Oh I thought you guys used cash. I actually canceled my debit card, they are just a terrible idea in the US. They do nothing for you credit score and if your PIN gets compromised it can be a PITA to recover your money.

That's assuming the tablet Apple releases will be a touchscreen Macbook. The device they're probably going to unveil is, according to rumors, a large iPhone/iPod Touch running some variant of the same operating system. They're saying it's basically a large mobile device optimized for ebook reading and other media. A Modbook would be a different class of device.

Even if your car had such a bizarre tank, I can't see any "orders of magnitude" difference there between 1/2 and 1/4. You do?

I also work for an IT contractor, although fairly small so I can go smack the sales guys on the head a few doors over as needed. I go for option B/E all the time. In my view, IT is kind of like a a bottomless pit you throw money into. You can throw more and more, but there is ALWAYS something else you can do. There's always an extra backup system you can add, an extra redundancy, an user experience you can improve, etc. But businesses have finite IT budgets, and all the slick sales guys in the world won't change that. So seeing as how there's a practically infinite opportunities to spend IT money in an organization that will have tangible benefits, I don't see the point in letting the sales guys get away with wasting their money. If I feel its a waste, I tell them that, and point out 2 or 3 things to them and the sales guys that should be higher priority. In my experience, the sales guys in IT are some of the most easily influenced by other salesmen I've ever met. A vendor comes through, gives a demonstration of their network appliance or software package of the week, tells them how all their customers will be knocking down the door to give them their money to buy it, and uses every tired old pitch technique in the book. The same techniques the sales guys use on their customers every day. And they buy it hook, line, and sinker. They go out and tell all their customers they have to have X, even when they themselves don't really understand what it does, but the vendors salesman told them so. Someone needs to inject some reality into the situation, or you wind up with a customer that has spent their entire budget on the latest buzzwords and their basic IT infrastructure is a disaster. Whether we spent their IT money on buzzwords, or we spent their IT money on things they needed, we still got their money. But one way leads to the customer saying at the end of the year "We spent $x on IT with you guys, and we still have tons of problems! Our PC's crash, our network is slow, our backups don't work, wtf?" and the other way leads to building a long term relationship with the customer that will keep them as our customer.

    Uncontrolled greed is the enemy of IT contracting in my mind. We are all in business to make money, but wanting to make money and being blinded by greed are very different. If every time you went to the doctor, he tried to sell you some new wonder drug you can only get from him, the first you might be inclined to believe him, after all he is the doctor, he knows more about medicine then you do. So you would buy it, and the doctor would make extra money. But when the medicine didn't make you feel better, and everytime you went back he wanted to sell you a new, different wonder drug, that THIS time would solve all your problems, pretty quickly you would find a new doctor. Next thing you know, the practice that doctor has built up over a decade is gone. The same thing for IT. Most of our customers don't know what they have, they don't understand it, they don't know what they need. They rely on us to tell them. But if we tell them lies, we will make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually they will get tired of shoveling money at us and seeing no results.

Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?

The problem is that M$ gets the timeline wrong so often. It should be:

1. Find bug
2. Patch bug

Not:

1. Find bug
2. Ignore bug for n months
3. News released about exploit
  compromising customers installations
  causing international incident.
4. Release self serving announcement
  that other systems are not affected
5. More exploits appear
  affecting larger numbers of customers
6. Patch bug

Until this irresponsible behavior stops there should ba a lot more stories. These guys need to have the light shown on their absurd practices as brightly as possible.

By "right people" he means people that need the supplies rather than jackshits that will horde everything and try to sell it to starving people for everything they have left.

I was watching the TV earlier today, and there was footage of Hilary Clinton in Haiti. This is not to demean the lady - I quite like her - but I got to wondering how much bread, surgical spirit, blankets or whatever they could have been flying in instead.

You casually dismissed three vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution, two of which live in OSX system libraries. I'm not too sure you're being objective. The other possibility: you are talking straight out your ass.

I guess my question is which is it?

No, and that is exactly what I consider to be one of the biggest issues of the Cloud. The Terms of Service of many, if not most, Cloud Computing/SaaS providers explicitly allow them to outsource their storage (or either primary data or backups or both) to unnamed 3rd parties. Where are these mysterious 3rd parties located?

Like all businesses keeping costs down helps them keep profits up and since Cloud Computing IS largely sold as a low-cost solution (we can discuss price vs. cost later) we know that keeping costs low is imperative. As we know the Internet crosses International borders (most of them anyhow) effortlessly. Is there any reason to think that a Cloud/SaaS provider wouldn't gladly outsource their storage to a cut-rate data center in another country? Maybe even a country that isn't very friendly to the U.S.?

The 4th Amendment means nothing in Malaysia or China or Venezuela or ...you get the idea.

Geez, what a miserable existence you must lead. Everyone is out to get you.

I've lived in Houston as well and many other cities, and yes, Houston is a very different type of city. But to claim that politicians purposely want to keep you from traveling around town? Come on. Metro has done a lot to try to get people to get out of their cars, and people around here just don't want to. They like their cars. So no, there is not going to be a direct bus from Greenspoint to Baytown, because there is not enough demand for it.

Houston is a HUGE metro area (600 sq miles compared to New York city at 305, Chicago 225, LA 460, Dallas 180), and you can find a bus from anywhere in the city to the Galleria, Medical Center, and Downtown. If you need to go from one city suburb to the next, then use one of those hubs, or drive. There's even a trip planner on the website, that will tell you when to arrive and when you will get there.

It's not rocket science, and nobody is out to get you. I've been successfully using the bus system for 4 years now. Yes, it takes about 50-100% longer to take the bus than to drive, I just make sure to leave early.

and therefore, it makes sense that it is also different legally

moving bits around is completely unlike moving pieces of paper around, in all sorts of fundamentally significant ways, with all sort of implications and ramifications for how society does work, could work, and should work

...medical hardware manufactures charge $18,000 for a piece of hardware worth about $100.

I should elaborate: Limiting only individual donations to individual candidates, and furthermore limited in sum annually. These types of laws have been attempted before, but shot down as "limiting free speech" by the Supreme Court. That's why an amendment is needed.

While we are on topic on Chinese spying, are you one of those poster Chinese government owned droids trolling the internet posts for a good fight? Seriously I've seen many of them on many news site's discussion board. You are the first one that are so balatently apparent on your intention here at slashdot.

The vocabulary you uses are not of typical of English speaking person would use. Rather I sense you either type in Chinese and then have the reply translated by a computer (are you using Google's language tool for the translation?), or you have an electronic Chinese/English dictionary rigth in front of you.

We slashdot readers are technology centric people who cares about technology as well as the humanities in general around us. I don't think we really like to parade a particular nation for its virtues (just look at how much fun we have with the American government and businesses). We have good discussions on what is fair, and what is not. We are stongly opinionated, but we tend to respect each other's point. I think you should read the help section of the Slashdot's forum before posting any more and make a fool out of yourself.

Market yourself on it. Do computer repair work.

If you are good enough at it and have a car (or a bike depending on how small your area is), you can make $40/hr doing computer repair work along with your job at Safeway. Safeway cash is for the bills, computer repair money is for saving/investing and buying yourself things. I work in IT for a school district as a contractor and I do computer repair for people locally. Anybody from your neighbor next door who does construction to the guy across the street who runs a small business out of his house is a marketable person and usually don't need on-demand service (ie: drop what you're doing and get here to fix this).

The $40 number may be a little high depending on which area you're in, but that number is what I use for people locally and it's a very competitive rate when you look at GS or any of the smaller companies. People are often more comfortable bringing someone into their house to fix their computer who works for a school district because you have the security checks.

And here comes the Off Topic mods if they're still reading this...