I, for one, am surprised there has not been a single Oog comment yet.

So, is it safe to say that the Neanderthal DNA may have contributed to the non-complacency which catapulted Western civilization from stone and mud huts to where we are today? It stands to reason that there would be a partial genetic basis, in addition to the fact that places like Europe were more conductive for civilization advancement (more meat animals, 4 seasons, rainfall, etc.).

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I miss the Slashdot days when there were cool stories about the Stanford computing lab matchbox PC and wearable gear that was way ahead of its time...

Yes, absolutely.

Look, if there were a hurricane warning (I'm in Western South Dakota), I'd really kind of expect an "oh shit" reaction. We don't have hurricanes here (... technically - more on that in a second), so I'd expect a proportionate response.

"Northerners" may bawk a bit at Southerners and hteir response to snow, but having lived in the Northeast and in VA, as well as having lived out here in the Black Hills for the past 8 years or so, I can say that the kind of snow you get when it's warm and cools quickly is entirely different than something in the Northeast, where the snow is thick and clingy. The elevation of the originating snowfall also seems to change things.

For instance, we've had a relatively uncommon winter here, for here. :P We've had week-long cycles since December where it'll get up to 50F, then drop in the next day (to eg. 20 or even -20) and rain/snow in the process. You'll get slick, dangerous roads from the rain, which then get powder coated. It's hellish.

This is part of what happened to us last October; we had a thundersnow and osmething like 3' of snow in a matter of a day (an uncommon event for us) with winds >50MPH. So, like a land locked winter hurricane, of sorts. It was unexpected, and it caught a lot of people off guard (wasn't said to be as bad as it was) - but we're used to winter storm events like Floridians are used to hurricanes, so we knew to prepare. But still, we weren't ready for it - it was in mid-October and most plows didn't have eg. winter fuel in them, chains on the tires, etc. and nobody was truly ready.

They should've shut the city down simply because they weren't prepared. This seems like a no-brainer. Having school on a day like this should result in any injuries to children result in criminal charges against the politicians: after all, it's a crime for parents to simply not send their kids to school if school is being held.

That's the short game strategy.

Long game, they're kinda headed in the same direction as Caldera/SCO. You remember them?

Big companies like IBM are 'hardening' their market position in certain areas, not acquiring. Oracle is doing similar - though acquiring assets, they're stripping them of their value to integrate it into their core product offering/identity products.

PCs have become commodity, yes, and the new boom market is in mobile/platform apps and data. MS is moving that way, but it seems they've not moved from their core competency of marketing - there's a LOT of competition in this market, and they're by no means good at it.

A big part of it is, I think, that people are now using Facebook apps on their phones and/or tablets. From the people I know, facebook seems to be somewhere between texting and email, in terms of significance of communication.

Facebook is a thing, 'facebook.com' is a site. We don't do web sites anymore, this is the 'mobile' era.

Their 'peak' nicely coincides with the first Christmas where people bought tablets and started supplanting their desktops with portable devices. With a lot of work places blocking sites like facebook outright due to it causing productivity issues, people are just using their personal/portable devices at work to do so...

You're precisely the kind of person I wouldn't want to hire. Why?

In my experience, the people who stay at a job (at least, an IT job) for more than 3 to 4 years start to languish pretty severely. Their skills get dull, their vision grows narrow, and they become a 'specialist' - usually a specialist of a very small subset of technology, and they lose much of their utility or ability to do things like troubleshoot or think outside the box.

Stability is great, as long as it doesn't lead to stasis. Every organization does need the "long stays", but arguably someone who "gets comfortable" in a position lacks the drive to self-improve.

(It's another story if the employer encourages internal advancement/improvement and that is expected from both sides when the position is taken...)

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.

Probably SusE, its the best choice.

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

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

Solaris is dead. Long live Solaris!

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

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.

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*).

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.

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.