My only physical machines are a handful of infrastructure boxes and some boxes that run Oracle software that's not licensed in a manner compatible with virtualization (OBIEE and Oracle database EE), everything else is a VM. I'd be doing VDI but I just can't find anything approaching a positive ROI and so we still do physical desktops, I was hoping one of the VM on desktop with sync to VDI players would work out but either technical problems or pricing have kept me from adopting them.

Oh man do hangouts suck. With Talk on my phone I could tell if people were online or not. Hangouts doesn't indicate (on Android).

They also take 5-10 seconds to activate. Like the dam thing isn't * phoning * home, it is composing a letter long hand.

Why would you be mad? Each of those people commuting via bike is one less car on the road and anyone who's ever studied complex systems knows that traffic reacts very non-linearly so the removal of even a few percentage of the traffic can mean a significant reduction in the number, severity, and duration of traffic jams.

Agreed and I argued this point effectively with the police officer that taught our biking safety class, he admitted that way too many people are self absorbed idiots while driving and so you probably were safer being able to see them coming while having time to react.

Right here: http://www.boozallen.com/careers :-)

You sound like you actually read the report. Of the $2.74 million spent, close to $1.5 million was on contractors.

http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/sec-automates-identification-suspicious-trading-110401-1.html?pg=1

They're digital. There doesn't need to be a "separate" copy. That was my point.

The majority of Google's Gmail users just hit "archive" and the mail "goes away". Google did that on purpose. Out of sight, out of mind. Then THEY have vast quantities to mine for data. Giving it to the government is incidental.

You're thinking about Google keeping a separate set of archive systems for something like this. I'm saying *they don't need to* for the vast majority of it. It happens that way naturally.

Yes, you can POP it down but the bulk of their customers just live with the tyranny of the default. The result is the same.

Temp to hire isn't that unusual, I've gotten all my long term jobs through temp to hire offers and as a hiring manager I've had a couple that didn't work out where it was good for the company that I didn't do a direct hire as firing someone is much more expensive and legally risky than not renewing a contract.

Yes, and the use of nanotubes (if the geometry is at all important) means the promise of cheap is a bit far fetched, mwcnt's are stupid expensive, swcnt are 50-100x more and aren't yet produced on commercial scales.

4. Google is compelled by law to lie.
5. The NSA is tapping the routers one step up from Google's data centers and Google's hands are clean, but the NSA has all the data anyway.

#5 would be my guess, but should be stymied by always using an SSL/TLS connection to Google. Of course, I doubt the *SMTP* connections delivering mail to/from Google servers are all encrypted, regardless of the webmail interface.

Actually...Google provides 15 Gb of storage for standard, free Gmail accounts. Unless you're attaching movies or large numbers of music files, that is enough to retain years worth of e-mail.

I know, I have years worth of e-mail in my Gmail box. 8 years, to be exact, and I'm using less than 10% of that 15 Gb.

The money is spent.

And as a side note. I once went thru and started deleting large quantities of older e-mail, that I had no reason to keep. After about 15 minutes the little "advertising" strip on the top of Gmail switched to "We have a sale going on tin-foil hats" and stayed there until I logged out..

Normally that would be true but with the weird twist in the jetstream the last few weeks I doubt it was too much help unless they wanted to go over the gulf of mexico and canada.

Have you looked at M-disc? They're supposedly nigh indestructible and claim to last 1,000+ years w/o errors.

Google for OCR-A and OCR-B as TTF. There are freely available versions. I use them for mailing labels, along with PostNet bar codes to make it as easy as possible for the Post Office.