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User: CAIMLAS

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  1. Re:Shocking on Lawsuit: Oracle Called $50K 'Good Money For an Indian' · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So if "going rate" is 60k and I offer someone 50k, that's discriminatory? That happens All. The. Time. Except it happens with "locals" - it's called negotiating from a position of power. Employers think they've got a position of power (ie something the interviewee wants) and use it. How is this any different?

    Why would I ever offer an Indian a job, then? What I understand here is that this is a big mess because the fucking H1B worker didn't get preferential treatment?!

    That's idiotic.

    I hate Oracle on numerous grounds, but I'm on their side on this one.

  2. Re: Gosling's Solaris alternatives? on James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech · · Score: 1

    Probably SusE, its the best choice.

    http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:SPARC

  3. Re: Solaris fees & SPARC on James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech · · Score: 1

    I can't speak for oracle Solaris but all the opensolaris community forks that are based on illumos are pretty much exclusively amd64 now.

  4. solaris on James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech · · Score: 1

    Solaris is dead. Long live Solaris!

    (Illumos/illumian/Nexenta/SmartOS, that is...)

  5. app? on Government Lab Uses Smartphones To Measure Gamma Ray Exposure · · Score: 1

    So, if this research has been done and it's been shown to be tenable, where are the apps so we can do so ourselves?

    Presumably they did this on various Android phones and maybe an iPhone or two? I don't see anything in Play.

  6. Re:Regulations a bit premature on US Light Bulb Phase-Out's Next Step Begins Next Month · · Score: 1

    The quality of the newer bulbs is not sufficient to switch on their own. The lifecycle cost does not justify their use in most places (they don't last as long as advertised, ever, and when energy is cheap, it makes no sense...)

    I've personally gone back through my place with incans and replaced all the dead CCFL bulbs I've bought, such as in the basement. The incans last much longer on average I've found, even the stupidly cheap $0.25 ones. My power bill is no different (not enough to notice) and I've got a fairly high use (due to having kids who don't know how to turn off a light, yet *grumble*).

  7. Re:A tragedy in any other country is success here on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    How do household burglaries, assault, and other violent crime rates track against those firearm restrictions?

    I'd bet they've gone up, if demographic information from other firearm restrictions are to be of any guide.

    Sorry, I'll accept a higher likelihood of being shot if I've got the ability to shoot back, along with the decreased likelihood that violent crime will be perpetrated against me in the first place.

  8. Re:Rule #1 on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    Your rationale justifies fire bombing urban ghettos more so than it justifies banning guns, if you're going to look at actual correlative causation instead of just pure statistics, by the way.

  9. Re: Rule #1 on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    It's slim to nil, once you eliminate the criminal element.

    And for the deaths that do occur from lawful use of firearms in self defense, they're usually from the demographic which is more likely to cause criminal firearm deaths.

  10. Re: Rule #1 on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    If you've got people coming into your house to take you and your family away, do you think a couple guns in the bedstand leading to a shootout with the jackboots might be preferable to dying of starvation in a deathcamp?

    Or maybe they'd like to be able to help rescue their fellow ideologues before they themselves are brought to the camps. You forget that German disarmament occurred long before the Jews and other undesirables were collected. They didn't have the option, they could only keep their heads down.

    Some people would like that option. And you can be assured that collection of undesirables would be much less likely to be the 'right thing to do' when the soldiers doing the collecting are concerned about getting shot while doing so.

  11. Re:no you just have lots and lots of stabbings and on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    What percentage of the UK population is stepped in ghetto thug culture?

    Because that correlates pretty tightly in the US with gun grime rates.

  12. Re:Rule #1 on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    Correlation is not causation. Germany has (and always has) a much different culture than the US. Germans are known (over here) for their stoicism. This may have something to do with the lack of firearm fatalities - you may be surprised to find out that other culture-related crime statistics are also likely different.

  13. Re:police arive within 'minutes' on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    What is absolutely hilarious is the dissonance on this topic. They fear something, don't understand something - so they want to ban it. It's a typical knee-jerk response (for pretty much anyone, for any agenda, but it's particularly bad in this case).

    How can a person, with a straight face, say "prohibition will work" in one case (banning guns, or any variation thereof), while at the same time getting on the soapbox about pot legalization (or similar) is laughable.

    Look, we've tried that. Prohibition has failed. And then it failed again, and again, and again: Prohibition, War on Drugs, etc. Arguably, the illegality of prostitution and long-standing abortion illegality are also related to increased crime rates, violence, and organized crime.

    Prohibition not only directly causes crime by making previously peaceful, legal things illegal but creates a black market, which further increases violence and organized crime.

    If you want to stop gun related crime, stop making everything illegal. Don't make gun-free zones. Don't ban peaceable citizens from owning things they can use for their own self-reliance which are easily acquired by the criminal element through black markets. Start addressing the socioeconomic situations in urban ghettos which are the vast majority of firearm related crime. Do things to get people off welfare, get people jobs, and get their lives drug-free.

  14. Re:police arive within 'minutes' on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    And what of that number once you adjust it for suicides?

    You're left with a number lower than the number of people who drown in a bathtub every year. This makes your statement really kind of silly-stupid:

    "Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby."

    While we're at it, we might as well make it illegal to sleep on your back and to not wear untied shoes.

    Firearms are just a scrapegoat for a political agenda which wants to ignore the real social issues surrounding violent crime.They're cultural and largely relate to the misconceived War on Drugs.

  15. Re:police arive within 'minutes' on How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School · · Score: 1

    MoveOn.org. It's not 2003 anymore.

    In case you haven't been paying attention, there has been more death and killing in Afghanistan during Obama than Bush Jr by a factor of 3. Gitmo is not only still open but it's expanded its efforts, and there are many more privately run detainment facilities now.

    I'd appreciate it, for the sake of an honest argument, if you wouldn't castigate your opponents falsely and negatively simply because you disagree. Should we compare gay rights activists to Nazis as well? Should we say they just want to rape little boys? You're doing the same thing. (The NRA response has never been "more nuts with guns", either. In case I didn't make that clear.)

    You know what's also got a perfect relationship with these mass shooters? Democrat voter registration (where appropriate), left leaning political views, and psychotropic medication for mental illness. Maybe we should be talking about paying more attention to signs of sociopathic tendencies and treating those people accordingly instead of demonizing roughly half the US population?

  16. Re:red v blue on Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US · · Score: 1

    Something you should probably consider is youth exodus, for both maps.

    The best and brightest tend to leave home at a young age and never come back. They go to where the opportunity is, which, if you have an advanced degree or a specialist degree, is not anywhere near your home state (more often than not, if it's got a low population density).

    Also, other data/studies I've read contradict this map. For instance, CA has one of the lowest IQs in the country. Observe:

    http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/05/state-iq-estimates-2009.html

    (This information can be found elsewhere 'officially' but this is quick/easy to digest.)

    Note that CA is the 4th lowest, DC is the lowest, etc. with the more staunchly conservative states right up there with Massachusetts and Vermont (SD, ND). This is composed from official US education data. (I'll note that military brats, who have tumultuous upbringings by anyone's standard (and stereotype), score notably higher than eg. NY, Hawaii, RI, CA, etc. as well. And yes, this data suggests the South is not likely to rise again...)

  17. Re:red v blue on Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of stupid liberals out there, plenty. They'd be stupid conservatives if it wasn't for their drug abuse, welfare recipience, and extra-marital children.

  18. Re:red v blue on Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US · · Score: 1

    Strong social safety nets (or any other social program, really) are not practical or cost effective unless you're dealing with a largely urban environment. So that's where they have the most success, and where they're most often tried.

    Of no significant coincidence, I'm sure, urban environments have more people, which tends to result in a higher amount of diversity of need and thus, a stronger likelihood that a random enterprise may succeed.

    In smaller locales (outside the general interest realm of massive and monopolistic corporations), business owners tend to be highly involved in the community, fostering growth in the community (largely out of self interest).

  19. Re:red v blue on Census Bureau: Majority of Affluent Counties In Northeast US · · Score: 1

    I live in the US and I don't see the division you're speaking of. It's more like:

    * entitlement and statist culture votes left: yuppies, inner-city citizens, welfare recipients, Marxist idealists, etc.
    * self-reliant and culturally conservative culture votes 'right': business owners, contractors, people who depend on strong economic growth for livelihood

    IE, it's not a racial thing. (Of course, there's a looooot of back and forth. Eg. a small family farmer voting for a Democrat (eg. left) because of farm subsidies but also voting for a Republican for another seat for moral/ethical issues. There are quite a few single-issue voters in the US.)

    Populist states - NA, CA, NJ, etc. - at the top of the redistribution curve, and due to their income have less to lose by increased taxes. The threshold between "what I make" and "just getting by" is significantly larger, not only as a percentage of income but also absolute dollars.

    I've noticed there seems to be a fairly significant association between "people who do the actual market production and keep things moving" and conservative voting habits (eg. engineers, business owners, laborers, and other male-dominated fields) and "people who do high-level/service work and 'liberal' voting habits. The more abstracted from the everyman's existential needs, the more likely they are to vote with a leftist policy.

    When you're making 30k, a 1% tax increase means you need to make household budget cuts, because that tax increase 'trickles up', to abuse a term used by economists. That 1% tax increase may cost a chunk of your income, but you'll also have to contend with the increased prices of goods and services which results from the increased costs of doing business, which is caused by needing to increase pay of their employees and increased material costs, all caused by people needing more money to cost justify a specific job.

    If I'm making $100k a year, I'm probably not even going to notice a 1% tax increase.

    Another part of it is ideological affinity. To many people in Western states, it doesn't matter how poor they are. Sure, they want to have more money, but there is a certain pride in eg. the Western US states about being able to say, "I did it my way, pulled myself up by my bootstraps". Ironically, my experience is that it's notably more difficult to actually make a go of a business in these states due to population density, and possibly due to a higher sense of cultural self-reliance and minimalism which naturally leads to less consumption of amenities.

    I would be interested in seeing a county wealth heatmap like this, after adjusted for total cost of living (including state and local taxes). I'm in South Dakota, where we have no state (income) tax, sales tax is 4%, and municipal taxes aren't more than another 2%, IIRC. $40k here goes a lot further than $100k does in eg. the SF Bay area or downstate NY. On 40k, you can comfortably (with spending discretion!) start a family, buy a house with a yard in a nice neighborhood, have paid-off used-in-good-condition vehicles, have money for vacations and/or activities, and not live paycheck to paycheck. That's with a single income, I might add.

  20. Re:I wasn't born yesterday on Is the Porsche Carrera GT Too Dangerous? · · Score: 1

    Some of us still drive those cars.

    The people who were too dangerous in those cars were too dangerous then, too. They got in a lot of accidents. Now, they get in a lot more accidents at higher speeds, with more totaled vehicles.

  21. Re:I'd like to be able to switch it off at will. on Is the Porsche Carrera GT Too Dangerous? · · Score: 1

    We have bad blizzards out here, and the fact is that all the special modern features in newer vehicles (traction control, etc.) basically enable bad drivers to be even worse - often more dangerous.

    Granted, they'd have been out on the road previously, during normal conditions, but in bad driving conditions, they still tend to ignore the differences in road condition and just keep on driving as they had been previously, oblivious to how the vehicle is handling differently. They eat through the margin of error the slip control and abs provide, and when they wreck, it's at a higher speed with more damage to those around them. It's all fun and games to drive down the interstate in your truck at 70mph during whiteout sleet, until you slip into the ditch or hit an oncoming car due to a slick patch...

  22. Re:Not much difference on Building an IT Infrastructure Today vs. 10 Years Ago · · Score: 2

    Another big difference which relates to the list you mentioned: almost nobody runs their own in-house mail anymore. It's too expensive (in time and experience, mostly) to maintain efficiently and effectively, in no small part due to spam. Even larger organizations have decided it's not worth the headache.

    If there is in-house hosting of mail, it's due to complex requirements and the headache that migration would be to another system. Many of these have also put in place either Google or Microsoft frontend filtering to their mail systems.

  23. abstraction on Building an IT Infrastructure Today vs. 10 Years Ago · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The biggest difference in the past 10 years is that everything has been abstracted and there's less time spent dealing with trivial, repetitive things for deployments and upkeep. We support more users now, per administrator, than we did back then by many a massive amplitude.

    No more clickclickclick for various installations on Windows, for instance. No more janky bullshit to have to deal with for proprietary RAID controllers and lengthy offline resilvers. These things have been abstracted in the name of efficiency and the build requirements of cloud/cluster/virtualization/hosting environments.

    We also have a lot more shit to take care of than we did a decade ago. Many of the same systems running 10 years ago are still running - except they've been upgraded and virtualized.

    Instead of many standalone systems, most (good) environments at least have a modicum of proper capacity and scaling engineering that's taken place. Equipment is more reliable, and as such, there's more acceptable cyclomatic complexity allowed: we have complex SAN systems and clustered virtualization systems on which many of these legacy applications sit, as well as many others.

    This also makes our actual problems much more difficult to solve, such as those relating to performance. There are fewer errors but more vague symptoms. We can't just be familiar with performance in a certain context, we have to know how the whole ecosystem will interact when changing timing on a single ethernet device.

    Unfortunately, most people are neither broad or deep enough to handle this kind of sysadmin work, so much of the 'hard work' gets done by support vendors. This is in no small part due to in-house IT staffing budgets being marginal compared to what they were a decade ago, with fewer people at lower overall skill levels. Chances are that the majority of the people doing the work today are the same ones who did it a decade ago, in many locations, simply due to the burden of spinning up to the level required to get the work done. In other places, environments simply limp by simply on the veracity of many cheap systems being able to be thrown at a complex problem, overpowering it with processing and storage which was almost unheard of even 5 years ago.

    The most obnoxious thing which has NOT changed in the past decade is obscenely long boot times. Do I really need to wait 20 minutes still for a system to POST sufficiently to get to my bootloader? Really, IBM, REALLY?!

  24. Re:Only four years? on 25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last · · Score: 1

    How is it not long enough? It corroborates existing, known information - even 'best practice' of assuming drives are more likely to fail after 3 years, as well as that if a drive survives a year, they're likely to survive 3.

    Things are mostly the same across the board. I'm not sure why anyone claiming 10% in the first year is 'low'.

  25. This isn't surprising on 25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last · · Score: 1

    This isn't surprising. To summarize: most early failures happen within the first year, and after 3 years, the survival rate drastically drops off.

    This is a well-known phenomenon in IT storage, and it's why people will typically start replacing storage (or individual disks with any pre-fail signs) after 3 years.

    That said, of the many disks I have still in service, most of them are older than 5 years, and I have some which are pushing 15 years old now without any concern of immediate failure. I've had pretty good luck with disk failures, and have only had SSDs die on me (Kingston, looking at you) personally.