Your one-sided revisionist history is astounding.

"Note that racism and other forms of discrimination was institutionalized by the very same government that you seem so willing to put in place as the sole arbiter of fairness."

Gee, where did those northern free states come from then? Oh thats right, they came as a result of government. And before you get your dander up, do remember slavery wasn't ever that strong in the north to begin with.

"It was the moral and religious institutions in the United States that fought for the end to slavery and championed civil rights for all races, and they were opposed at every step by the federal government and the Democratic party."

The first part is utter bullshit. There were many religious institutions pushing for slavery, there are passages in the Bible that were used extensively to justify it. The second part, yeah, the Fed opposed it so much they let states decide for themselves. And your dig at the Democratic party is pathetic; you are historically correct, but you are obviously trying to drag this into the modern era.

"Governments do not have morals, and when they enforce the morals that the most vocal and powerful participants in the political process it's not always a good thing."

And corporations are required by law to be psychotic in the pursuit of money. Can you honestly sit there and say you are more comfortable with groups in charge who are, by definition psychotic rather than the ambiguously moral?

" I happen to think that even were it legal, no business in the US could survive today openly discriminating against people because of race or sexual orientation."

Haven't been in the south of late have you? Hell there are still places with segregated high school proms. Come with me some time, I will take you to places I know that will give you an extra serving of spit on your burger if I tell the waitress you are gay and biracial. And how long would it take to backslide into open discrimination again? Here is a thought experiment, go look up the prison population by race, or crack vs powder cocaine sentencing, or why Sheriff Joe keeps getting re-elected. Do you thing those are do to this benevolent 'It cant happen again' age we are living in?

"They can force businesses to do things you like today, just as they forced liberty-minded people in the 19th century to return slaves to their owners."

As opposed to all the people that did it without a coercive hand? No slave ever ran to the nearest neighbor for a reason and there was a hell of a lot more of that then the Feds OR States returning slaves.

... oh and I just *explained* you the default behaviour; It's broken.

Yeah, try doing that with anything a "little larger". Ever worked with dataminers? These people do insane things....

Try using CSV in a localized setting. For example, in a country where the decimal separator is the comma and the list separator is the ;. Now, you get a CSV from a co-worker in the US. Now, you think this would work... the C stands for comma, right, right? Well, Excel makes the import locale dependent. so your co-workers CSV will fail to import. Inversely, the one you generate with commas between the numbers and semicolons as a separator, will fail to import for your co-worker.

Now, I haven't read the standard. Excel might as well implement it correctly, and even the Free alternatives might do this (I don't know, I rarely use CSV in a setting where I have only Libre/OpenOffice), but that is very damn confusing for the end-user.

Steam also allows for one other interesting use. I have many many games in my steam library, but I have only ever purchased one game from Steam. I buy games where ever and register thier codes on Steam. Thus I get all of the Steam goodness and if they ever shut down their servers, I have all my games still. Let see suXBOX do that.

The Freedom-hating Scumbags on the SCOTUS continue to chip away at Miranda.

Give 'em enough time, they'll do away with it entirely.

The reason for the Fifth is known by everyone with the barest minimum of Google Skills and self-awareness.

Go watch Dont Talk to Police and try to pay attention for at least the first five minutes. You can do it.

Why do you assume they aren't as happy, relative to others? You seem to be judging a culture based on your own culture, which doesn't always work so well (to say the least). I mean no snark, but because people from your culture wouldn't like it doesn't mean others wouldn't.

Yes, I have to admit that the DHCP situation you described is indeed quite weird.

*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Tip your waitor and try the fish.

I think the worst part about being in a small and previously questionably-run IT environment is that the expectation is that things will be bought once and work forever. It's not a matter of whether I could have upgraded these seven-year-old machines, but whether I would have to explain myself if something fails on an old machine we just spent money upgrading.

I wouldn't blame it on IT. You see, I have tried here too to make the best of things. I try (but apparently fail) to pass the message that you need to replace old stuff, because of the increased failure rate. Case in point, I have now been waiting for three weeks for our only PoE enabled switch to come back from warranty repairs. In any shop, you'd get the budget to buy a second asap, or even better before such a thing happens. Right now, only two people can use the phone and only because I had two power bricks for their IP phones. I think that's unacceptable, my boss doesn't seem to care. As long as there are no absolutely unavoidable costs that make him look bad in the reports. (Hey, would it hurt to give me a budget for stuff like this? But noooooo!). So, I just stopped asking. If something breaks, it's easier to ask for money.

As best as I can tell, several years ago it was automatically syncing to somewhere, but it had been years since that stopped working...

You can sync Windows machines by both NTP and by Samba (Not sure, it's the "net time" command, it seems to suggets ntp these days but it definitely wasn't in the NT4 days). I'd suggest NTP to one of the first-level stratum servers with your domain controller and make that a second-level stratum machine for the rest of your machines. NTP servers are best not virtualized. Just get a small cheap dedicated machine for this, or so.

"f the cop was singing "Stop Resisting" to the tune of "Happy Birthday", you're still civilly liable for copyright infringement. "

Stop resisting, I'm beating you!
Stop resisting, I'm beating you!
Stop resisting, I'm beating yoooooou!
Stop recording or I'll beat you too!

I hope you get the resources to streamline the mess left behind. It gets doubly hard if there is never money for IT. I know how that is. *sigh*

Vogtle was President/Chairman of Southern Company, Georgia Power's parent company. (Southern tends to name most of their plants after company bigwigs.) Apparently, he was a real POW who inspired the motorcycle dude in The Great Escape.

If it weren't so very complicated to actually sign your own binaries and have a nice keystore... userfriendly and all (within the firmware of course), perferably standardized that once you know it for one machine, you know it for all... Yes, then it would be nice...