Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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Individually they may pay more taxes(depending how they structure the company of course), but remember you pay tax for earning income and your employer pays tax for paying you, and they add up to quite a lot.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
There isn't really that much risk so long as you're a) short term or b) have multiple clients.
Last I heard the period you had to fall under for this was a full year of exclusive employment. A full year is a damned long time to be consulting for just one company.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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Because self employed contractors run companies, they have to for legal and tax reasons. The earnings(at least in large part) of your company can then be transferred to you via capital gains.
It's like Bill Gates doesn't draw a salary from Microsoft, but that doesn't mean he's not making money.
No, it's more like when you put the name of your wife and her birth date in for a work password. You've given that information to the system, but your employer hasn't collected it. Both of course are shitty passwords.
The fingerprint scanners for a biometric check don't take enough information for someone to have your fingerprints, they generally only take a print for one finger, and the print is usually not able to be removed from the system, so you haven't been finger printed.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Basically, it's a duck law. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck it is a duck.
If you work for one company long term, doing what is essentially a full time position, then you are an employee whether you want to be or not and are entitled to things like health care and you employer is required to pay payroll taxes. It doesn't matter if you call yourself a consultant or work out of some sort of shonky staffing agency, and more importantly it doesn't matter if your employer calls you a consultant and hires you through some shonky staffing agency.
In theory it's to protect the rights of workers so they get all the benefits of full time employees if that's what they are, however in reality it's to close a tax loophole. Ya see the thing is generally speaking capital gains tax is less than income and payroll tax. Consultants running their own companies generally pay capital gains on most of their income whereas employees pay income tax and their employers pay payroll tax, which generates more revenue for the government. The extra benefits for employees are nice too, but that isn't really the goal.
Now the thing about this law is that if you actually are a consultant(you know, changing clients regularly, working for multiple clients, or doing work that isn't standard 9-5 work) none of this affects you, you're still a consultant and you still get the pluses and minuses of that arrangement. If you're not really a consultant(more than a year at the same place, no additional clients, doing what would normally be a salaried position) then your employer has to treat you as an employee. This means paying payroll tax, health benefits, 401k if applicable, which is of course expensive. Generally speaking if this happens a company decides to either get a real consultant or get a real employee. If they make you a real employee it generally means a pay cut(since they're paying all those benefits) and essentially the end of the little consulting business you had going.
Now none of this is in and of itself a problem, people who were being exploited got their proper benefits, the tax man got his money, and real consultants weren't affected. The problem is that some people are either stupid or lying to themselves. They want all the stability and routine of a salaried position with the higher salary, lower taxes, and theoretical freedom of a consultant. Essentially they want to be consultants without incurring any risk. This, of course, doesn't work because the loser in this relationship is the government who gets fewer tax dollars, and everyone who does the right thing since they're paying extra tax to make up for you dodging yours.
There were a few problems because of people who really couldn't face doing either real consulting or real employment(which this guy seems to be one of with the whole slave thing) or who invested a lot of money and time into their business shell even though they weren't actually using it. All in all it's a fair law though, real consultants stay consultants, real employees stay employees, people who are in the wrong category get moved to the right one. Everyone pays the taxes they owe.
The moral of the story is that consultants get higher pay and lower taxes because they incur higher risk(a consultant/contractor may or may not have work at any given time and has pretty much zero protections) and you can't get rid of the risk and still retain the other benefits.
It's far to expensive, and at present they can get better performance and better size out of liquid crystals. The XEL-1 sells abysmally, it costs more than a substantially larger screen with comparable quality. No amount of early adopters are going to fix that, and it'd likely be crazy for Sony to push it too hard in a much better economy, forget the one we're in today.
The day will come for OLEDs, just like it came for blue lasers in optical drives(I remember hearing about those when CD drives were still around 4x and DVDs were still pretty rare. There will be a tech break through and the cost will drop, or the limits of liquid crystals will finally be reached and companies will be forced to go to new technology, but it hasn't happened yet.
And to the best of my knowledge, a modern sea kayak would have been substantially beyond what it was believed humans were capable of over 100 thousand years ago. I can drive from one side of the country to the other in a car in just a few days. Even a few hundred years ago, that trip would have been considered almost impossible.
That's only actually a fairly recent phenomena. Even the ancient Greeks who were more about the physical body and manliness than most respected their blacksmiths. They sure as hell didn't like them, they stank for one, but the guy who can make your shiny new weapon which is better than your old weapon is someone you have to pay attention to.
According to TFA(or at least one of the many I've read on this subject so far), the tools are of a style used by pre-humans 700,000 years or so ago. They're not saying that these tools are necessarily that old, or that they're made by pre-humans, just that the tools are of that style. It's a bit like finding a katana in a rubbish tip in New Jersey. You can't say that it was made by someone who was Japanese, but you can say that it might have been. The discovery is very new, and they'll find out more in due time.
As to the rest of it, what does it matter whether they came from Greece or from Africa. They think based on the evidence(the style of the tools, the known populations at that time) that it's more likely Africa, but it doesn't really matter.
Two thousand tools is a hell of a lot, you're talking about a large number of individuals even if they weren't all there simultaneously. That means at the very least a community of some description, and likely a fairly large one for that kind of time period. To get a population that large you'd have to get there, likely on purpose. Yes 20 miles is a lot less impressive than 200, but it's still sea travel. It's still taking enough people to build a population 20 miles over the sea. To get from mainland Greece they'd have to do it several times. Even under those circumstances it's a hell of a lot more than we thought people at that time were capable of.
Learn JEE. Learn some hibernate, learn struts, learn about containers, and servlets, and beans. Learn about JDBC and relational databases. Learn JPA and see how great it is and how crap it is. Then actually do something with it.
Or it could be the fact that pre-release infringement is a felony in the US, and if it isn't here(I don't actually know) the US and Australia do have an extradition agreement. It's true they might not have let him get extradited over this kind of offense, but I wouldn't bet on them stepping in and using political capital to save this guys sorry ass.
Personally if I were offered a choice to pay 1.5 million(which I'll probably avoid by going bankrupt) or serve jail time in a foreign country. Especially when I know I'm guilty of the crime and I'm 24 years old and so don't get to pull childish stupidity as a mitigating defense with the judge, I'd take it. Especially when my only defense was a bullshit "I wanted to prove I'd gotten it".
The guy was an idiot, we all know by now that while your odds of getting caught distributing pirated software is fairly low, that the content companies come down on pre-release like a tonne of bricks. He did something stupid, he didn't cover his tracks very well, and he's offered himself up for some serious pain as a consequence. Nintendo didn't need to offer him a deal to become the poster boy, they could have made his life a hell of a lot more miserable than 1.5 million.
Come on, you know the law on this, we all do by now.
The hardware is yours the service isn't and that includes the updates. You're free to do whatever you like with your hardware, but you forgo your rights to any services Microsoft may offer you(including support, updates and Live) if you do so. If not having an update means you can't play your game, that's the price you pay, you're otherwise free to do whatever you like with it.
I'd argue the same should probably have been true in the Nintendo case, but I think this may have been one of those taking it too far cases. It's one thing to sell a device to allow for fair backups of our games (which might not actually apply here, we didn't have legal format shifting till a couple years ago), but it's another to sell pirated games on that device. I don't know if this specific company was involved in that, but I do know it goes on. Plus of course, after the iiNet decision which is one of the greatest online copyright decisions of the internet age, our court system had to have something asinine to keep things in balance.
Manual transmission really does bugger all for fuel efficiency compared to a well tuned automatic transmission. That's not to say that automatic transmissions are always efficient, they aren't, but that's a separate problem.
As for the speed limit, 55 MPH far far far to fast to be driving anywhere other than highways. Smaller roads just have too much going on them to be driving at that speed.
It's not really a marketing department issue. The marketing departments might be blocking them, but they're blocking them because they won't sell.
Cars which are incredibly aerodynamic are so at the expense of other more important factors. They are generally impractical because they don't have enough seating, the seating is uncomfortable, they have little to no storage space, and at least in the current road systems, they are ridiculously unsafe. Essentially you end up with a gasoline powered bicycle with all the disadvantages of a bicycle with very few of the advantages(cost, ease of parking, effect on fitness).
Aerodynamics is probably the easiest and cheapest way of increasing fuel efficiency, but you may as well tell everyone to throw away their cars and ride bikes(which would be even cheaper and more effective.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).
The other solutions involve redesigning cities to one degree or another. Making them more public transport friendly, adding infrastructure for full electric cars(or ones with petrol only as a backup), improving traffic flow, and creating cities where people can work outside the city center closer to their homes.
The problem with that is it's difficult and expensive.
That's why you have metrics for page faults. If you don't have any page faults you're not swapping. If you have some you're probably slightly over utilized or doing something odd. If you have a lot, you have a problem.
The issue with ext4 had to do with dirty cache not being written to disk in a timely manner. This meant that you could have disk writes you thought had already happened and certain actions could get out of sync because of they way they'd been written.
The cache in this case is not dirty(in fact it's read only) so there's no risk of losing data (since most of the time the data on the disk and the data in memory are identical and when they're not the disk is right).
The old office quick starter, and the adobe acrobat version of the same thing were like that. They started applications at startup which would use up system memory(they were real applications actively running and had the same priority as any other app) to make those applications appear to start up faster. That was(and in the case of adobe at least is) a cheat and a pain in the ass. Loading an application in the background so that if I try to use it it's already running is a bad thing.
On the other this is not like this. Windows tries to guess which data from the hard drive I might want want in the immediate future. It then pulls this data into memory when I'm not trying to use the disk for something else. If it's wrong, it flushes the data away and no harm is done, but if it's right then I've saved the time taken to pull that data.
Seems to me that unless it's designed really poorly(paging loaded applications to do this, trying to cache disk when you're using disk IO for other functions, etc) then little to no disadvantage for a chance at great advantage is a pretty good thing.
They are NOT finger printing him. They are having him clock on with a biometric finger print scan. There are certainly concerns with this sort of thing, but it's not the same.
Certainly there are issues with biometric scanning in regards to the quality of the scanners and what you do if your biometrics get compromised(which is possible), but biometric scanning is not the same as being fingerprinted. They'll only ever take one finger, and generally speaking the resulting hash probably won't even be useful outside the proprietary hardware it's running on.
As for looking for a new job, after making a huge fuss about this and accusing them of acting like a police state in the papers, they're more than likely to sack his ass anyway.
Yes, but the only evidence we have that anything you "do need" is being swapped out is presumptions from someone who rights crappy overpriced performance monitoring software.
They don't say that Windows 7 generates ____ page faults, they just say memory was highly utilized which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I've never seen this behavior in Windows 7, nor have I ever heard of anyone who has. If it was really causing swapping on 86% of PCs we'd have seen something about this before now. It's just as likely that the monitoring software has a memory leak on Windows 7 as anything else.
As a side note, hasn't the SSD myth been debugged by now? Last I checked the math, writing the volume of the disk every single day would give you thirty years before the drive died and it scaled in a linear fashion. Even noatime probably isn't actually necessary on an SSD.
Looking at my windows 7 system. it does appear that you are correct and disk cache is not included in the "In Use" Category. However it isn't included in the "Free" category either, but rather in "Available", so if they're crappy software is reading the "free" category instead of "available" that won't include cached disk.
It's also possible of course that they're monitoring software leaks like a sieve on 86% of windows machines, which is entirely plausible.
There is no speed difference between loading data off the hard drive into empty memory vs loading the data into memory which is being used for cache. You still have to load the same memory either way, and wait for the same delays.
The reason you get memory issues when your memory is over full is because the data which is being taken out of memory may either be modified(in which case it needs to be written back to the disk cache) or reread at a later date.
If the data doesn't need to be written back to the system(because it hasn't been modified) and isn't going to have to be fetched again in a few seconds, then you get no performance degradation at all.
Generally speaking you will get much better performance having RAM full of stuff you might need, as opposed to empty since if you do need it you won't need to fetch data from the disk.
Basically any site this large will have a policy in place requiring all data to be saved onto a network drive. People of course don't do this, for any number of reasons, some good, some bad.
However, whatever their reasons, generally speaking, IT departments have no real sympathy for people who violate this specific policy and will generally only spend any significant time trying to restore files stored in this way if the person who lost their files is high enough up to cause trouble.
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Individually they may pay more taxes(depending how they structure the company of course), but remember you pay tax for earning income and your employer pays tax for paying you, and they add up to quite a lot.
There isn't really that much risk so long as you're a) short term or b) have multiple clients.
Last I heard the period you had to fall under for this was a full year of exclusive employment. A full year is a damned long time to be consulting for just one company.
Because self employed contractors run companies, they have to for legal and tax reasons. The earnings(at least in large part) of your company can then be transferred to you via capital gains.
It's like Bill Gates doesn't draw a salary from Microsoft, but that doesn't mean he's not making money.
No, it's more like when you put the name of your wife and her birth date in for a work password. You've given that information to the system, but your employer hasn't collected it. Both of course are shitty passwords.
The fingerprint scanners for a biometric check don't take enough information for someone to have your fingerprints, they generally only take a print for one finger, and the print is usually not able to be removed from the system, so you haven't been finger printed.
Basically, it's a duck law. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck it is a duck.
If you work for one company long term, doing what is essentially a full time position, then you are an employee whether you want to be or not and are entitled to things like health care and you employer is required to pay payroll taxes. It doesn't matter if you call yourself a consultant or work out of some sort of shonky staffing agency, and more importantly it doesn't matter if your employer calls you a consultant and hires you through some shonky staffing agency.
In theory it's to protect the rights of workers so they get all the benefits of full time employees if that's what they are, however in reality it's to close a tax loophole. Ya see the thing is generally speaking capital gains tax is less than income and payroll tax. Consultants running their own companies generally pay capital gains on most of their income whereas employees pay income tax and their employers pay payroll tax, which generates more revenue for the government. The extra benefits for employees are nice too, but that isn't really the goal.
Now the thing about this law is that if you actually are a consultant(you know, changing clients regularly, working for multiple clients, or doing work that isn't standard 9-5 work) none of this affects you, you're still a consultant and you still get the pluses and minuses of that arrangement. If you're not really a consultant(more than a year at the same place, no additional clients, doing what would normally be a salaried position) then your employer has to treat you as an employee. This means paying payroll tax, health benefits, 401k if applicable, which is of course expensive. Generally speaking if this happens a company decides to either get a real consultant or get a real employee. If they make you a real employee it generally means a pay cut(since they're paying all those benefits) and essentially the end of the little consulting business you had going.
Now none of this is in and of itself a problem, people who were being exploited got their proper benefits, the tax man got his money, and real consultants weren't affected. The problem is that some people are either stupid or lying to themselves. They want all the stability and routine of a salaried position with the higher salary, lower taxes, and theoretical freedom of a consultant. Essentially they want to be consultants without incurring any risk. This, of course, doesn't work because the loser in this relationship is the government who gets fewer tax dollars, and everyone who does the right thing since they're paying extra tax to make up for you dodging yours.
There were a few problems because of people who really couldn't face doing either real consulting or real employment(which this guy seems to be one of with the whole slave thing) or who invested a lot of money and time into their business shell even though they weren't actually using it. All in all it's a fair law though, real consultants stay consultants, real employees stay employees, people who are in the wrong category get moved to the right one. Everyone pays the taxes they owe.
The moral of the story is that consultants get higher pay and lower taxes because they incur higher risk(a consultant/contractor may or may not have work at any given time and has pretty much zero protections) and you can't get rid of the risk and still retain the other benefits.
It's far to expensive, and at present they can get better performance and better size out of liquid crystals. The XEL-1 sells abysmally, it costs more than a substantially larger screen with comparable quality. No amount of early adopters are going to fix that, and it'd likely be crazy for Sony to push it too hard in a much better economy, forget the one we're in today.
The day will come for OLEDs, just like it came for blue lasers in optical drives(I remember hearing about those when CD drives were still around 4x and DVDs were still pretty rare. There will be a tech break through and the cost will drop, or the limits of liquid crystals will finally be reached and companies will be forced to go to new technology, but it hasn't happened yet.
And to the best of my knowledge, a modern sea kayak would have been substantially beyond what it was believed humans were capable of over 100 thousand years ago. I can drive from one side of the country to the other in a car in just a few days. Even a few hundred years ago, that trip would have been considered almost impossible.
That's only actually a fairly recent phenomena. Even the ancient Greeks who were more about the physical body and manliness than most respected their blacksmiths. They sure as hell didn't like them, they stank for one, but the guy who can make your shiny new weapon which is better than your old weapon is someone you have to pay attention to.
According to TFA(or at least one of the many I've read on this subject so far), the tools are of a style used by pre-humans 700,000 years or so ago. They're not saying that these tools are necessarily that old, or that they're made by pre-humans, just that the tools are of that style. It's a bit like finding a katana in a rubbish tip in New Jersey. You can't say that it was made by someone who was Japanese, but you can say that it might have been. The discovery is very new, and they'll find out more in due time.
As to the rest of it, what does it matter whether they came from Greece or from Africa. They think based on the evidence(the style of the tools, the known populations at that time) that it's more likely Africa, but it doesn't really matter.
Two thousand tools is a hell of a lot, you're talking about a large number of individuals even if they weren't all there simultaneously. That means at the very least a community of some description, and likely a fairly large one for that kind of time period. To get a population that large you'd have to get there, likely on purpose. Yes 20 miles is a lot less impressive than 200, but it's still sea travel. It's still taking enough people to build a population 20 miles over the sea. To get from mainland Greece they'd have to do it several times. Even under those circumstances it's a hell of a lot more than we thought people at that time were capable of.
Learn JEE. Learn some hibernate, learn struts, learn about containers, and servlets, and beans. Learn about JDBC and relational databases. Learn JPA and see how great it is and how crap it is. Then actually do something with it.
Or it could be the fact that pre-release infringement is a felony in the US, and if it isn't here(I don't actually know) the US and Australia do have an extradition agreement. It's true they might not have let him get extradited over this kind of offense, but I wouldn't bet on them stepping in and using political capital to save this guys sorry ass.
Personally if I were offered a choice to pay 1.5 million(which I'll probably avoid by going bankrupt) or serve jail time in a foreign country. Especially when I know I'm guilty of the crime and I'm 24 years old and so don't get to pull childish stupidity as a mitigating defense with the judge, I'd take it. Especially when my only defense was a bullshit "I wanted to prove I'd gotten it".
The guy was an idiot, we all know by now that while your odds of getting caught distributing pirated software is fairly low, that the content companies come down on pre-release like a tonne of bricks. He did something stupid, he didn't cover his tracks very well, and he's offered himself up for some serious pain as a consequence. Nintendo didn't need to offer him a deal to become the poster boy, they could have made his life a hell of a lot more miserable than 1.5 million.
Come on, you know the law on this, we all do by now.
The hardware is yours the service isn't and that includes the updates. You're free to do whatever you like with your hardware, but you forgo your rights to any services Microsoft may offer you(including support, updates and Live) if you do so. If not having an update means you can't play your game, that's the price you pay, you're otherwise free to do whatever you like with it.
I'd argue the same should probably have been true in the Nintendo case, but I think this may have been one of those taking it too far cases. It's one thing to sell a device to allow for fair backups of our games (which might not actually apply here, we didn't have legal format shifting till a couple years ago), but it's another to sell pirated games on that device. I don't know if this specific company was involved in that, but I do know it goes on. Plus of course, after the iiNet decision which is one of the greatest online copyright decisions of the internet age, our court system had to have something asinine to keep things in balance.
Oh, it can be done, you'd just have to be sure you weren't going to be getting load fluctuations.
Somehow I think that after being stuffed in a tiny tube with no air conditioner you wouldn't be an awful lot better.
Manual transmission really does bugger all for fuel efficiency compared to a well tuned automatic transmission. That's not to say that automatic transmissions are always efficient, they aren't, but that's a separate problem.
As for the speed limit, 55 MPH far far far to fast to be driving anywhere other than highways. Smaller roads just have too much going on them to be driving at that speed.
It's not really a marketing department issue. The marketing departments might be blocking them, but they're blocking them because they won't sell.
Cars which are incredibly aerodynamic are so at the expense of other more important factors. They are generally impractical because they don't have enough seating, the seating is uncomfortable, they have little to no storage space, and at least in the current road systems, they are ridiculously unsafe. Essentially you end up with a gasoline powered bicycle with all the disadvantages of a bicycle with very few of the advantages(cost, ease of parking, effect on fitness).
Aerodynamics is probably the easiest and cheapest way of increasing fuel efficiency, but you may as well tell everyone to throw away their cars and ride bikes(which would be even cheaper and more effective.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).
The other solutions involve redesigning cities to one degree or another. Making them more public transport friendly, adding infrastructure for full electric cars(or ones with petrol only as a backup), improving traffic flow, and creating cities where people can work outside the city center closer to their homes.
The problem with that is it's difficult and expensive.
100% continuously is pretty ballsy unless you really really know your server loads.
That's why you have metrics for page faults. If you don't have any page faults you're not swapping. If you have some you're probably slightly over utilized or doing something odd. If you have a lot, you have a problem.
Sort of.
The issue with ext4 had to do with dirty cache not being written to disk in a timely manner. This meant that you could have disk writes you thought had already happened and certain actions could get out of sync because of they way they'd been written.
The cache in this case is not dirty(in fact it's read only) so there's no risk of losing data (since most of the time the data on the disk and the data in memory are identical and when they're not the disk is right).
I think your confused.
The old office quick starter, and the adobe acrobat version of the same thing were like that. They started applications at startup which would use up system memory(they were real applications actively running and had the same priority as any other app) to make those applications appear to start up faster. That was(and in the case of adobe at least is) a cheat and a pain in the ass. Loading an application in the background so that if I try to use it it's already running is a bad thing.
On the other this is not like this. Windows tries to guess which data from the hard drive I might want want in the immediate future. It then pulls this data into memory when I'm not trying to use the disk for something else. If it's wrong, it flushes the data away and no harm is done, but if it's right then I've saved the time taken to pull that data.
Seems to me that unless it's designed really poorly(paging loaded applications to do this, trying to cache disk when you're using disk IO for other functions, etc) then little to no disadvantage for a chance at great advantage is a pretty good thing.
Let's get something clear here.
They are NOT finger printing him. They are having him clock on with a biometric finger print scan. There are certainly concerns with this sort of thing, but it's not the same.
Certainly there are issues with biometric scanning in regards to the quality of the scanners and what you do if your biometrics get compromised(which is possible), but biometric scanning is not the same as being fingerprinted. They'll only ever take one finger, and generally speaking the resulting hash probably won't even be useful outside the proprietary hardware it's running on.
As for looking for a new job, after making a huge fuss about this and accusing them of acting like a police state in the papers, they're more than likely to sack his ass anyway.
Yes, but the only evidence we have that anything you "do need" is being swapped out is presumptions from someone who rights crappy overpriced performance monitoring software.
They don't say that Windows 7 generates ____ page faults, they just say memory was highly utilized which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I've never seen this behavior in Windows 7, nor have I ever heard of anyone who has. If it was really causing swapping on 86% of PCs we'd have seen something about this before now. It's just as likely that the monitoring software has a memory leak on Windows 7 as anything else.
As a side note, hasn't the SSD myth been debugged by now? Last I checked the math, writing the volume of the disk every single day would give you thirty years before the drive died and it scaled in a linear fashion. Even noatime probably isn't actually necessary on an SSD.
It depends what they're monitoring.
Looking at my windows 7 system. it does appear that you are correct and disk cache is not included in the "In Use" Category. However it isn't included in the "Free" category either, but rather in "Available", so if they're crappy software is reading the "free" category instead of "available" that won't include cached disk.
It's also possible of course that they're monitoring software leaks like a sieve on 86% of windows machines, which is entirely plausible.
There is no speed difference between loading data off the hard drive into empty memory vs loading the data into memory which is being used for cache. You still have to load the same memory either way, and wait for the same delays.
The reason you get memory issues when your memory is over full is because the data which is being taken out of memory may either be modified(in which case it needs to be written back to the disk cache) or reread at a later date.
If the data doesn't need to be written back to the system(because it hasn't been modified) and isn't going to have to be fetched again in a few seconds, then you get no performance degradation at all.
Generally speaking you will get much better performance having RAM full of stuff you might need, as opposed to empty since if you do need it you won't need to fetch data from the disk.
It's called lessons learned the hard way.
Basically any site this large will have a policy in place requiring all data to be saved onto a network drive. People of course don't do this, for any number of reasons, some good, some bad.
However, whatever their reasons, generally speaking, IT departments have no real sympathy for people who violate this specific policy and will generally only spend any significant time trying to restore files stored in this way if the person who lost their files is high enough up to cause trouble.