I'm atheistic. We don't care for any organized religion but we'll leave any religion alone that leaves us alone / doesn't preach at us / doesn't try to convert us / doesn't try to kill us for not being one of them.
Ballmer sucks as a CEO. Don't know what he's good for but it's not running Microsoft.
MS gets a shitload of revenue from server operating systems and server side apps like SQL Server, Exchange, Remote Desktop Services, SharePoint, etc. These are products that have corporate mindshare and are considered well supported, reliable products by the decision makers. MS also gets a shitload of money from MS Office and other desktop apps. Their consumer OS makes them some money but not as much as the other areas.
I believe that states are considered sovereign entities - in other words, they can't declare bankruptcy. They can do all kinds of other shit to break contracts but they can't do the same shit as cities or counties.
From what I understand (and I may not have it right) it's possible that at some point soon the courts could soon take over setting tax rates, fees and such to ensure that the state meets its obligations.
Yep, rented it to someone I knew. They took reasonably good care of it and were going to buy it from me. They ended up buying another house in the 'hood when we decided to move back.
The OP is dumb. We used to have just that. Then the Asians came in with cars that were cheaper (though initially not well made) and we bought them. Later they made them better quality and we bought even more of them.
The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process. Fake and altered drug and food items have been a serious problem in China.
Ethnic Koreans from northeastern China who now live in South Korea were intending to use the capsules themselves or share them with other Korean-Chinese, a customs official said. They were being carried in luggage or sent by international mail.
The capsules were all confiscated, but no one has been punished because the amount was deemed small and they weren't intended for sale, said the customs official, who requested anonymity, citing department rules.
China's State Food and Drug Administration and its Health Ministry did not immediately respond to questions faxed to them today. But the problem of treatments made from dead foetuses or newborns has been recurrent.
Chinese media identify the northeastern provinces as the source of such products, especially Jilin which abuts North Korea.
The Jilin province food and drug safety agency is responsible for investigating the trade of such remains there.
Calls to the agency and to the information office of Jilin's Communist Party were not answered today.
The South Korean agency began investigating after receiving a tip a year ago. No sicknesses have been reported from ingesting the capsules
South Korea finds smuggled capsules contain human flesh
SOUTH Korea has seized thousands of smuggled drug capsules filled with powdered human flesh and is strengthening customs inspections, officials said today.
The capsules were made in northeastern China from dead babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, a statement from the Korea Customs Service said.
Customs officials refused to disclose where the babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials have been cracking down on the production of such capsules since last year.
The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the statement said. The capsules of human flesh, however, contained superbacteria and other harmful ingredients.
Around 40 to 50 people is where I tell clients who are growing that they need to hire a full time IT person and use me as a backup / mentor.
This doesn't work at law firms though - they require much more care and feeding. Around 20 or so employees and they need to bring on a full time IT person.
The results of this study support the widespread belief among restaurant servers that Blacks leave smaller average tips for waiters and waitresses than do Whites. They also suggest that Blacks leave smaller average tips for at east some other service providers. In particular, large ethnicity effects on stiffing and/or percent tip accompanied by small reversed ethnicity effects on dollar tip for bartenders, cab drivers, bellhops, and food delivery persons suggest that Blacks tip these service providers less on average than do Whites.
Dropbox: Your Stuff & Your Privacy: By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, your stuff). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We dont claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.
Microsofts SkyDrive:
5. Your Content: Except for material that we license to you, we dont claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also dont control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.
Google Drive:
Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).
The last sentence makes all the difference. While these rights are limited to essentially making Google Drive better and to develop new services run by Google, the scope is not defined and could extend far further than one would expect.
Simply put: theres no definitive boundary that keeps Google from using what it likes from what you upload to its service.
I try to convince companies to use what they need and to adjust their wants to the available products. Sometimes I'm successful, sometimes not so much.
But thinking that Dropbox or Google Drive is appropriate for most small companies is no more accurate than saying that these companies should always have a server in house. It all depends on the particular companies needs.
And by the way, take a look at the rights issues with data stored on Google Drive. A company would be foolish to use that service.
I have a number of clients in "creative" fields. They simply refuse to work logically. They use Exchange to store all kinds of shit it shouldn't be storing, they send versions of files back and forth to each other all day and never delete any of them.
One client has 15 employees and their average mailbox is 20 GB. I've been over it with the owner a hundred times but he just tells me, "Look, this is the way we want to work. It makes sense to us. Just spend whatever you have to on the email system so it does what we want it to do." So I do what it takes. They make money, I make money, life goes on.
In general you're right, other than the fact that servers and workstations need more care and feeding than electrical circuits or pipes. I'm proactive to the extent it's reasonable to be but I don't go overboard with it.
I joke about being a network plumber all the time. But you'd be surprised at how few competent network plumbers there are.
When a company outsources something like IT they're after more for their money than they're getting having it in house. IT seems easy to carve out because it's mysterious to non-technical people, it's a cost area, the people in it are weird, etc. The company they outsource to promises all kinds of shit for a set price without a clue as to whether they'll be able to deliver or not. They know they'll take a loss during the first year or so of a 5 year contract but that by the end of the 5th year they'll have made so much money that it won't matter. And if they can't do the work they'll walk away and say, "Sorry we couldn't meet your needs. Bye!" Rarely if ever do these outsourcing firms get sued. It's just not worth the fucked company's time.
I do some strategic level consulting for a few medium sized firms and the outsourcing thing is one that comes up every few years. I've not seen it be the right way to go yet - and I've been offered the opportunity to do it if I'd take the same money the other company is offering to do it for.
All that being said there are some things that can be outsourced. Microsoft Exchange is a good example - for a company with 2 to 10 employees going with Intermedia is usually a good idea unless you insist on using Exchange as a file storage system.
Yes I am. And every time I take on a new client after they've been fucked over by managed providers / fixed cost providers / somebody's incompetent nephew / etc. I end up with a customer for life.
The sad thing is that this isn't all that difficult. You just have to keep good records of how you have things configured including a note or two about how the people in that company prefer to work and you're golden. Well, that and showing up when you say you will and doing things correctly.
