... and you're suppose to just take their word that those were the only changes? If they had access to make changes then the chain of evidence is tainted... who knows that happened.

I think you're confusing jerk-off with asshole. A jerk-off is what you're describing in the first sentence, and also the environment that eventually turns other people into assholes.

A true asshole does quality work, but quickly becomes annoyed when:
- people check in "shit" code that fixes the symptom without addressing the actual problem
- they have to adhere to shit specs they had no input on
- they have to work with jerk-offs (as defined above)

"Know your shit" OR "Know you're shit"

I have a DNS-323 NAS device. It's an ARM based low power server with SATA and GigE. It's worked for years, but it is getting out dated. Even though it has GigE and a reasonable HDD I can only push 13MiB/s. Plus, it doesn't properly support 4k IO. I would really like to see an open source and open hardware version of this. I've searched around for SATA and GigE on ARM a couple years ago and you could find one or the other but not both.

The commercial alternatives are $200-800 without drives so there is room to bump the price.

By the way, if you'll never need more than 640k of memory why does this thing have 512MB?!!! Seems a little over kill already... so why not go one step further :)

The other guys were given scripts!? I was freelancing the whole time... where can I join this "astroturfer" group you speak of?

Trust me, that is never an issue. From my experience any time you give an organization free space... it will be filled!

Now, I'm not saying it will be useful stuff, but it will be full.

What about the energy offset?

How much energy is consumed by driving to blockbuster, picking up a physical tape that had to be produced and shipped to the store Vs. streaming from Netflix?
How about paying bills online vs mailing an envelope.

I'm not sure what the number is but it may be possible that for every increase in energy 'x' by computers there was '5x' amount of energy saved in other areas???

They are relying on Oracle Db dominance to bring in the T5. They are working on adding "software on silicon" to future processors so certain DB calls happen at HW speeds.

As long as Oracle DB has market dominance, then anyone who needs to squeeze absolute performance from their DB; then they logical choice will be SPARC.
With that user base they can move in to other segments.

I have nothing against "software on silicon". However, it does smell of anti-competition... I doubt Oracle works with other CHIP designers on this HW API... but I could be wrong.

You are utterly wrong. Without regulation there would be no capitalism.

In the early industrial revolution of Britain it was the wild west of commerce. Rival companies could mimic the packaging of quality brands. It was also said some vendors would dust used tea leaves in lead to make them look new again to resell. These were all practices to mislead the consumer.

Sure, caveat emptor. But if the consumer is continually mislead how can they make valid choices and how can the invisible hand work. There needs to be some regulation to ensure capitalism works.

As HSBC and the drug cartels have proven, regulation only encourages organization. Sure it pushes mom&pop dealers out, but do you really want powerful cartels running everything?

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/report-hsbc-allowed-money-laundering-likely-funded-terror-drugs-889170

Is paypal regulated in a similar manner?!

Not that I agree with this, but I do hate paypal.

Unlike religion, taxonomy is based on science. You can't just name something a new species because of a slight variation.

Species:
A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.

If the short wing swallows can breed with the long wing swallows to create fertile offspring... they probably aren't a new species.

Thanks for this post. I was running out of material for my "First World Problems" meme generator. But this is pure gold :)

Nice try. You're confusing breastfeeding with a breast that is feeding.
I bet you feel more than a little embarrassed now.

P.S. How else do you think breasts get so big. You have to feed them.

I call bullshit on losing Discovery and History channel. As for the others; why do you find it necessary to artificially prop up specialty channels?!
If the user base isn't there to support it, it should go, plain and simple. Either pass on the true cost to the customer or axe it.

Furthermore, what percentage of channels show their own in-house content and how much comes from shows that were shopped around? AMC's flagship series Breaking Bad -- made by Sony. If AMC the channel didn't exist, the show could still be shopped around to another channel. Maybe eliminating channels would clean up the ratio of quality shows on the channels that do exist?

I'm no expert but I have watched several episodes of "Pawn Stars" ;).

Early muskets were stamped by the maker and the tester. The tester simply loaded the muzzle with 4x the normal amount of black powder. If it didn't explode, it passed for repeated use at 1x. Simple and apparently stood the test of time.

Bubble, no bubble... in the end a user could use a similar test method.