Comcast did not come from the split up of AT&T (otherwise I would own lot more share of Comcast). The split went to the "Baby Bells", which were Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and US WEST being created. AT&T still existed after the breakup as well. Verizon was formed when Bell Atlantic merged with Ameritech. Southwestern Bell, eventually changed their name to SBC, who later bought Pacific Telesis, and later then bought AT&T Corp (and changed the name from SBC to AT&T Inc since AT&T carried the bigger name, even though it was the loser of the takeover), and finally purchase Bell South.
So recap, AT&T, split to 8 companies, then years later when the government stopped their regulation and allowed free market forces to dictate, those 8 phone companies consolidated into 3 companies, AT&T Inc, Verizon, and Qwest (Qwest formed from US WEST). Don't be surprised when further consolidation occurs. The only good thing going right now is that Verizon is primarily located on the north east, and Qwest is obviously in the mid-west/western side of the country with AT&T covering the entire middle and southern portions of the country. Verizon and Qwest are less likely to merge due to this large physical separation.
Yes you can take a photocopy of the key and make a duplicate, but not without raising suspicions from the guys making the duplicate keys (possibly with a phone call to local or state police) or you have to have the equipment yourself and it isn't cheap. With the barcode, you just have to go to the nearest copy machine, and poof, you are in. RFIDs are not quite as easy as the barcode in that sense, but it doesn't cost more then a couple Benjamins to do it.
Again, RFID is a great technology for inventory, NOT access control or data storage! It was designed to be the update to barcodes for stores and warehouses to allow computer systems to keep track of the products, maybe include how old they are as well for things that have sell-by dates. Basically to better, more easily manage a warehouse full of stuff without needing an army of people running around with barcode scanners, scanning everything all the time...But it was not designed with security in mind, which is why all these companies and policies that are being pushed to use it in places which have security concerns should get smacks on the side of the head until they realise that this is NOT the product to do it with.
Except the problem is that RFID is being used in a manner that barcodes are not being used. Everyone knows it is utterly stupid to rely on a barcode as an access code for a company, build, or secured facility. Too bad they did not make the same jump in conclusion with RFID. And because they can store more information in RFID, it is being used to hold personal identification data, not just a number (which is what barcodes encode).
Personally I have not used Comcast's DNS in years because it has been so unreliable. There has only been 1 time I have had service outage that was not due to Comcast's DNS servers not responding in all the years that I have had Comcast internet. I have also only had to call Comcast 1 time, and it was because the reverse lookup on my IP address was wrong, again, their DNS servers and DNS system is crap. I have long been using the 4.2.2.x, and 4.4.4.x servers for my DNS, ever since I totally gave up on Comcast being able to keep a properly working DNS server up and running.
Sorry, in my gall bladder paragraph, I meant to say liver, not kidney as to where the bile is produced. I still had kidneys on my mind from earlier in the post.
You can lose "a" kidney because you have 2. If you lose both, you are dead... We have two because without one we are dead, and they are in a fairly unprotected part of the human body, so our ancestors/predictors who developed two tended to survive to procreate better then the ones without two.
The tonsils are part of the lymphatic system and also help our immune system (like the spleen) mainly by being the mechanism where the ducts for our immune system to access the upper repritory system (i.e. mouth, throat). You can "live" without tosils, but you are more prone to respritory infections, which is manageable in this post-penicillin medical world.
The gall bladder is actually something that is very important to the digestive system. It isn't a "vital" organ (again, meaning you can live without it), but fatty foods will possibly not be handled properly by the body. The gall bladder stores up and concentrates the bile (produced in your kidneys) and regulates when to release it into the digestive tract properly. Without the gall bladder, the kidneys are directly releasing the gall into the tract whenever the kidney produces it. The trigger to produce bile is fat in the blood stream, which happens by absorption in the digestive tract as well as from other sources as well. One possible major drawback to not having a gall bladder is that you might be running to the closest bathroom almost immediately after eating a meal which contained lots of fats because your kidney just dumped a ton of bile into your digestive tract and you have automatic diarrhea from that much gall.
I can tell you exactly why I don't play EVE, because there is no way I can compete with guys how have been there for a year. It isn't just the learning curve, it is how the character gain abilities/skills/etc. EVE is based entirely on how long you have been there with no upper cap, which means guys how have been there will ALWAYS be more powerful then you, no matter WHAT you do. At least in WoW or other MMORPGs, after being there for a while (3-4 months), you actually have a chance to compete with people who have been there for years. It is reverse age-ism on EVE. You will always be a subordinate. While I have to say I liked the idea of removing the ability of some class of players who do nothing but play the game all day every day from completely dominating the game (as is the case in most MMORPGs), in the long run, the method used is very bad for allowing new people from joining due to a permanent "level gap" between new players and old players.
Why the heck are you complaining? New Jersey with a population of 8.6 - 9.1 million (depending on your estimate source for 2008-2009) has a budget of $91.5 BILLION for 2009. And you with your 6.5 million are complaining about a $55 billion budget... Do the math, New Jersey is still spending more per person than you are... We also have a $3.5 billion deficit which is double what Arizona has for the year, yet we aren't trying to sell the state buildings...
Took a couple weeks to hash out the database schema. Doing "what if", scenarios and the like to try and take into account future needs. We did a pretty darn good job since it has lasted 10 years now with only very minor changes to the database (adding a field here or there for other data that we felt was pertinent). The main idea is to make sure that it is robust in the sense that anything which could grow or change in the future is in its own table and you simply have a foreign key to easily get the values. Another big deal is to remove as much human input as possible, doing things like pull-down menus or choose from things so that you don't have something like "Sun", "Sun Microsystems", "SunMicro", "sun", "SUn Microsystmes" in a field...
As I said with ours, since we have the building/floor maps, we do not let you physically type in a location, you have to click on the location from the maps. Again, this removes the chances of someone entering strange data. We do as much pattern matching/validity testing as we can do on the data to make sure it is correct, and have a verification page before data is actually input or changed in the database (with highlighting exactly what is changing). It also keeps a "history" of the hardware, along with who updated the data and when. It sounds a lot more involved then it is. A good schema for the database can easily take care of all these things. History is simply a table that is 3 fields, "id", "item_id", and "value", with "id" and auto increment primary key, item_id a foreign key which corresponds to the particular item, and value a text blob which stores HTML formatted text output of the fields that were changed, the old values, the new values, the date, and by whom. The information that gets placed in that is handled by the PHP webpage.
I think we have something like 6-7 tables in our schema. Separating anything that we wanted to keep uniform into its own table which we have an administration front end to modify or add to those tables (things like manufacturers, models, etc). Again the idea is to make as little as possible be up to the human inputting the data so that the data will be consistent which will allow you to actually search for things and be sure that you find all of them, and not miss something because someone made a typo when entering the manufacturer name.
It took probably 4 months from soup to nuts. But at the time, we had to compile everything from source code (something like a LAMP server wasn't really there yet, and you had to compile mysql, apache, and PHP to get them all to work properly back then). Now its a push of a button and it is basically done. In fact we had to compile the compilers before we could compile the LAMP software. A lot has changed in the last 10 years...
We finally made our own. We created a mysql database and table schema storing the hardware information along with the schema for locations in the facility (typically cubicles, offices, labs, and server rooms). Wrote up a website using PHP with proper forms to insert new hardware, move hardware from one location to another, or remove hardware, and search functions to find hardware. We went a little further as well by getting floor and building plans and made clickable image maps for all the locations so that you can just browse to the building/floor/cubicle, see what is in there already, and add new stuff or move existing stuff etc., as well as have a way to highlight the location of a particular piece of hardware if you looked for it based on hostname, etc.
It really isn't that hard to do. And if you setup your database tables and schema correctly so that you can easily expand for new hardware types, buildings/locations, it isn't too hard to maintain. The hardest thing that we deal with is when we move into a new building and we have to generate the floor map, but it doesn't usually take more then a few hours at most.
Which is why I think that any electronic voting system needs a voter verified printout of his/her selections which is the official ballot which is cast. The electronic vote tally is not the official count. The printed ballot could be easily coded so that an electronic counting machine could count the vote (something like an optical scanner, or more like a system which can photograph the ballot and pattern match/color code the vote results). In any case, you have a physical medium which was verified by the voter as the official document. You gain the usability benefits of the electronic system in terms of how you select your vote and still keep the integrity of the paper ballet system by having lasting physical media which can not be easily corrupted as the true ballet.
Well, if this does work, it looks like the waste processing plants will get a complete overhaul. But that assumes there is a easy way to separate the urea from the water and other things that flow down the sewer lines....
Breaking the ToS of a website should simply mean that that website has no obligation to let you continue using the site and can ban you from accessing if it is found that you are in violation of the terms. It is that plain and simple. Go read one of the few good ToS, like the one here at/. for instance. Violating it means that your access to/. or any SourceForge associated site can and will be terminated. But if you look at something like Microsoft's ToS for one of their forums (where-in they claim such things like the copyright to anything posted belongs to Microsoft, including USER posts), is simply ridiculous to believe. There is no official transfer of copyright document as required for copyrighted material, and since that document does not exist, that transfer has not legally happened, no matter what the site says in a ToS. And I am sorry, but bad ToS agreements are the norm for most of the internet, not the exception.
Creating criminal liability for violating a ToS is an extremely bad precedent to create when the norm is bad ToS agreements to begin with. And as I stated, with that precedent, I could do exactly what I posted in my example. And has been shown in the particular case at hand, no one could prove who actually read or agreed to the ToS, and it certainly could not be proven that the defendant was the person who agreed to the ToS, which means she can not be held liable. There were 3 people known to have access to the account, and the one charged was not the one who setup the account, who presumably would be the person most likely to have read an ToS agreement if there was one.
Seriously, the charges she was convicted of were an EXTREMELY BAD precedent to set. Under that same precedent, I could put up a website, where-in, I could specify in the terms and conditions of the agreement "that everyone or everything (bots included), upon accessing the website agree to pay me $20, and must opt out of such payment by clicking on the "do not agree" button on the page within 30 days of accessing the site." And for everyone who does not pay me $20, I can have prosecuted under the same statue used in this case for "hacking" computer systems, because they have access them without my consent and against the terms and conditions of use.
I mean, how are they going to really test that it works? Because, I am sure there are just tons of people out there that want to be exposed to HIV just to see if the vaccine they took actually keeps you from getting a virus that WILL kill you.
Not really. Once you know you have a good training set (i.e. example work that has been verified and attributed to a particular artisan by being signed, or otherwise documented (like how we know which architects designed certain pyramids in Egypt)), that training set could be used to train the computer to look for other works that match the training set. This is no different than what the current experts are doing now to attribute the works to individuals, the difference is that a computer program has been designed to do the analysis, and it worked on the first sample set given to it. I would say that you need to test a few more samples, but the fact that it was correct on all the samples given so far is a good sign.
Seriously here. Why not make sure that there are STRONG WARNINGS on these drugs and require that they also place the warnings on TV Ads (not just in the small print, but actually required spoken warning about exceeding the 2000mg limit, and mention that other drugs like prescription pain killers may also contain this substance and to check with your doctor). I mean, if people know that over-dosing on this WILL seriously damage and potentially kill your liver, they will pay a little more attention to how much they are taking...
As it currently is, with the current ads and warnings, more people think that something like Tylenol with Codeine is pretty safe to take. I mean, its Tylenol, safe for your stomach (too bad just not necessarily safe for your liver).
This isn't just the death of slashdot, it would be the death of the internet itself. No one will be allowed to link to ANY page unless it is owned or operated by the same company without getting express permission. This means that everything grinds to a complete halt because everything written (in the USA at least), IS copyrighted automatically. It might not have a specific copyright on file with the Library of Congress, but it is still copyrighted.
The east coast companies response of looking for local candidates is simply telling you that they are not willing to spend a dime on relocation costs. Your response for getting past that is to let them know that you are already planning on moving there on your own and that you are simply looking in advance for work in the area. Their reluctance is stemming more from the fact that they are tight on the budget and have no room to deal with things like signing bonuses and relocation costs at this time for any talent that they may hire.
You need to learn to read between the layers a little.
Not really. What is dead is Rock. Coolthreads are here to stay, especially now that Oracle bought them. Niagra Falls is the fastest single server Oracle server currently in existence. Oracle is going to continue to build on that platform, with most speculation being that they are going to release a "black box" Oracle solution, which will simply be a drop in place, connect power and network, and turn the key solution, eliminating the need for the company that purchases said solution to have system admins who have had enough Oracle training to know how to properly setup a server to run the database. Oracle will then sell "support" for the systems on a tiered basis. It will most likely be based on the same platform as the Sun Unified Storage System line, like the 7410, even available with Oracle RAC as an option.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast did not come from the split up of AT&T (otherwise I would own lot more share of Comcast). The split went to the "Baby Bells", which were Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and US WEST being created. AT&T still existed after the breakup as well. Verizon was formed when Bell Atlantic merged with Ameritech. Southwestern Bell, eventually changed their name to SBC, who later bought Pacific Telesis, and later then bought AT&T Corp (and changed the name from SBC to AT&T Inc since AT&T carried the bigger name, even though it was the loser of the takeover), and finally purchase Bell South.
So recap, AT&T, split to 8 companies, then years later when the government stopped their regulation and allowed free market forces to dictate, those 8 phone companies consolidated into 3 companies, AT&T Inc, Verizon, and Qwest (Qwest formed from US WEST). Don't be surprised when further consolidation occurs. The only good thing going right now is that Verizon is primarily located on the north east, and Qwest is obviously in the mid-west/western side of the country with AT&T covering the entire middle and southern portions of the country. Verizon and Qwest are less likely to merge due to this large physical separation.
But what about Rocket Jumps? I think right now you can only do one. After that things don't work so well....
No, no , no, no. You got it all wrong. They should be fined $80,000 for each $1 of product they sold, just like the RIAA got.
Yes you can take a photocopy of the key and make a duplicate, but not without raising suspicions from the guys making the duplicate keys (possibly with a phone call to local or state police) or you have to have the equipment yourself and it isn't cheap. With the barcode, you just have to go to the nearest copy machine, and poof, you are in. RFIDs are not quite as easy as the barcode in that sense, but it doesn't cost more then a couple Benjamins to do it.
Again, RFID is a great technology for inventory, NOT access control or data storage! It was designed to be the update to barcodes for stores and warehouses to allow computer systems to keep track of the products, maybe include how old they are as well for things that have sell-by dates. Basically to better, more easily manage a warehouse full of stuff without needing an army of people running around with barcode scanners, scanning everything all the time...But it was not designed with security in mind, which is why all these companies and policies that are being pushed to use it in places which have security concerns should get smacks on the side of the head until they realise that this is NOT the product to do it with.
Except the problem is that RFID is being used in a manner that barcodes are not being used. Everyone knows it is utterly stupid to rely on a barcode as an access code for a company, build, or secured facility. Too bad they did not make the same jump in conclusion with RFID. And because they can store more information in RFID, it is being used to hold personal identification data, not just a number (which is what barcodes encode).
Personally I have not used Comcast's DNS in years because it has been so unreliable. There has only been 1 time I have had service outage that was not due to Comcast's DNS servers not responding in all the years that I have had Comcast internet. I have also only had to call Comcast 1 time, and it was because the reverse lookup on my IP address was wrong, again, their DNS servers and DNS system is crap. I have long been using the 4.2.2.x, and 4.4.4.x servers for my DNS, ever since I totally gave up on Comcast being able to keep a properly working DNS server up and running.
Sorry, in my gall bladder paragraph, I meant to say liver, not kidney as to where the bile is produced. I still had kidneys on my mind from earlier in the post.
You can lose "a" kidney because you have 2. If you lose both, you are dead... We have two because without one we are dead, and they are in a fairly unprotected part of the human body, so our ancestors/predictors who developed two tended to survive to procreate better then the ones without two.
The tonsils are part of the lymphatic system and also help our immune system (like the spleen) mainly by being the mechanism where the ducts for our immune system to access the upper repritory system (i.e. mouth, throat). You can "live" without tosils, but you are more prone to respritory infections, which is manageable in this post-penicillin medical world.
The gall bladder is actually something that is very important to the digestive system. It isn't a "vital" organ (again, meaning you can live without it), but fatty foods will possibly not be handled properly by the body. The gall bladder stores up and concentrates the bile (produced in your kidneys) and regulates when to release it into the digestive tract properly. Without the gall bladder, the kidneys are directly releasing the gall into the tract whenever the kidney produces it. The trigger to produce bile is fat in the blood stream, which happens by absorption in the digestive tract as well as from other sources as well. One possible major drawback to not having a gall bladder is that you might be running to the closest bathroom almost immediately after eating a meal which contained lots of fats because your kidney just dumped a ton of bile into your digestive tract and you have automatic diarrhea from that much gall.
I can tell you exactly why I don't play EVE, because there is no way I can compete with guys how have been there for a year. It isn't just the learning curve, it is how the character gain abilities/skills/etc. EVE is based entirely on how long you have been there with no upper cap, which means guys how have been there will ALWAYS be more powerful then you, no matter WHAT you do. At least in WoW or other MMORPGs, after being there for a while (3-4 months), you actually have a chance to compete with people who have been there for years. It is reverse age-ism on EVE. You will always be a subordinate. While I have to say I liked the idea of removing the ability of some class of players who do nothing but play the game all day every day from completely dominating the game (as is the case in most MMORPGs), in the long run, the method used is very bad for allowing new people from joining due to a permanent "level gap" between new players and old players.
Why the heck are you complaining? New Jersey with a population of 8.6 - 9.1 million (depending on your estimate source for 2008-2009) has a budget of $91.5 BILLION for 2009. And you with your 6.5 million are complaining about a $55 billion budget... Do the math, New Jersey is still spending more per person than you are... We also have a $3.5 billion deficit which is double what Arizona has for the year, yet we aren't trying to sell the state buildings...
Too bad it won't stand the Blinski test....
Took a couple weeks to hash out the database schema. Doing "what if", scenarios and the like to try and take into account future needs. We did a pretty darn good job since it has lasted 10 years now with only very minor changes to the database (adding a field here or there for other data that we felt was pertinent). The main idea is to make sure that it is robust in the sense that anything which could grow or change in the future is in its own table and you simply have a foreign key to easily get the values. Another big deal is to remove as much human input as possible, doing things like pull-down menus or choose from things so that you don't have something like "Sun", "Sun Microsystems", "SunMicro", "sun", "SUn Microsystmes" in a field...
As I said with ours, since we have the building/floor maps, we do not let you physically type in a location, you have to click on the location from the maps. Again, this removes the chances of someone entering strange data. We do as much pattern matching/validity testing as we can do on the data to make sure it is correct, and have a verification page before data is actually input or changed in the database (with highlighting exactly what is changing). It also keeps a "history" of the hardware, along with who updated the data and when. It sounds a lot more involved then it is. A good schema for the database can easily take care of all these things. History is simply a table that is 3 fields, "id", "item_id", and "value", with "id" and auto increment primary key, item_id a foreign key which corresponds to the particular item, and value a text blob which stores HTML formatted text output of the fields that were changed, the old values, the new values, the date, and by whom. The information that gets placed in that is handled by the PHP webpage.
I think we have something like 6-7 tables in our schema. Separating anything that we wanted to keep uniform into its own table which we have an administration front end to modify or add to those tables (things like manufacturers, models, etc). Again the idea is to make as little as possible be up to the human inputting the data so that the data will be consistent which will allow you to actually search for things and be sure that you find all of them, and not miss something because someone made a typo when entering the manufacturer name.
It took probably 4 months from soup to nuts. But at the time, we had to compile everything from source code (something like a LAMP server wasn't really there yet, and you had to compile mysql, apache, and PHP to get them all to work properly back then). Now its a push of a button and it is basically done. In fact we had to compile the compilers before we could compile the LAMP software. A lot has changed in the last 10 years...
We finally made our own. We created a mysql database and table schema storing the hardware information along with the schema for locations in the facility (typically cubicles, offices, labs, and server rooms). Wrote up a website using PHP with proper forms to insert new hardware, move hardware from one location to another, or remove hardware, and search functions to find hardware. We went a little further as well by getting floor and building plans and made clickable image maps for all the locations so that you can just browse to the building/floor/cubicle, see what is in there already, and add new stuff or move existing stuff etc., as well as have a way to highlight the location of a particular piece of hardware if you looked for it based on hostname, etc.
It really isn't that hard to do. And if you setup your database tables and schema correctly so that you can easily expand for new hardware types, buildings/locations, it isn't too hard to maintain. The hardest thing that we deal with is when we move into a new building and we have to generate the floor map, but it doesn't usually take more then a few hours at most.
Which is why I think that any electronic voting system needs a voter verified printout of his/her selections which is the official ballot which is cast. The electronic vote tally is not the official count. The printed ballot could be easily coded so that an electronic counting machine could count the vote (something like an optical scanner, or more like a system which can photograph the ballot and pattern match/color code the vote results). In any case, you have a physical medium which was verified by the voter as the official document. You gain the usability benefits of the electronic system in terms of how you select your vote and still keep the integrity of the paper ballet system by having lasting physical media which can not be easily corrupted as the true ballet.
Too bad almost all computer monitors use the 16:10 aspect ratio (or 8:5)... Do the math 1920/1200 = 16/10....
Well, if this does work, it looks like the waste processing plants will get a complete overhaul. But that assumes there is a easy way to separate the urea from the water and other things that flow down the sewer lines....
Breaking the ToS of a website should simply mean that that website has no obligation to let you continue using the site and can ban you from accessing if it is found that you are in violation of the terms. It is that plain and simple. Go read one of the few good ToS, like the one here at /. for instance. Violating it means that your access to /. or any SourceForge associated site can and will be terminated. But if you look at something like Microsoft's ToS for one of their forums (where-in they claim such things like the copyright to anything posted belongs to Microsoft, including USER posts), is simply ridiculous to believe. There is no official transfer of copyright document as required for copyrighted material, and since that document does not exist, that transfer has not legally happened, no matter what the site says in a ToS. And I am sorry, but bad ToS agreements are the norm for most of the internet, not the exception.
Creating criminal liability for violating a ToS is an extremely bad precedent to create when the norm is bad ToS agreements to begin with. And as I stated, with that precedent, I could do exactly what I posted in my example. And has been shown in the particular case at hand, no one could prove who actually read or agreed to the ToS, and it certainly could not be proven that the defendant was the person who agreed to the ToS, which means she can not be held liable. There were 3 people known to have access to the account, and the one charged was not the one who setup the account, who presumably would be the person most likely to have read an ToS agreement if there was one.
PLEASE!!!!! There havn't been any good space combat sims since this game.
Seriously, the charges she was convicted of were an EXTREMELY BAD precedent to set. Under that same precedent, I could put up a website, where-in, I could specify in the terms and conditions of the agreement "that everyone or everything (bots included), upon accessing the website agree to pay me $20, and must opt out of such payment by clicking on the "do not agree" button on the page within 30 days of accessing the site." And for everyone who does not pay me $20, I can have prosecuted under the same statue used in this case for "hacking" computer systems, because they have access them without my consent and against the terms and conditions of use.
I mean, how are they going to really test that it works? Because, I am sure there are just tons of people out there that want to be exposed to HIV just to see if the vaccine they took actually keeps you from getting a virus that WILL kill you.
Not really. Once you know you have a good training set (i.e. example work that has been verified and attributed to a particular artisan by being signed, or otherwise documented (like how we know which architects designed certain pyramids in Egypt)), that training set could be used to train the computer to look for other works that match the training set. This is no different than what the current experts are doing now to attribute the works to individuals, the difference is that a computer program has been designed to do the analysis, and it worked on the first sample set given to it. I would say that you need to test a few more samples, but the fact that it was correct on all the samples given so far is a good sign.
Seriously here. Why not make sure that there are STRONG WARNINGS on these drugs and require that they also place the warnings on TV Ads (not just in the small print, but actually required spoken warning about exceeding the 2000mg limit, and mention that other drugs like prescription pain killers may also contain this substance and to check with your doctor). I mean, if people know that over-dosing on this WILL seriously damage and potentially kill your liver, they will pay a little more attention to how much they are taking...
As it currently is, with the current ads and warnings, more people think that something like Tylenol with Codeine is pretty safe to take. I mean, its Tylenol, safe for your stomach (too bad just not necessarily safe for your liver).
This isn't just the death of slashdot, it would be the death of the internet itself. No one will be allowed to link to ANY page unless it is owned or operated by the same company without getting express permission. This means that everything grinds to a complete halt because everything written (in the USA at least), IS copyrighted automatically. It might not have a specific copyright on file with the Library of Congress, but it is still copyrighted.
The east coast companies response of looking for local candidates is simply telling you that they are not willing to spend a dime on relocation costs. Your response for getting past that is to let them know that you are already planning on moving there on your own and that you are simply looking in advance for work in the area. Their reluctance is stemming more from the fact that they are tight on the budget and have no room to deal with things like signing bonuses and relocation costs at this time for any talent that they may hire.
You need to learn to read between the layers a little.
Not really. What is dead is Rock. Coolthreads are here to stay, especially now that Oracle bought them. Niagra Falls is the fastest single server Oracle server currently in existence. Oracle is going to continue to build on that platform, with most speculation being that they are going to release a "black box" Oracle solution, which will simply be a drop in place, connect power and network, and turn the key solution, eliminating the need for the company that purchases said solution to have system admins who have had enough Oracle training to know how to properly setup a server to run the database. Oracle will then sell "support" for the systems on a tiered basis. It will most likely be based on the same platform as the Sun Unified Storage System line, like the 7410, even available with Oracle RAC as an option.