows nothing about accounting. Accounting (like IT) can be a very significant differentiator for companies that do it well and I can tell you from first hand experience that many do their accounting quite badly and it hurts them in ways that are easily measured. Efficient accounting operations can help the company win business they would not otherwise and to keep costs low. That is one of the biggest possible differentiators there is.

"I was just following orders" is a poor argument. If the sysadmin or the accountant is aware that there is a problem that requires management authorization then they have a duty to bring it to the attention of management. The users have a similar obligation but if the problem involves IT or accounting, those departments are the first place to bring the issue up. You go to management once you get some sort of consensus recommendation on a course of action. Furthermore those departments would be rightfully pissed off if someone tried to do an end run around them.

Furthermore, a great many policies are not decided by management but by the IT staff. They may have management's backing but management typically does not have the time to make every decision themselves. If IT tells them that a policy change is a good idea, odds are good management will listen. If a user makes the same request about IT, the first question any good manager should have is whether IT is on board with the proposal.

Oh I've thought about it. My background is as an engineer but I'm also an accountant. I *totally* understand why they did what they did and could probably give you a pretty good model of what the costs look like and the decision tree to make the decisions they did. My point is just that I'm a little surprised (emphasis on little) that they weren't a little more forward thinking.

When I see ancient equipment like this in use long after it is considered obsolete, what it typically tells me is that they didn't do a good enough job defining their interfaces. They spent their effort getting a working system and didn't make the layers of the system sufficiently abstract. Easier said than done I know but really they should be able to plug any computer that can programmed to handle the instruction set for the robot and the underlying architecture shouldn't matter. Likewise the robot shouldn't care that its instructions are coming from a PDP-11. They should have some form of well defined interface layer between the computer and the robot so either can be swapped out without affecting the other half of the system. Again, easy to say, not quite so easy to do. But that is how it ideally should be handled. Then you can swap the hardware or update it or test it and have it make economic sense. Also it permits safety features not otherwise available. You can have several controllers with different architectures and see if they agree (basically what they do on the space shuttle). If you can arrive at the same answer using multiple different methods then odds are good you have a safe system.

In fact, yes, they do, because the US doesn't trust that the Russian encryption isn't crackable, and vice versa. So as of 2010, there's been a joint encryption agreement in place for the White House/Kremlin hotline, and the same technology is being deployed in this case as well. Specifically the GRU and SVR in Russia, and their opposite numbers in the US. The agreed upon solution was to use cryptosystems from both countries on the communications.

"More recently, the United States and Russia agreed on new joint encryption arrangements for the forty-year-old hotline between the Kremlin and the White House. Moreover, American and Russian banks already cooperate in secure digital communications for international transfers of staggeringly large sums of money."

See this 2010 report for details, specifically, the executive summary beginning on page 7:
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/USRussiaCyber_WEB.pdf

I'd be more impressed with a number of products if they permitted you to continue running them on their cloud services, after they have ben generally end of lifed. I doubt that anyone would be continuing to run Google Reader or similar products which were nothing but money-losing propositions, but there are other products that have been EOL'ed that I could imagine an enterprise wanting to keep something around for an extra 6-8 months to actually get their business processes migrated some place else.

If you're going to kill something like this, something on which a business has become dependent for day to day operations, and you are in the business of selling cloud services, you might as well open source the thing, since it's already tied to your back end cloud services anyway, and the worst thing that's going to happen, since those services are based on a proprietary platform, is the company gives you more money. Absolutely worst case, you don't open source it, but you time limit the contract so no one takes your sources and ports them over to OpenStack.

I think this is something that's frequently lost on people, Google has one main product, and they have a couple of vehicles that they use to deliver that product: primarily search, and secondarily AdWords/AdSense, with gmail at a distant third place. It's not even possible to argue Android, since nearly all productization of Android is done by code freezing the source tree, and the partners, not Google, productizing it to bring it to market. This might change with the purchase of Motorola Mobility, but I wouldn't count on it.

It is a scam that only the low IQ waste their money on.

"The group is designed for the carriers to let 'mobile operators shape Ubuntu's mobile strategy. " This will do nothing but destroy the platform. Carriers have nothing good to "advise" any phone OS maker about. Every one of them shovel more crap on top of the phone that what is upposed to be there and destroy features they dont like.

Thus ends Ubuntu Phone OS.

One that actually has a clue as to how Logic and computers work. Almost every single CS grad we get nowdays cant even pass the tests for employment like binary math, or solving a logic problem.

What oversight? Maybe she is in the inner circle that knows what is going on with the NSA but that is hardly what I would call oversight. A (mostly) secret program with secret directives overseen by a secret court with secret findings is not what I consider adequate oversight. There is no means by which the public will ever be informed of the findings of the surveillance and thus there is no possible way for the public to know if their rights are being compromised or if laws are being broken.

Meaning the FBI is doing whatever they feel like until someone tells them to cut it out. Apparently the FBI thinks oversight means spying on us from the sky.

It also is an economic activity that results in gaining an asset. More on that below.

Tidy argument but quite wrong. First off, it isn't just "a number", it is an asset in the same way the number that represents my bank balance is an asset. Bitcoins are an asset. An asset is ANYTHING (tangible or intangible) that is owned or controlled to that can reasonably be expected to produce future economic value. Bitcoins clearly fit this definition as they have a non-zero economic value to other people and they can be owned/controlled. Second, the earliest taxable event occurs when the asset is obtained/controlled ("mined" in this case) because it becomes property at that point. Mining is actually a fairly good term here because it is little different than if you dug gold or oil out of the ground. In formal accounting terms it is a current asset. The big difference is that oil or gold would be inventory whereas bitcoins would be considered cash or cash equivalents. When you acquire cash equivalents or acquire the reasonable expectation of receiving cash equivalents (accounts receivable), you are considered to have income. Income is taxable. So is property. It would be no different than digging up a coin you found on the beach because that is income.

And it is a silly argument. What backs up ANY asset is nothing more than the belief by people that it has value. What makes you think the promise to deliver the material backing up the currency is in any way an iron-clad guarantee? How can you be sure the other party actually has the gold to back up their dollars? Backing a currency with another asset like gold gives some people a (misplaced) degree of comfort but only because they really haven't thought it through. Having one asset (fiat currency) based on the value of another asset (gold) doesn't change what gives either one value (belief). Worse it makes it difficult to adjust policy to deal with economic ups and downs.

There are many important things that backers of the gold standard tend to overlook. The foremost is that the promise to (theoretically) exchange some amount of gold for a dollar is nothing more than a promise that can be broken. There is no way to force an unwilling government to actually hand over gold in exchange for dollars. Worse there is no way to truly be certain the other party actually has the gold they say they do. The "backing" is just theoretical. It's an IOU, no different than your "we're good for it" of a fiat currency AND it introduces a host of logistical, policy and administrative challenges.

A gold standard (or equivalent fixed monetary base) does not prevent a government from doing irresponsible things nor does it prevent bad things from happening. Worse it does prevent governments from doing many necessary and responsible things especially during a financial crisis.

No, that's just how they smell now, they never learned how to bathe.