That's a joke, I say, that's a joke, son. That moderator's about as sharp as a pound of wet liver.

The site seems to be slashdotted. Would some kind kharmawhore put up the article please?

You are such a nerd. I am jealous.

When Phil gets out of jail, he'll shoot you too.

There also has to be some strong blame pointed at HR as well. HR budgets for certain amounts of raises (rises) and firings. They do not care what it does for productivity and employee morale so long as they stay within their budget.

Adding new tech to a van is OK, if you're into that kind of thing. (Which I am.) But of far more importance is what kind of art you put on your van. Be it a wizard summoning a space unicorn to be ridden by a hot babe, a barbarian protecting hot babes, or an interstellar wizard summoning hot babes for nefarious purposes, van art is what takes your van and gives it that certain je ne sais pas which says, "I am awesome."

In this case, I think you need to consider the technological contents of your van and create a motif based around that. For example, you can have a wizard summoning hot technological Linux cyborg babes. That would be cool. And when you drove down the street, people would be like, "that's cool." And isn't that the real purpose of owning a van?

There was a cause to the recession, which is the passage of the 1999 Gramm Leach and Bliley Act signed by Bill Clinton. (Messrs Gramm Leach and Bliley are GOP, but it had bi-partisan support in the house. Almost the entire democrat Senate was opposed.) 1999 GLBA overturned the 1933 Glass-Steagall. It means that mainstreet banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, investment banks, and commercial banks were allowed to all become the same institution. There was no real check on the banking system, because the banks that were "too-large-to-fail" knew that there was no incentive for security, moral hazard. Instead, short-term profits were the only motivation.

These government created corporations acted without restraint in search of profit, because the environment they operated allowed this. It was only natural. The consequences were (and are) inevitable - collapse of large banks. (This has not been fixed yet. Another recession WILL be caused by this. It's only a matter of time. The foolish regulations imposed by the Obama administration have only proved effective at shutting down credit unions and small community banks by increasing the costs of banking, all without making us any safer.)

But the recession became a depression because of the cost of student loans. The average student loan debt for graduating seniors is about $23000. When two of these student loans gets married, they have a household debt of about $46000 then. AKA - a mortgage. The average college student is graduating college with a small mortgage.

It gets worse. The people who should be doing the real production for the economy are those graduating with Masters and PhDs. Their student loan debt is higher, as they have to pay for undergraduate school, and then graduate school. Yes, graduate school is typically not as expensive as undergraduate school. But the typical graduate school student still needs loans. And they still have undergraduate school interest accumulating.

So basically, the top ten percent of the generation who should be driving most of the economic growth cannot afford to do so, because they already have a not-so-small mortgage.

Now we are in a depression. It's no longer a recession, because other economic environment conditions have stalled the necessary recovery. We can get out of it, but the nation needs to stop spending money foolishly. The Federal and State governments need to stop with the atrocious regulations like the last round of ADA. Instead, we should focus on improving the real infrastructure of the nation, namely its citizens - creating needless regulation to force companies to spend does not stimulate the economy, it is a broken window fallacy.

(1) Start with free community and state colleges - eliminate the need for student loans for an undergraduate degree. (2) A WPA style program should be created to let college students work off their existing debt, one that is not so onerous as requiring a sacrifice of income potential (or life) from working in inner-city schools or the military. (3) Much like alcohol was legalized during the Great Depression, so should marijuana be legalized now - leave its legal status up to the several states. (4) Fix immigration and bring in productive student immigrants - stop kicking out PhDs and masters.

ATMs used to be mostly OS2 under the hood. It's this ADA update that is putting the final nail into OS2's coffin.

Cusco, good call on the USB drive for backup purposes. I was just thinking of the risks associated with them from viruses, student papers, etc. That's a really good idea for a low-cost rather bullet proof backup option.

Good suggestion on keeping the server far from grease, etc. Spot on.

The ADA is screwing up my life. This year, my small credit union had to spend half a million dollars replacing perfectly good ATMs so that a headphone jack can be plugged into them. My condo is spending a minimum of 10000 dollars to install a swimming pool lift. And now my Netflix subscription will need to rise in order for sub-titles.

This is too much. The ADA should be limited to insuring there is total access to government buildings and government projects. Otherwise, they should leave us alone.

Get a decent server, maybe an HP. Dual CPUs, Dual HDDs, Dual Power supplies. Get a UPS.

Install Windows, SQL, and UPS controlling software. Install AV, but be certain to exclude AV scanning the SQL directory and SQL DBs and logs. You don't want AV killing your SQL server by accident. You might want to consider putting a firewall on the box and blocking all non-SQL traffic.

Patch as needed.

Install nothing else. No mine-sweeper, no restaurant food ordering software, no adobe. Nothing will kill a server faster than turning it into a desktop. Don't try to do anything on it. Just let it be a server running SQL and you'll be fine. Don't plug USB drives into it.

You should be able to back up the SQL db every so often stopping SQL and then starting it. Try to do this around the monthly patch cycle. Don't patch immediately upon one becoming available, but rather wait a week. This will give Microsoft time to correct any patch issues they have. You'll be much more vulnerable to patch issues than you will from viruses if you follow the "don't turn it into a desktop" suggestion.

I know. I was joshing. Trying to be funny. Guess I failed.