An avid football fan calls their equally fanatic friend after their team scores the winning goal and yells, "GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!" The friend yells the same thing back, everyone is excited, and both they shout about how much they love their country. After no more than fifteen seconds of conversation, they both hang up.

Sure, some people might not be able to understand why these two people are so football crazy, but everyone can identify that something rich and emotional just happened. But when the exact same thing happens on twitter, it gets denounced it as 'useless observation.' Why?

They actually do talk about that in the article. The difference in cost for one of the homegrown petabyte pods from the cheapest suppliers (Dell) is about $700,000. The difference between their pods and cloud services is over $2.7 million per petabyte. And they have many, many petabytes. Even if you do add "a few hundred thousand a year for the people who need to maintain this hardware" - and Dell isn't going to come down in the middle of the night when your power goes out - they are still way, way on top.

I know you don't pay premiums because you're stupid. But think about how much those premiums are actually costing you, what you are getting in return, and if it is worth it.

No, this is Scala, a language that is a blend of functional and object oriented programming. Scalia [wikipedia.org] is mix of textualism and originalism with a very conservative framework. Some consider its inability to recuse itself to be its greatest asset.

Eh, different tools for different jobs.

Hate to break this to you little girl, but especially in the textile industry during this new Industrial Age, this is just the way it is. My boss, like many others, seems to think that by being my employer, he dictates what I work, where I live, what I eat, who I can associate with... even if that means I neglect my family and health. In fact, I lost an arm in one of the factory machines a few years ago - didn't see me trying to fight the system, because I know how hard it is. Don't like it? Leave and don't come back.

The laws in place to protect against such things are way too mild and useless. Someone can fire you for being maimed in their own machinery or assaulted by their own managers... you can even get fired for refusing to have sex with your manager... and then get fired for getting pregnant if you do! Sure it isn't legal, but the trouble you have to go through to fight it, then what you get in return for doing so is horribly skewed.

The only solution, my dear child worker, is to find another job. Don't bother forming a union with others - strikes have never worked and never will. Don't bother protesting, or trying to raise awareness by getting your story out. Don't try the courts - they are just a horrific waste of time stacked against you. And especially don't bother voting - except with your feet to another employer. What? You can't leave because nobody will hire a child who has already run away from a factory? You can't leave because you don't have the money to go looking for another job because you're employed 17 hours a day just to eat? Well child, the best you can do is be resigned to your life of virtual slavery, complaining to yourself that the system just doesn't work for you. It may not be right. It may not be fair. That IS how it is.

This is the piece of advice that is always thrown around in these kinds of discussions - and for good reason - but it doesn't get you anything more than peace of mind. Yes, you should obviously ask that question in the interview, but that doesn't guarantee you anything. First, it is incredibly easy and tempting for the employer to simply 'underestimate' on such a question, and you will rarely get anything in writing to bind that spoken assurance. Another situation in bigger companies is that the person with whom you're interviewing/negotiating is not actually the one giving you assignments and performance evals. You should ask to talk to your immediate supervisor(s) and get their word on these issues (and other things as well). Finally, corporate cultures can change in an instant. Profits drop, management gets shuffled, consultants are hired, synergy is synergized, policies and regulations are streamlined, and then your 40 hours + 10 hours extra once a month gets turned into 55-60 hours a week every week.

If the company is big enough and you don't have to make a decision on an offer instantly, the best thing you can do is ask for a copy of their employee regulations. If they have a formalized policy on a specific aspect, like overtime pay or on-call hours, then you can have some security in your decision. But if all you have is a pat on the shoulder, a warm smile, and an empty promise, I wouldn't feel too secure.

The Supreme Court overturned 68% of all cases it decided to hear last year (and 74% the year before that!), so she actually is below average in terms of reversals. But you're confusing appealed with heard - every decision gets appealed to the Supreme Court, if the client still has money to pay for the lawyer. She only had 1.2% of her decisions overturned, which is a far lower figure.

Source: Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/id/199955

If you wear a mask to rob a bank, you will get a harsher sentence than if you rob a bank without a mask. Now, masks aren't banned - you are totally free to wear one in public. Wearing a mask is neither a crime nor suspicious behavior that can be used as evidence of a crime by itself. The increased punishment only applies if you commit a crime wearing a mask.

Now replace mask with proxy.

I'll be the first to admit that this seems pretty tricky at first - that the GNU and Wikipedia could get together and retroactively re-license an entire project through the "later versions" clause. However, the later versions have to be "similar in spirit" to the original in order for this to happen. If they did this to re-license Wikipedia's GFDL content under the BSD license or the public domain, that would not be similar in spirit. The differences between the CCSA and the GFDL are minor, especially in the context of Wikipedia - which uses no front cover texts or invariant sections. The big one is the need to attach a copy of the license to the content (as opposed to a URI to the license) - it is a bit absurd that I've violated the GFDL by printing out a copy of a Wikipedia article and giving it to my students, because I didn't think to attach a copy of the GFDL to it.

To be fair, there is a 1 in 9,999 chance that 9999 are the last 4 digits of someone's SSN. Statistically speaking, it is no less and no more common than 8425, 1234, or 0001. However, there are no valid social security numbers ending in 0000 - they should use that as the default.

That's the 21st century version of failing a student for referencing a book from a "popular press" like Penguin, Harper, Random House, Doubleday, etc. No joke, one of my professors told me that when he was in grad school, he was publicly berated for citing one such book, even though it was a reprinted out-of-copyright classic. He was told he should have gotten the reprint published by a university press.

Wow, it looks like you just don't get the point, or you're just trying to be "edgy" by straw-manning a popular service. Why do you and the other posters in this thread get so angry over something that other people genuinely use but you don't find useful?

And no, I am not so important that everyone is interested in what I am doing, but the twenty-five or so people who follow me on Twitter do. If not, they wouldn't be following me. And I actually am interested in what all the people I am following are doing. If not, I wouldn't be following them - and I have dropped people who I don't care about or those update every thirty minutes. Twitter lets me stay connected to my friends without all the bloat of something like Facebook. If you don't want to know when I'm going shopping, then don't follow me on Twitter and shut up.