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.

They are going to spend money to deploy an interception system that doesn't really work against missiles that have no chance of hitting the US (unless they were aimed at New Zealand) which can't possibly hold a nuclear warhead because they are too large. This coming from a country who has about half the politicians who want to invade a country that wants to develop nuclear power but when another country threatens to detonate a nuclear warhead in their capital city they impose sanctions on their banks. Yep, sounds like a typical government.

Other than changing the interface and file formats (which don't need to be changed) what needs to be released on a quarterly schedule? It's office software. The majority of people type up memos, simple (as compared to what the software allows) documents, and PowerPoint presentations. Does Excel really need another mathematical function that only a person with a PhD in some obscure branch of mathematics has heard of? The cynic in me says that they will keep changing the file format in order to keep forcing people to upgrade and the subscription service is just to smooth out revenues instead of having very large sales every couple of years.

Probably everything will get thrown into the next budget omnibus bill which will pass and then we'll only find out six months later what was contained in it.

Please this is the country that refuses to drop the penny, can't move to a dollar coin, and is still using the imperial system for measurement. Do you really think that they are easily going to switch to a 5 day a week mail delivery system? I can't wait to see some heads explode when someone brings up super mailboxes!

Yeah but if you provide health care to the people then you turn the country into a socialist state and nobody wants that.