Couldn't disagree more. In some places, that 6-figure salary provides you less buying power than one half that size in other areas.

Having a larger cash flow does not equate to a higher standard of living.

Here I went and found the place and forgot to post the link to it.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/472-Racquet-Club-Rd_Leland_MS_38756_M86585-83323?ex=MS553220259#modal_PhotoGallery

Depends entirely on the area. For instance, Mississippi's median household income is a whopping $37,000 while in Maryland it's $70,000. Dig deeper and you find that within those areas there exist hot and cool spots with drastically different numbers.

Put that developer making $99,000 in certain counties of Northern VA, Boston, NYC, SF, etc and he'll be scraping by in a medium size condo or small townhouse. Put him in the middle of Mississippi and he can comfortably afford this 5,000 sq ft 6 bed, 5 bath house sitting on just under 2 acres of land.

Chances are good that if he's making that kind of money, he's in that first group of areas and he's wondering where all his money goes. Salary means little without the context of the particular regions cash flow.

You might wish to do a little more study of history prior to making such statements. One foray into socialism (Mao's Great Leap Forward) resulted in about 30 million people dead. About 2 million of those were suicides. Most of the rest were from famine.

Other attempts have been ... somewhat less successful.

So while Larry Page might be taking home a good bit more money than the developers working for him, and that might make some of us unhappy, what we don't have is millions of people dying in the streets around us.

No wonder employers treat you like dirt.

Works well right up until the economy takes a dive. Then you're not only the last man in (i.e. first man out), you're also so overpriced that nobody will touch you. Meanwhile, the 'chump' down the street who found himself a decent place to work and stayed there, pressing for better wages along the way, is the last guy out the door and is making a lot more than you are when you're standing in the unemployment line. I have a cousin who thought all the job hopping would be great and it was ... for a while. Sure he got that super high salary, got to live in the ritzy area with the nice car, killer stereo, and huge TV. Then the 90s' tech bubble burst and he spent the next ten years (yes, TEN years) looking for steady work in his field.

You all seem to sign up to bad jobs at bad companies. Rather than hopping around for extra cash now, why not do some research on prospective jobs, find the best of the best, get in there, and stay?

With the attitudes expressed here about "extorting" and otherwise screwing over the employer intentionally, it's no wonder they treat you like dirt. With what I've seen written here, sounds like a lot of the posters here deserve it.

To which measurements are you referring? Ground station measurements? Satellite measurements? Tree ring measurements? Other proxies?

Because none of those seem to agree on what's exactly happening with the global temperature. By some measurements, it hasn't risen at all in over a decade.

(and yes, they point to at least some, varying amount of warming that's occurred in the past century, but as the climate is never stationary, that's not necessarily something to worry about)

I'm not against data (though in the case of climate science, much of said data lacks accuracy, precision, or both), I merely question the methodology used in most cases, the selective use of data (specifically, ignoring data which disagrees with the apparently pre-arrived at conclusion), and the conclusions reached when poor data and poorer methods were used.

Your use of the word "denialists" seems to indicate you have a strongly-held belief, which makes reasonable argument impossible. Thus, we cannot explore tree ring data and atmospheric data which contradict ground station data, nor can we discuss ice core data, which is wholly lacking in the requisite precision to compare year-over-year, decade-over-decade, or even century-over-century values for either temperature or atmospheric composition. We cannot rationally debate the varying degrees of inaccuracy introduced into ground station data prior to the wide-scale deployment of computerized, standardized measurement. There are a whole host of perfectly valid issues with current data collection, methodologies, modeling techniques, and other aspects of climatology that become off limits the moment it becomes a topic of belief rather than a topic of rational discussion and debate.

I'm neither a religious zealot nor an oil company shill. I'm a scientifically minded, well informed individual whose only belief is that good science leads to truth. That I take issue with various aspects of modern climatology should not lead anyone to the conclusion that I'm the one who's somehow closed to a given thinking. Rather, it should lead one to consider whether those issues are valid and whether the popular way of thinking is actually based on good science. I'm of the opinion that much of the current work in climatology is based on a house of cards. I also recognize that poor data and poor methods sometimes still wind up leading to some truth. As such, I neither support nor reject the popular thinking on climate change as it relates to human beings' effects thereon. I do most certainly reject the idea that any of this is conclusive or that it's based on good science.

It isn't, and that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, either.

That said, I think most environmentalists are making the wrong argument. Rather than trying to convince the world that driving a car is destroying the planet, focus on the obvious, visible, irrefutable evidence we have of local environmental damage caused by human beings. Find me one AGW skeptic who doesn't think coal slurry and smog are real threats to the local environment and the humans who inhabit it. Find me one single AGW skeptic who doesn't think that fossil fuels are a limited resource which is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to extract. There are plenty of angles to approach this where nearly everyone will agree, allowing progress to be made.

What I've found, however, is that many who hold firm belief in AGW demand all others also believe. This strikes me as religious zealotry; not evidence of good science. I see some (yet far less) of this from supporters of the Theory of Evolution (of which I am one). However, far more often, for supporters of the ToE, there's a genuine attempt to discuss specific complaints or questions. There's also plenty of specific, reproducible scientific evidence they're able to cite. This all seems quite absent anytime someone questions AGW dogma which leads me to think that perhaps there's less confidence in the science behind AGW than there is confidence in the groupthink of its non-scientist supporters.

You're limiting it to homicides just like everyone else who's anti-gun.

What you're essentially saying is that someone who's robbed, raped, and damn near killed (but not quite) should be content with the fact that although they had no legal means of effectively defending themselves, at least their survival is keeping the homicide stats looking nice.

People who think guns are terrible like to point out the UK (which all but bans its citizens from owning firearms) has a much lower rate of gun deaths each year. First of all, limiting it to gun deaths is just plain stupid. Murder victims don't feel better because they're being murdered by something that isn't a gun. Their families don't have less grief because their family member wasn't killed by a gun. So let's drop that right now.

Secondly, let's look at total violent crime rates. Then let's remove violent crimes (including homicides) in which the "victim's" life choices have put them in a position where violence is to be expected (in other words, drug addicts, drug dealers, gang members, etc). If someone chooses to join a violent gang and another violent gang kills that person, I'm vastly less concerned about that and think it should be called out in the statistics. It isn't indicative of the risk of violent crime to ordinary law-abiding citizens.

That aside, when you compare the overall violent crime rates of the United States and nearly any other country on Earth, you find that the US is actually quite good. There's going to be a higher risk of homicide (but again, I'd like to see drug and gang related homicides and other violent crimes separated) in the US, but your risk of being the victim of violent crime overall (things like rape, mugging, serious physical assault, etc) are much lower. In fact, much, much lower. In the last stats I checked (which were probably for 2011), the UK (the gold standard for anti-gun folks) had an overall violent crime rate far higher than some of the worst cities in the US. When you took the whole US' combined statistics, it was something like 1/5th the violent crime rate.

There a lot of guns and people who like guns and own guns at balloon factories?

The point is that the presence of guns or people who like guns has no positive correlation (if anything, it has a negative correlation) with mass shootings. Hence, the reduction of available firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens would likely have little to no positive impact on reducing mass shootings.

But please do continue blabbering on about completely unrelated things in a futile attempt to make a non-existent point.

I'd be curious whether your opinion on this would change were the lives of your family being threatened by brutal savages before your eyes. Perhaps with the lives of those you love being taken before your eyes, you would come to see that there do exist circumstances where a peaceful, law-abiding individual must use deadly force to defend himself and other peaceful, law-abiding people from criminal savages that prey upon the vulnerable.

Don't take this to mean I wish any harm to come to you or those you love; rather, take it to suggest having the wisdom to empathize with those who've been in such a situation and the understanding to realize just how frighteningly common such situations are.

I initially thought you were talking about gun shows when you said "ZERO massacres". Then I saw that you'd qualified that with a year, so you weren't talking about gun shows.

Funny how in all those gun shows full of guns and people who love guns, there's never a mass shooting. It's almost as though it's not possible for an individual to successfully massacre large groups of heavily armed individuals.

I don't think the argument has ever been that less people will die if more responsible citizens have guns. Rather, I think the argument is that there will be less defenseless victims for the uncontrolled criminal savages to prey upon.

Firearms can be an equalizer which enable ordinary people to defend themselves from thieves, thugs, and tyrants alike.

This is great news for all you Hindenburg reenactors out there!

Bingo. This is the major driving force behind the move to virtualization: underutilized hardware. But systems don't scale up and down perfectly, so I can't pay $30 for enterprise grade servers with the processing power of a Pentium II and 10GB of RAM and disks that do 20 IOPS because I'm only ever writing some log files. I have to spend $3,000 for a server that's going to have much of its hardware sitting idle most of the time.

Because having one broken service bring down 40 others is bad and I don't want to have to bring down 40 other services to upgrade a piece of software or troubleshoot a bug. Also, there will be times where some of those physical servers would suddenly experience a huge spike in usage. For instance, the launch of a new piece of content, functionality, etc that makes a huge number of normally idle users either want or need to access the services all of a sudden. What you're suggesting has zero scalability, zero redundancy, zero service isolation, and zero resiliency to software glitches and user error. By completely isolating the OS, you're isolating the services on there and everything else. I can also set limits on hardware utilization so a runaway process isn't eating through the RAM, disk, network, and other shared resources.

The snapshots taken during risky operations take seconds to put in place, seconds to revert, and seconds to remove. It takes hours to image any reasonably large physical system. Enterprise backup solutions take seconds to do full backups of a VM once the first backup has been taken (essentially diffs against the vmdks). Shared enterprise storage allows further backups to be taken in case entire volumes or disk aggregates are lost/deleted/etc.

As for speed, I already talked about this. If you're talking about running an emulator on top of an OS (like VMware Workstation/Player/Fusion etc), then it's going to be slow and hog resources. If you're talking about a hypervisor running on bare metal hardware (like VMware ESX), then the common wisdom is you lose 5-10% of the performance of the system. Meanwhile, you gain scalability, redundancy, resilience, reliability, efficiency, and truly massive cost savings.