I am a network administrator by the definition of it; a mere desk jockey. I haven't a mind for international affairs, but I do for network related foo. Having said that, and having not read a single reply (thusly this could be a redundancy) to this article I have to say... there are some great ideas that come from the government, but they are not always practical. This I do not think is practical. What do they want, an 802.11q VLAN? Ok... no, they want better technology... but throw VPN/IPSec out of the picture. Instead of conforming to the Internet, they seek to change it; thus asking us to conform to them. Otherwise they are misinformed and do not understand the workings of a network in the present day and need to hire better informants, or I don't know what I'm talking about.

Maybe you need more discipline.

This might sound paranoid, or even cynical... potentially retarded. If IE takes over the entire market again like it had, it would set us back starting the entire diversity process over again. Thus, should we avoid using IE out of principle? I think it would encourage developers to work on something else rather than "beating" IE and allows for a genuinely creative and new ideas; as less time is spent competing with the complete crap IE has historically been. Any billion-dollar company can throw a bunch of programmers at a problem, and that's what they're probably starting to do. Jeez, how many years and version releases has it taken them to just get to IE8? And IE8 is still a half ass piece of sluggish shit.

Develop web pages that must work in all browsers much? I didn't think so. If you did, you'd know exactly why standards are important.

I see you haven't actually developed a lot of websites for customers using Internet Explorer.

You're right... we do. However we're ranked very low among the rich countries in health care quality, but we take the gold in medical bankruptcy... go USA!

There are a lot of ways to do it. If it involves a DHCP server and vital infrastructure, then anyway you put it seems stupid to me. I log into my switches for troubleshooting, configuration changes, etc... we have about 350 or so. So no, not for the ever so important SNMP data.

I hope your DHCP *never* goes down.

Would you recommend DHCP for network switches? I ask cause if you would....uh...why?

So does House still have a working liver at this point?

Run a mirror.