It says right in the amendment that they are altering the definition of the crime. Since this law is replacing the old law, it will replace the definition in the old law with the new definition. Essentially everything that used to be a misdemeanor will now be a felony, but now with the caveat about TOS and Employment contract violations inserted. Assuming of course that the law gets passed at all; it seems that the whole thing is rather premature, because the bill hasn't even been voted on.
I apologize for the "crying and screaming" comment. For some reason I thought you were the poster from the original comment (who pretty much was crying and screaming).
No, they changed the definition of the crime itself to exclude violations of TOSes and similar. Read the amendment, it's like a whole paragraph of reading.. Or, ya know, just scream and cry that your rights are being violated reflexively.
The law that mad it a misdemeanor was already on the books. Did Franken vote for it? I rather doubt it, he hasn't been in office all that long, and the act is rather old. When you get elected to a senatorial post you don't get to review all the old laws on the books and call for a revote.
Seems to me that his won't be an issue, though I don't know anymore about it that anyone else. While the libraries the API accesses will be compiled differently based on architecture, the APIs themselves ought to be the same, I'd think. So your code calls win.api.dosomething(). When the call happens on an ARM machine it goes to a dosomething.dll library which is compiled for ARM and returns a value. When the call happens on an x86_64 machine it goes to dosomething.dll which is compiled for x86_64 and returns a value. Assuming the main instance of your code is running in the.NET virtual machine, calls to outside APIs ought to fine (assuming the APIs are the same). Your issue will be that you can't compile an app for ARM (a native app) and expect it to run on x86.
Some people seemed to be expecting this, but I can't imagine how they'd do it without a huge performance hit.
This I wouldn't disagree with; and Intel does do some of this. For whatever reason they don't think this particular product is worth it. I pulled the 15% number out of my ass of course, but if they aren't expecting the optical interface to be a huge improvement over the copper, maybe they just aren't bothering for such small gains.
There's at least two points of failure in your counter here. First, what Microsoft is proposing here isn't a "software as a service" compiler, the title of the article is simply wrong. It's simply a compiler that provides a lot more access to the internals than current compilers (at least current MS compilers). Anything that a hacker could do to this compiler, he could do to a normal MS compiler. He'd have to have the same level of access to your box to modify this as he would to insert new code into your current copy of VS. Second, that's not what you said. What you said was that any compiler that you haven't coded and built yourself is untrustworthy. Which is completely true, but also completely paranoid.
It's always the case that you can only completely trust things which you have done yourself (assuming you made no errors, which is a whole nother ball of wax), but it's equally true that you can't live your life not trusting anything done by anyone else. Not if you want to live in society and participate in in human interaction in any case.
Except it doesn't work like that. Let's say Intel know that it will cost them 10 million dollars to create the optical version of the tech. They know that the optical version will (ignoring dev costs, just on parts) cost, say, three times as much as the copper, but only offer a 15% improvement in performance. They can make a reasonable guess that while a small subset of people will happily pay three times as much for a 15% performance gain, they aren't going to be able to make their 10 million back. If they can't make back their dev costs, they aren't going to dev. They'll wait till the economics make more sense.
You also can't trust food you didn't grow yourself. Doors and locks you didn't build yourself. People whom you haven't given birth to and watched from infancy. The level of paranoia represented by that quote is borderline hysteria. If you applied that mantra to any other area of your life you'd have to live in a sealed commune, by yourself or maybe with with a single (well vetted and not allowed to leave) life partner. Of course you can't trust any software you didn't create yourself... Like anything else in life you take some level of risk with nearly every decision you make. I'm not going to personally code review everything I put on my system on the off chance that Microsoft has inserted malware into it. Just like I'm not going to grow my own food on the off chance that Kraft suddenly decides to start poisoning every 20th bag of chips.
Indeed, were I to decide to do either of those things, I probably wouldn't have time to do the other, or much of anything else.
IIRC Apple's compiler is or was gcc, I seem to recall them moving to another (also open source?) compiler a while back. Regardless, Apple compilers are more or less standard C/C++/ObjC. The trick with iDevices is getting the compiled code onto the device. You can write, compile, and test IPhone apps all day with free tools on any Mac, or even a (questionably legal) Mac VM. Getting your code onto an iPhone requires either a license or cracking the device.
(It's a fine point I'll agree, but somewhat important. If Apple disappeared tomorrow you could still write and compile software for iDevices, and after jailbreaking them, get it onto the devices.)
Biggest problem you're going to have, and the reason I think some of the people suggesting renting outside resources rather than purchasing may be on target, is storage (both physical and logical). You can get a machines with 4-8 cores, and 4-8 GB of memory for around $1000 in a rack mount case, so around 6 boxes with your budget (since you don't have VAT on.edu gear I'm assuming around 1/1.5 dollar/pound ratio). That doesn't get you a rack to mount them in and doesn't get you any storage beyond the hard drives in the boxes. Realistically, something approaching a quarter to a half of your budget will go to incidentals. You'll need a at least one, preferably two ten port Gig-e network switches, some kind of low end shared storage, at least a half height rack, cables, a multiport KVM, the monitor/KB/mouse (ideally rack mount, but you could save some dough by getting regular ones or using spare hardware)... Individually none of those things is horribly expensive, but together I'd guess 1-2K pounds.
If you've got all that stuff, then your goals are a lot more reasonable... if you don't, you're taking a shoe string budget and making it one of those shoe strings that has been pulled through the metal trivet on your boots a few to many times. If you absolutely must have dedicated hardware, one way to save on storage might be something like gfs. It's a shared cluster file system that allows you to create one file system from disks on multiple computers. In theory this could allow you to use the spare space on each node to create a large shared storage... in practice I'm not sure how well it scales when the "servers" are also the "clients". I've only ever used it with separate server boxes.
My wife, with no HPC experience at all ever, just read this and said "Either this guy's an idiot or this is bullshit." I just thought the/. community should know:-)
Also who the Hell buys hardware like this without vendor support? OS and backend choices should have been part of integration from the vendor. No one buys 3000 rack mount servers, a bunch of switches, some racks and some storage and builds "the largest x86_64-based supercomputer on the east coast of the U.S."
OP, if you are in anyway serious about this stop now. You don't want the largest supercomputer on the East Coast, you want a computer that works. Call SGI, IBM, Cray, or even (ewww) Oracle/Sun and get them to sell you a smaller system with full integration support. Trust me, I've done HPC, been there, done that, literally got the t-shirt (several of them). Even with integration support you'll be lucky if the vendor gets the thing up and running on schedule and as advertised. There's a thousand blades, 200 switches switches, a million cables... get the experts to figure out integration and you'll be a much happier camper.
I've not only heard of it, I lived there. It was the largest port in the world at one time, and is still one of the top three in the country. You've clearly never been there if you don't know how important the Port of New Orleans is to trade up and down the Mississippi River. It also supplies seafood to the entire gulf coast and about 2-300 miles up the river.
As I responded to an earlier post, while in the VERY long term a warmer climate could have that affect, in the shorter term it will result in destruction of arable land and several rather important cities. This is inarguably bad for human civilization as a whole. There's also the fact that a slowing or even stopping of the Jet Stream would paradoxically leave a good chunk of North America and Europe a lot colder and decreasing the arability of two of the world's bread baskets.
"Morons" didn't build on coastal areas... people that thought it might be nice to have things like intercontinental trade, and seafood built on coastal areas. Most coastal cities were built when rivers and oceans were indispensable sources of food and trade, and commutes were well nigh impossible. Today rivers and oceans are still indispensable sources of food and trade, and most people don't fancy commuting a few hundred miles a day to work on the coast and live inland (though it is at least realistically possible now).
No, the polar ice caps melting in any significant fashion is inarguably bad for human civilization as a whole. Lots of arable land and several important cities will be destroyed. It is perhaps arguable that this will happen, or that we are the cause or part of the cause, but it being bad is not arguable. It might not be a direct problem for someone in Central Europe, but it will have huge and negative indirect effects even there.
First of all, the "Oracles" are being interpreted by hundreds, if not thousands, of people the world over and the vast majority of them are coming to the same conclusion... Second of all, no one is saying we need to condemn ourselves to eternal poverty, only that we need to find alternatives. Third, most of what "they" want us to do is good in all kinds of ways beside reducing climate change even if you choose not to believe it, unless you really like living in smog or something.
Beyond all of that is the clear evidence of the eyes. The planet is getting warmer on average. There are some other potential explanations for this, but none of them makes as much immediate sense as "All these insulating gases we produce cause insulation." (Occam's Razor and all that) The high level of solar activity recently is a likely contributing factor, but similar levels of activity have been seen before without the dramatic increase in temps we're seeing now.
At worst it's a risk/reward scenario:
Fact: the planet is growing warmer. Fact: this is extremely bad for human civilization for a number of very obvious reasons. Supportable theory: Part of the cause of this warming is human greenhouse emissions. Supportable theory: There are various other external and uncontrollable environmental factors contributing
Given the potentially huge cost involved in the trend continuing (like the loss of most coastal cities in the world and lots of arable land), doesn't it make sense to do something about the one controllable factor in the equation? Even if we're not 100% sure?
I'd argue that OSX succeeded, at first, only because it was so much better than OS 9. It's early success was the remaining Apple faithful upgrading their OS or buying a new computer with the new OS. It was only after the faithful adopted it, and the remaining Apple software vendors were dragged kicking and screaming into developing for it; that other people began to realize that it wasn't just better than OS 9, it was actually a pretty good OS. Had it not had the built in user base from those remaining Macheads, I don't think it could have had the affect it did... certainly not in the time frame that it did. It's a good OS, but so was BeOS, and so is Linux, both of them had popularity surges around the time of 10.0. The first is relegated to the history bin, and the second is largely irrelevant on the desktop.
Other than the big screen and maybe the impact resistant glass, most people don't care. Are the pictures clear enough? I don't care if the camera is 8MP or 6MP if the pictures are clear enough for my needs. Really, the cameras on cell phones are getting enough pixels that they're becoming irrelevant. The glass isn't good enough to keep up with the sensors. My wife's Nikon D70 is a few years old now, but it's only 7.5 MP, and you can already tell when she uses inferior lenses. I seriously doubt there's a cell phone out there with a lens capable of getting the full value out of an 8MP camera. Even if there is one that's got good glass when brand new, a cell phone isn't a camera. They get dropped, get finger prints on them, get scratches... after a month or two the glass will still not be good enough for the sensor.
Same with the CPU. Take my most processor intensive application... Does it run without major issue on my phone? Then the CPU is fast enough. I don't care if it's 1.2 GHz dual core of 1 GHz single core, per se. I care that my stuff runs, and runs comfortably. Now stepping out of the role of user I care about specs. Sure, when phones get faster, I can develop more hefty apps, I can do more, offer more. Users don't care about that though. They figure out that Angry Birds is their most CPU intensive app (though they wouldn't use those terms in the thought process), and find a phone that runs Angry Birds well. Whatever the cheapest phone that will do that, and take acceptably clear pictures is the one they want. (Though that bigger screen might be worth a few bucks too).
Which doesn't negate his point. What could be considered a minor operational risk in active combat would be considered a much more serious risk in a training exercise. While we're technically at war with North Korea, there are no active hostilities and violating the border would still be considered a serious incident (much more so than passive GPS interference). There is also a small but not insignificant increased risk to flying the plane without all systems go. A commander in an exercise is more likely to consider that the risk to equipment and crew is too great during a training ex. People die in both combat and training, but "acceptable risk" is much higher in combat. Far better to train pilots on degraded ops in simulators or controlled exercises with greater safety constraints built in.
I'd disagree with: "My advice is to only submit your CV to companies you actually want to work for; give any "recruiting" firms a wide berth (unless you really don't have anything to lose, i.e. you're desperate for your first job)."
I'll agree that responding to one of the four a day "My client has a need for $somesucker for a six month gig..." e-mails is a terrible idea. Having said that, a real, professional, recruiting company can be very helpful in finding a position. When I was looking to move up here to Boston I hooked up with a recruiter who got me numerous interviews and eventually got me this job. All the jobs were with real companies (you've heard of at least one, guaranteed; one was a local company but large and successful; the one I got was with a large multinational, but not necessarily one you've heard of).
They were professional in their dealings with me, never called or contacted anyone that I didn't specifically approve of, and only presented me with position that were appropriate to my experience and abilities. In fact, against normal Slashdot protocol, I'll go so far as to recommend Winter-Wyman if you're looking for tech jobs (and probably other sorts as well) in the northeastern US.
Your advice about cold calls and fly by night recruiters is good, but there are good recruiting companies out there.
Nah, The adult sites will keep their.coms and get.xxx domains too. They may even change their "official" name to the.xxx domain, but still keep the.com. Best of both worlds. It will make them easier for people looking for a.xxx site to find, but still keep the advantages of a.com and avoid breaking bookmarks. It's not like it isn't trivial to have more one domain for a site.
Slashdot Mirror
It says right in the amendment that they are altering the definition of the crime. Since this law is replacing the old law, it will replace the definition in the old law with the new definition. Essentially everything that used to be a misdemeanor will now be a felony, but now with the caveat about TOS and Employment contract violations inserted. Assuming of course that the law gets passed at all; it seems that the whole thing is rather premature, because the bill hasn't even been voted on.
I apologize for the "crying and screaming" comment. For some reason I thought you were the poster from the original comment (who pretty much was crying and screaming).
No, they changed the definition of the crime itself to exclude violations of TOSes and similar. Read the amendment, it's like a whole paragraph of reading.. Or, ya know, just scream and cry that your rights are being violated reflexively.
The law that mad it a misdemeanor was already on the books. Did Franken vote for it? I rather doubt it, he hasn't been in office all that long, and the act is rather old. When you get elected to a senatorial post you don't get to review all the old laws on the books and call for a revote.
Seems to me that his won't be an issue, though I don't know anymore about it that anyone else. While the libraries the API accesses will be compiled differently based on architecture, the APIs themselves ought to be the same, I'd think. So your code calls win.api.dosomething(). When the call happens on an ARM machine it goes to a dosomething.dll library which is compiled for ARM and returns a value. When the call happens on an x86_64 machine it goes to dosomething.dll which is compiled for x86_64 and returns a value. Assuming the main instance of your code is running in the .NET virtual machine, calls to outside APIs ought to fine (assuming the APIs are the same). Your issue will be that you can't compile an app for ARM (a native app) and expect it to run on x86.
Some people seemed to be expecting this, but I can't imagine how they'd do it without a huge performance hit.
This I wouldn't disagree with; and Intel does do some of this. For whatever reason they don't think this particular product is worth it. I pulled the 15% number out of my ass of course, but if they aren't expecting the optical interface to be a huge improvement over the copper, maybe they just aren't bothering for such small gains.
That was pretty much my point.
There's at least two points of failure in your counter here. First, what Microsoft is proposing here isn't a "software as a service" compiler, the title of the article is simply wrong. It's simply a compiler that provides a lot more access to the internals than current compilers (at least current MS compilers). Anything that a hacker could do to this compiler, he could do to a normal MS compiler. He'd have to have the same level of access to your box to modify this as he would to insert new code into your current copy of VS. Second, that's not what you said. What you said was that any compiler that you haven't coded and built yourself is untrustworthy. Which is completely true, but also completely paranoid.
It's always the case that you can only completely trust things which you have done yourself (assuming you made no errors, which is a whole nother ball of wax), but it's equally true that you can't live your life not trusting anything done by anyone else. Not if you want to live in society and participate in in human interaction in any case.
Except it doesn't work like that. Let's say Intel know that it will cost them 10 million dollars to create the optical version of the tech. They know that the optical version will (ignoring dev costs, just on parts) cost, say, three times as much as the copper, but only offer a 15% improvement in performance. They can make a reasonable guess that while a small subset of people will happily pay three times as much for a 15% performance gain, they aren't going to be able to make their 10 million back. If they can't make back their dev costs, they aren't going to dev. They'll wait till the economics make more sense.
You also can't trust food you didn't grow yourself. Doors and locks you didn't build yourself. People whom you haven't given birth to and watched from infancy. The level of paranoia represented by that quote is borderline hysteria. If you applied that mantra to any other area of your life you'd have to live in a sealed commune, by yourself or maybe with with a single (well vetted and not allowed to leave) life partner. Of course you can't trust any software you didn't create yourself... Like anything else in life you take some level of risk with nearly every decision you make. I'm not going to personally code review everything I put on my system on the off chance that Microsoft has inserted malware into it. Just like I'm not going to grow my own food on the off chance that Kraft suddenly decides to start poisoning every 20th bag of chips.
Indeed, were I to decide to do either of those things, I probably wouldn't have time to do the other, or much of anything else.
IIRC Apple's compiler is or was gcc, I seem to recall them moving to another (also open source?) compiler a while back. Regardless, Apple compilers are more or less standard C/C++/ObjC. The trick with iDevices is getting the compiled code onto the device. You can write, compile, and test IPhone apps all day with free tools on any Mac, or even a (questionably legal) Mac VM. Getting your code onto an iPhone requires either a license or cracking the device.
(It's a fine point I'll agree, but somewhat important. If Apple disappeared tomorrow you could still write and compile software for iDevices, and after jailbreaking them, get it onto the devices.)
Biggest problem you're going to have, and the reason I think some of the people suggesting renting outside resources rather than purchasing may be on target, is storage (both physical and logical). You can get a machines with 4-8 cores, and 4-8 GB of memory for around $1000 in a rack mount case, so around 6 boxes with your budget (since you don't have VAT on .edu gear I'm assuming around 1/1.5 dollar/pound ratio). That doesn't get you a rack to mount them in and doesn't get you any storage beyond the hard drives in the boxes. Realistically, something approaching a quarter to a half of your budget will go to incidentals. You'll need a at least one, preferably two ten port Gig-e network switches, some kind of low end shared storage, at least a half height rack, cables, a multiport KVM, the monitor/KB/mouse (ideally rack mount, but you could save some dough by getting regular ones or using spare hardware)... Individually none of those things is horribly expensive, but together I'd guess 1-2K pounds.
If you've got all that stuff, then your goals are a lot more reasonable... if you don't, you're taking a shoe string budget and making it one of those shoe strings that has been pulled through the metal trivet on your boots a few to many times. If you absolutely must have dedicated hardware, one way to save on storage might be something like gfs. It's a shared cluster file system that allows you to create one file system from disks on multiple computers. In theory this could allow you to use the spare space on each node to create a large shared storage... in practice I'm not sure how well it scales when the "servers" are also the "clients". I've only ever used it with separate server boxes.
My wife, with no HPC experience at all ever, just read this and said "Either this guy's an idiot or this is bullshit." I just thought the /. community should know :-)
Also who the Hell buys hardware like this without vendor support? OS and backend choices should have been part of integration from the vendor. No one buys 3000 rack mount servers, a bunch of switches, some racks and some storage and builds "the largest x86_64-based supercomputer on the east coast of the U.S."
OP, if you are in anyway serious about this stop now. You don't want the largest supercomputer on the East Coast, you want a computer that works. Call SGI, IBM, Cray, or even (ewww) Oracle/Sun and get them to sell you a smaller system with full integration support. Trust me, I've done HPC, been there, done that, literally got the t-shirt (several of them). Even with integration support you'll be lucky if the vendor gets the thing up and running on schedule and as advertised. There's a thousand blades, 200 switches switches, a million cables... get the experts to figure out integration and you'll be a much happier camper.
It doesn't matter if you're first to file if someone publishes the invention in the public domain before you file.
I've not only heard of it, I lived there. It was the largest port in the world at one time, and is still one of the top three in the country. You've clearly never been there if you don't know how important the Port of New Orleans is to trade up and down the Mississippi River. It also supplies seafood to the entire gulf coast and about 2-300 miles up the river.
As I responded to an earlier post, while in the VERY long term a warmer climate could have that affect, in the shorter term it will result in destruction of arable land and several rather important cities. This is inarguably bad for human civilization as a whole. There's also the fact that a slowing or even stopping of the Jet Stream would paradoxically leave a good chunk of North America and Europe a lot colder and decreasing the arability of two of the world's bread baskets.
"Morons" didn't build on coastal areas... people that thought it might be nice to have things like intercontinental trade, and seafood built on coastal areas. Most coastal cities were built when rivers and oceans were indispensable sources of food and trade, and commutes were well nigh impossible. Today rivers and oceans are still indispensable sources of food and trade, and most people don't fancy commuting a few hundred miles a day to work on the coast and live inland (though it is at least realistically possible now).
No, the polar ice caps melting in any significant fashion is inarguably bad for human civilization as a whole. Lots of arable land and several important cities will be destroyed. It is perhaps arguable that this will happen, or that we are the cause or part of the cause, but it being bad is not arguable. It might not be a direct problem for someone in Central Europe, but it will have huge and negative indirect effects even there.
First of all, the "Oracles" are being interpreted by hundreds, if not thousands, of people the world over and the vast majority of them are coming to the same conclusion... Second of all, no one is saying we need to condemn ourselves to eternal poverty, only that we need to find alternatives. Third, most of what "they" want us to do is good in all kinds of ways beside reducing climate change even if you choose not to believe it, unless you really like living in smog or something.
Beyond all of that is the clear evidence of the eyes. The planet is getting warmer on average. There are some other potential explanations for this, but none of them makes as much immediate sense as "All these insulating gases we produce cause insulation." (Occam's Razor and all that) The high level of solar activity recently is a likely contributing factor, but similar levels of activity have been seen before without the dramatic increase in temps we're seeing now.
At worst it's a risk/reward scenario:
Fact: the planet is growing warmer.
Fact: this is extremely bad for human civilization for a number of very obvious reasons.
Supportable theory: Part of the cause of this warming is human greenhouse emissions.
Supportable theory: There are various other external and uncontrollable environmental factors contributing
Given the potentially huge cost involved in the trend continuing (like the loss of most coastal cities in the world and lots of arable land), doesn't it make sense to do something about the one controllable factor in the equation? Even if we're not 100% sure?
But the NeXT of iOS is really descended from OSX, which succeeded because it was better than OS 9.
I'd argue that OSX succeeded, at first, only because it was so much better than OS 9. It's early success was the remaining Apple faithful upgrading their OS or buying a new computer with the new OS. It was only after the faithful adopted it, and the remaining Apple software vendors were dragged kicking and screaming into developing for it; that other people began to realize that it wasn't just better than OS 9, it was actually a pretty good OS. Had it not had the built in user base from those remaining Macheads, I don't think it could have had the affect it did... certainly not in the time frame that it did. It's a good OS, but so was BeOS, and so is Linux, both of them had popularity surges around the time of 10.0. The first is relegated to the history bin, and the second is largely irrelevant on the desktop.
Other than the big screen and maybe the impact resistant glass, most people don't care. Are the pictures clear enough? I don't care if the camera is 8MP or 6MP if the pictures are clear enough for my needs. Really, the cameras on cell phones are getting enough pixels that they're becoming irrelevant. The glass isn't good enough to keep up with the sensors. My wife's Nikon D70 is a few years old now, but it's only 7.5 MP, and you can already tell when she uses inferior lenses. I seriously doubt there's a cell phone out there with a lens capable of getting the full value out of an 8MP camera. Even if there is one that's got good glass when brand new, a cell phone isn't a camera. They get dropped, get finger prints on them, get scratches... after a month or two the glass will still not be good enough for the sensor.
Same with the CPU. Take my most processor intensive application... Does it run without major issue on my phone? Then the CPU is fast enough. I don't care if it's 1.2 GHz dual core of 1 GHz single core, per se. I care that my stuff runs, and runs comfortably. Now stepping out of the role of user I care about specs. Sure, when phones get faster, I can develop more hefty apps, I can do more, offer more. Users don't care about that though. They figure out that Angry Birds is their most CPU intensive app (though they wouldn't use those terms in the thought process), and find a phone that runs Angry Birds well. Whatever the cheapest phone that will do that, and take acceptably clear pictures is the one they want. (Though that bigger screen might be worth a few bucks too).
Which doesn't negate his point. What could be considered a minor operational risk in active combat would be considered a much more serious risk in a training exercise. While we're technically at war with North Korea, there are no active hostilities and violating the border would still be considered a serious incident (much more so than passive GPS interference). There is also a small but not insignificant increased risk to flying the plane without all systems go. A commander in an exercise is more likely to consider that the risk to equipment and crew is too great during a training ex. People die in both combat and training, but "acceptable risk" is much higher in combat. Far better to train pilots on degraded ops in simulators or controlled exercises with greater safety constraints built in.
I'd disagree with: "My advice is to only submit your CV to companies you actually want to work for; give any "recruiting" firms a wide berth (unless you really don't have anything to lose, i.e. you're desperate for your first job)."
I'll agree that responding to one of the four a day "My client has a need for $somesucker for a six month gig..." e-mails is a terrible idea. Having said that, a real, professional, recruiting company can be very helpful in finding a position. When I was looking to move up here to Boston I hooked up with a recruiter who got me numerous interviews and eventually got me this job. All the jobs were with real companies (you've heard of at least one, guaranteed; one was a local company but large and successful; the one I got was with a large multinational, but not necessarily one you've heard of).
They were professional in their dealings with me, never called or contacted anyone that I didn't specifically approve of, and only presented me with position that were appropriate to my experience and abilities. In fact, against normal Slashdot protocol, I'll go so far as to recommend Winter-Wyman if you're looking for tech jobs (and probably other sorts as well) in the northeastern US.
Your advice about cold calls and fly by night recruiters is good, but there are good recruiting companies out there.
Nah, The adult sites will keep their .coms and get .xxx domains too. They may even change their "official" name to the .xxx domain, but still keep the .com. Best of both worlds. It will make them easier for people looking for a .xxx site to find, but still keep the advantages of a .com and avoid breaking bookmarks. It's not like it isn't trivial to have more one domain for a site.