Their traffic is up that much?! I assumed they were all but dead.

Also, I thought they sold themselves to GGF and went legit half a decade ago?

This requires a great number of assumptions or an tremendous amount of work to prove them out and there are too many variables to make this viable in more than a few very specific edge cases.

Even if we somehow know that the account belongs to the person it appears to, that the account is active, that it doesn't just appear active due to automatic sign-ins, browser extensions, mobile apps, malware, that someone else doesn't have access to the account (any form of significant other, roommate, family member, etc), that the person actually ever reads their messages (I have an account just so nobody else can use the identity; I sign in maybe twice a year; I can count the number of times I have read my inbox there on one hand), that they read *that* message, etc.

If it were simply enough to say "we know this account really belongs to this person and that they actively login and use the account", then we wouldn't need certified mail or people to serve a summons in person. It would be enough to say "we have a mail address for this person and we'll just send a regular first class mail notification to them". But that *isn't* enough. And neither is saying "well, shit, we sent a facebook message".

And facebook can be more reliable than physical mail? We're going to bank all of this on the reliability of a single third party entity? Didn't we just go through like six months of "gosh, we lost every single email for all these important IRS people of the last five years, because email's supes unreliable, guys!"?

You need to sign for certified mail to verify that you at least received it, after which the onus is on you to consider it important and actually read it. If someone else signs for it or it is never signed for, then there is no verification that *you* received it and that can be proven with a simple signature comparison.

There is no way to verify that this has been done with any sort of online delivery. Saying that "well, it went to his inbox" (or worse, "it went to his fucking facebook messages") or even "his inbox or facebook messages show that they have been read" do not in any way confirm that the message has reached the point upon which the onus is now upon you. There is no way to verify that a human processed the message. Or that a human actually saw and read it. Or that the correct human did. Especially in a world of cracked accounts, handing over your credentials to your bosses, idiots "sharing facebook logins to confirm their love", userscripts, browser extensions, malware, fake accounts, and any number of things.

I mean, relying on facebook or twitter or any other service as some sort of delivery verification is even less reliable than banking on an SMTP DSN, which is itself practically meaningless.

Proof that it has been viewed is more important than delivered. Who cares if it has been delivered to a Facebook account that I don't actually use? And, unfortunately, there is no more proof that someone viewed a document online than there is that someone actually viewed a EULA (skipping it, looking the other way, getting a toddler to click-through for you, etc).

I block ads because I don't need to have every second of my life consumed with being fed advertisements (my adblocker on just one machine has blocked nearly one million ads in just 2014, so far). That it also prevents certain tracking and infection from nefarious advertisements and payloads is just a bonus.

Find a new model or find a new job, nutsacks.

They're not burned out. They have lives now. Wives. Families. Something to do other than be a slave to the corporation.

To be fair, most animals don't allow multiple males to lead the herd/pack/whatever, so it's harder for them to form an attack troupe like humans or chimps do. Yes, there are exceptions, but when those packs encounter another pack it's just as vicious a battle. And they will gang up on a lone intruder as well.

I don't think humans or chimps are as "special" as a lot of people would like to believe them to be. We're just tool-using animals at the root of it all.

Properly tuned DB/2 UDB outperforms Oracle so badly it's not even funny. Sorry, dude, but popularity != quality.

At one point I had 5 machines all networked together, but nowadays you can get enough memory and CPU to install six different database servers on a laptop, so I'm down to one machine. I did have two, but my Linux box recently decided to go tits up so I've shifted everything to my WIndblows 7 laptop instead. Someday I'll buy another box for Linux, but it'll be a long time before I can save enough to buy a new machine -- I have other things that need buying first, and I'm on a disability budget nowadays.

Ah, how I miss the glory days of big-dollar contracting and being able to buy a machine with a bi-weekly paycheque without flinching. :)

Most animals fight for mates. The only reason they don't kill each other is it's tougher for them to be lethal about it. But if a moose could head-butt another moose into oblivion to win a mate, I've no doubt it would do it.

That theory assumes that growth can be virtually unlimited, when it's not. At this point in time, the only energy source we have that can deal with providing the transportation, food growing, and energy needs of the population is fossil fuels. If we continue using fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate, global warming is going to decimate food production. And millions upon billions are going to starve to death, if we aren't killed off by some plague or a nuclear war first.

Still, it does bother me that the biggest population growth centers are those least capable of supporting an increasing population. That makes the likelihood of wars that much greater.

It only concerns me in that a separation of Scotland would likely give the Quebec Separatists a second wind and we'd have to put up with their fantasies of keeping Quebec as it is now, keeping the Canadian dollar, and not taking on their share of the national debt. The Quebec separatists have always been in la-la land compared to the rational approach Scotland is following.

Canada has put up with enough nonsense from the separatists in Quebec. Personally I think if they try it again we should just fence off the original Quebec borders and kick the ungrateful fuckers out of the country.

That's almost as big as when Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft -- it's the end of an era.

It'll be interesting to see what direction Oracle heads without him at the helm.

Okay. So. Do it. I'm not stopping anyone.

Yeah, it's not like Americans spent some $15,000,000,000.00 during Bush's second term to help fight AIDs in Africa, dropping the death rate by some ten percent and saving millions of lives or anything with the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (although, it seems like the funding may have been cut by the following presidency).

Or... any of the countless foundations that spend billions of dollars conducting charitable work in Africa, such as some of those sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.