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Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 891

It's only presumed in your mind because you haven't gone to look. There's a ton of very telling economic research on the costs of smoking to society and it doesn't take a degree in rocket science or even economics to understand why. End of life care is expensive and end of life care for smokers is often even more expensive. Also are you asserting the federal and state govts lack the power to levy an excise tax for whatever purposes congress and the legislature deem fit? You can say that but just saying doesn't make it so. There is a *very* long history of those kind of taxes and plenty of jurisprudence on the subject.

Comment Re:Configuration management (Score 2) 424

It may not just be a reliability problem. It may also be a time problem. The time to restore 10TB for example may be prohibitive for many applications. That used to be a big enterprise problem, but now everybody can afford such things. In other words make sure you have a data protection plan and not a backup plan and that you've tested the system and your assumptions.

Comment Re:Configuration management (Score 4, Informative) 424

Lots of folks here have talked about backups but if you're company is really successful then restores could be more of a problem than backups. Large databases and system configuration can take a loooong time. Develop a plan for restore and execute it regularly as a test. Make sure management understands the time for restoration. Two other things--virtualize (that reduces the coefficient of friction for moving things considerably) and consider using Amazon or some other cloud provider in your restore plan to in case your cage/server room/whatever burns. Some of those services are low or no cost until you start loading things up. If you go the cloud route be sure to get a read on your traffic, storage and other billable numbers. If that's the disaster plan then if the numbers are of any size at all you need to run the cost by the CFO to make sure that it's sustainable.

Comment Re:I like his IRS plan! (Score 3, Informative) 2247

I like how libertarians and teahadists if that's the particular stripe of know-nothings just boldly stuff up. This is an oversimplification but early on it was mostly funded by ARPA and was looked at least initially as a strategic investment in network technologies that could be used for military command and control. The IMPs (routers) which tied together the early ARPAnet sites were built by BB&N under contract to the federal government and yes the universities were involved from the beginning. That's where the ideas but not the $$ came from. Go read the Wikipedia article on the History of the Internet. It's the 2nd unpaid article that shows up for a google search on Internet.

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