Indeed, clearly higher European tax rates lead to a better recirculation of the wealth and overall fiscal health superior to the US. Unless you actually look at the data. Belgium, Ireland, the UK Spain, Portugal and Greece all have higher private debt defaults than the US as a percentage of GDP, Germany is statistically equivalent. All of those states aside from Germany, despite higher taxes have a higher debt to GDP ratio and again, Germany is roughly equivalent. The Europeans may "love" their higher taxes, but they aren't any better at controlling their spending or debt, quite the opposite. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704140104575056751636031606.html

I've seen similar arguments against using hyper-threading with Java. Curious, have you tried limiting the number of threads to prevent the thrashing or a pbind equivalent to keep a thread closer to a cache pipeline?

Is it me or is Mailinator a blatant rip-off of http://spamgourmet.com/?

Honestly, the MF has bigger issues they should be focused on. If they were killing it, Chrome wouldn't even make the front page. Bloat continues to overtake their software and they're being out-engineered by smaller teams backed by big companies. They should turn their attention inwards first and worry about Chrome second.

Small to mid-sized shops who get by with less than a dozen SAs and who don't have WAN volume replication concerns might go this route, but there is too much risk for Fortune 500. It mostly boils-down to 3rd party applications, hardware and drivers. If you're a F500, you probably have proprietary storage of some sort and you probably rely on volume replication across the WAN. You want to hook into that storage from Linux, you need a "certified" platform and that ain't going to be an arbitrary set of Ubuntu packages. Sure it will probably work from Ubuntu, until you get kernel panics under load. Then your in-house Linux "experts" call support for the storage vendor and they ask what distro version and driver you're using. When you say "Gutsy Gibbon recent" they laugh and refuse to support you. At that point, your idea of community support doesn't look quite so hot considering nobody in the community can repro your hardware/driver issue.