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User: Zeek40

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  1. Murders and Assassinations?

  2. Re: Customers are treated better than employees on Beware of Oracle's Licensing 'Traps,' Law Firm Warns (scottandscottllp.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure that only applies to the sales and legal teams. Engineering, test and support either aren't paid enough to care about doing their jobs right or too understaffed to get the work done.

  3. Re:"repair the relationship" on Beware of Oracle's Licensing 'Traps,' Law Firm Warns (scottandscottllp.com) · · Score: 1

    Don't worry, the oracle stack is on it's way out. The main problem is the fact that it's already a part of a mission-critical system for our customer, so change comes slow.
    A part of our AAR/Lessons Learned discussion regarding this particular scenario involved realizing that oracle knew the 'relationship' was over before we did and stopped giving a shit about making us happy after they had our money.

  4. "repair the relationship" on Beware of Oracle's Licensing 'Traps,' Law Firm Warns (scottandscottllp.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work on a team that builds and operates an enterprise service bus that runs partially on the Oracle Weblogic/OSB stack, along with other JMS brokers such as fuse/talend AMQ brokers and Solace messaging appliances. The Weblogic/OSB portion of the ESB is by far the most brittle and expensive piece of software in the system. We're working to remove the cancer that is oracle software from our network, but since it's an operational system critical to our customer's business it's taking time. We spent about six months working with thoroughly incompetent oracle support staff in an attempt to get the OWSM security modules to perform some basic encryption/decryption and SAML token validation without any success. A significant portion of that time was spent just waiting on oracle support to provide patches for all the roadblocking bugs we encountered. When the patches were finally delivered, they were provided to us completely untested 'as-is'. The first patch delivered wouldn't even run because there were class files missing. We wrote our own security module using WSS4J and java callouts in about three months after we gave up on oracle ever getting us functional patches. A few months after that, oracle performed an audit and attempted to extort additional licensing fees from us for using OWSM. We had never used OWSM for anything but development and testing, and had removed it from our systems entirely by that time. The most satisfying call I've been on working this project was listening to my PM tell the oracle goons to go fuck themselves while they were issuing legal threats via conference-call. After that incident, Oracle wanted to "repair our relationship" and sent a team of what they called "customer service specialists" to meet with us. What they actually sent was a trio of arrogant used-car salesmen. We met with them and after introductions and a system overview we started discussing what it would take to get Oracle to actually fix our laundry-list of open SRs and enhancement requests (If you've never worked with oracle support, an Enhancement Request is what they call a bug they don't plan to fix). They responded to this by bringing up a new project being worked by another team at our company that they were starting database license negotiations with. They suggested that if we could grease the wheels and guarantee that database licensing deal went through then they could put pressure on support to fix the issues we had with weblogic/osb. Their "customer service specialists" were demanding a quid-pro-quo before they'd consider giving us the support we had already paid for. That meeting ended just as poorly as the OWSM shakedown attempt. Our weekly oracle phone conference is openly hostile at this point.

  5. Re:If you deputize them on Counterterrorism Expert: It's Time To Give Companies Offensive Cybercapabilities · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That hasn't worked too well with the NSA. I can't imagine that a private corporation with a financial incentive would be able to restrain themselves from attacking their competetors once they were given the go-ahead to start lashing out when their network gets DDOSd.

  6. Re: Your biggest screw up on "We Screwed Up," Says Reddit CEO In Formal Apology · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I think at this point even she realizes this will be her last job as a CEO, so she's not gonna give it up without a fight.

  7. Re:Unless it was part of a contract..... on Student Photographer Threatened With Suspension For Sports Photos · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I can't see any way that the school could have a copyright claim to the pictures unless they were paying the student to take them, and unless things have really changed since I was in high school, "student photographer for the school yearbook" is not a payed position.

  8. Re:One small problem on What To Say When the Police Tell You To Stop Filming Them · · Score: 1

    A group has no rights, period.

    In what country? Here in the USA, groups called corporations have more rights than individuals, including the right to make unlimited bribes ... i mean campaign contributions.. to whatever politician they think will legislate them a tax-break.

  9. Re:Capitalism on Why Companies Should Hire Older Developers · · Score: 1

    Are you referring to the hundreds of millions of people killed by 'free market forces' such as starvation, preventable disease, and war-profiteering?

  10. Re:Capitalism on Why Companies Should Hire Older Developers · · Score: 1

    Are you suggesting that the USA is a socialist country? Because we throw a larger percentage of our population in cages for no good reason than any other country but China.

  11. Re: nonsense on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    Not really. Please provide me a source that has manipulated the numbers in a way that presents the price of American healthcare in a positive light.

  12. Re:nonsense on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your French cousins must be idiots. According to the World Health Organization, France has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. On top of that, your cousins already have access to American Health Care. All they have to do is come over here and bring a ton of cash. Unless they're independently wealthy, France and never speak ill of their healthcare system again after they saw the bill from an American hospital.

  13. Re:nonsense on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Canada is the only country with a single-payer system that is looking for private sector solutions and that's because they're also the only country with a single-payer system that made it illegal for private corporations to compete with the goverment to provide healthcare. Canada is literally the only country in the world struggling with the problem you mentioned. European countries generally have large private health care industries that make significant income performing optional and cosmetic procedures. Medical tourism is a thriving industry in Europe. Germany alone makes about €1 billion in revinue per year on medical tourism. http://www.medicaltourismmag.c...

    For some reason, pretending that a single poorly implemented health care system is representative of all single-payer systems has become an American past time.

  14. Re:Obama should negotiate on Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way) · · Score: 1

    In case you hadn't noticed, compromise became anathema to congress somewhere in the early 2000s

  15. The internet is not a broadcast medium. on Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)" It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.

  16. Re:Ya Think? on US Air Traffic Control System Is Riddled With Vulnerabilities · · Score: 1

    Over 10 miles of cable needed to be replace, and yes there was a fire. 18 server racks full of equipment needed to be replaced as well. The fire actually only damaged about 1/4 of the hardware mounted there, but the fire hoses took care of everything the fire didn't.

  17. Re:"A related article suggests..." on FCC Favors Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I've never understood the libertarian delusion about free markets and small government. If you want to know what a free market actually looks like, look at the drug trade on the Mexican-US border. This is what lucrative, completely unregulated markets look like. Sane people don't want to participate in that shit.

  18. Re:Really? on Tech Firm Fined For Paying Imported Workers $1.21 Per Hour · · Score: 2

    Yeah, I mean slaves were willing to work for free, so it' pretty damn obvious that paying employees at all is stupid.

  19. Google has killed at least one deer. http://www.streetviewfun.com/2...

  20. Re:People on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    When I served in the King's African Rifles, the local Zambezi tribesman called it "long pig." Never much cared for it myself.

  21. There's a simple test for this question: on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    Can we still catch them?
    Some individuals may be too smart for us to eat, but the ones that end up in the fisherman's nets are obviously not too smart to be eaten.

  22. Re:People on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    You're dead wrong about "animal" instincts in humans being "a load of crap". Whenever you're scared into a "fight or flight" response, the adrenaline released decreases the blood flow to your frontal cortex re-directs it to your motor cortex. Your brain shuts down it's long-term planning center because it knows that if you don't survive the next few minutes, long term planning is pointless.

  23. Re:Most animals? on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 2

    Yeah, most of the species that have never been observed participating in cannibalism are what we call "herbivores". There is no such "evolutionary institutional element" not to eat your own kind. When leadership changes in most carnivorous pack animals, the previous alpha's offspring are usually killed and eaten. That's an evolutionary instinct to eat your own kind that actually passes itself on by reducing genomic competition.

  24. Re:Not comparable on High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are an average of ~4,400 construction workers were killed per year on the job in the US and there are about 3 million construction workers in the US. There are an average of 500-600 accidental deaths per year caused by firearms, and about 100 million gun owners in the US. It seems like guns are actually safer than most other tools ;)

  25. Re:College and school police involved on Two Years of Data On What Military Equipment the Pentagon Gave To Local Police · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because college and university police departments are full of petulant man-children who were rejected by city and county police departments and who whine like 8 year olds: But mom! All the cool kids are getting issued M-16's and tear gas launchers!