To get a better electorate for senators repeal the 17th amendment to the constitution. Steve

Uh... Not everyone. I think PBS is a waste of money. It was originally sold to the congress as an alternative to the 3 TV networks. There are now hundreds of alternatives so the tax dollars still being paid to PBS are a legacy to a problem which was fixed long ago.

MS is not unique here in their relationship with Gartner analysts. I have witnessed a case personally where a crap company got a Gartner Group analyst to make positive recommendations on a crap product because of a lack of rigor on vetting in my opinion mostly because of payola and perks given the rep. I have also interacted as a Gartner customer with reps who were simply repeating the talking points of the company sales people in the industry they were supposed to be analyzing. I'm not saying there are not good analysts and good analysis offered by Gartner but they sure have some stinkers. The problem is how do you tell the difference without knowing a fair amount about the questions you are asking. If you have the knowledge how much value can Gartner really offer?

Generally the Lithium packs will nto allow you to fully discharge the cells. All I have seen incorporate a small circuit board which among other safety functions like limiting current will also cut off the pack before the cells are discharged to the point where you will hurt them. You would have to allow the cells to sit without charging (there is about a 2% internal discharge rate with Lithium cells) after they had hit the cutoff point to get the cells to the point where you did permanent damage.

Could not agree more with your post. I take care of the network here at work as a part of my job and IT is nowhere near the top of my list. I run a Zimbra mail server and barely know clamAV is even there. Yesterday at 3:20 PM not only did virus scanning stop but it also kept my server from relaying mail messages. I have been in the IT field since 1981 and had thought I had seen it all until this happened. I have had many vendors mess up and not be able to fix a problem but have never had one go out of their way to create a problem for their users. I got my server running and it seems to be running today (I will be checking the Zimbra forums this weekend to find out what I need to do longer range) but I certainly hope that this gets addressed by ZImbra. If not, I will simply dump Zimbra and give in to the owner's biases here and implement Exchange (just before I start sending out resumes).

Yes, but many believe that President Nixon contemplated declaring marshal law during the Watergate crisis but did not enact it because "we the people" would rally against it. If you don't have a way to organize large groups of people this concern goes away and I offer as evidence the effective suppression of the demonstrations in Iran after the Internet communications were blocked.

I find your post offensive. You are belittling a woman who is active in the political arena and is espousing a point of view you disagree with. Rather than addressing her point of view with any intelligent arguments you attempt to dismiss her point of view by calling her a name. You have only shown your own ignorance and mental laziness with your post.

Our finance department bought an Apple III for doing VivCalc spreadsheets. It was a reliable computer for us until the hard drive started to make a grinding noise. Occasionally it would refuse to load or save a file when grinding away and the fix for us was to raise the separate hard drive cabinet a few inches off of the desk it was no and drop it. The grinding might stop after doing this and if it didn't then we just dropped it again. Eventually this process stopped working but by this time the IBM PC XT had come out and we replace Apple VisiCalc with IBM/Lotus. DOS was a disappointment after using the Apple III OS but the hardware worked flawlessly. Once we had implemented menus on the character interface the users were much happier with the IBM machines.

Economics 101 - If the price is cheaper the consumption will go up.