Is this another name for .Net? I've never heard of "MS Stack". Maybe it's too arcane to have much demand for it. Keep in mind that LA is the 2nd biggest metro area in the USA so finding work there using some little in demand technology is a lot different than going to a smaller area and trying to find a job using it. If it's .Net, well, that does have its users, but if anything it seems to me that .Net is dying not thriving.

I've been to the Pacific Northwest in the lengthy rainy season, several times in fact, and all I can say is it's not for everybody. If you've never really experienced it for a week or more at a time, you can't just assume that you'll be OK with it. Having said that, if you can actually put up with it, I do understand why this part of the country appeals to some people.

You are right that this is a deterrence. I posted yesterday a much longer comment about this in the thread about the guy who got a huge fine and 2 years probation for participating for a very short time in the DOS. Basically US law allows for punitive damages in some cases and the system allows them to be exorbitant and perhaps even illogical. Sometimes these get reduced on appeal, but not always. The point is indeed to provide a deterrent against others doing the same thing in the future. It's not at all about fairness. If you are American and don't like it, work to change the system (probably not possible though) or complain all you want, but it's not going away. If you're not American, you can complain all you want about it but you can't change it.

I mentioned this in my post yesterday too, but some of it is that jury members in general know little about technology and some are almost Luddites. Judges and lawyers in general also know little about technology. This leads to prosecutors and judges overreacting against things they don't understand very well and juries overreacting to punish people due to not really understanding what they did.

Wow. You sure are full of yourself. So you really believe that there is not one person here in all of Slashdot who makes more in an hour than your customized servers do? Anyway, congratulations I guess on finding the only way possible to use NT and make it work, but I bet you have to reboot everything every couple of months or earlier anyway because NT sucks. And anyway, the fact that your one specialized set of circumstances make you or your company company a lot of money (assuming you are telling the truth) does not prove that XP is not dying.

I'm American, so I speak from experience. The US legal system allows punitive damages. Eric Rosol didn't have to actually go to jail - that was the fair part of the sentence. But US verdicts with insane monetary awards are not unusual. There's the infamous "McDonald's coffee" case which eventually got settled out of court for a never disclosed amount after a jury awarded what almost everybody in the US considered an unreasonable and probably insane amount of money in punitive damages. Jammie Thomas, the last person you'd ever want to fight the RIAA, has gotten a series of shocking judgements against her, far in excess of any real damage that was done by her. I served on a jury once that awarded punitive damages and they're meant to send a lesson to the guilty party and others (this part is key) that there are very real financial costs to certain actions. In this case, the message is clear that people should not do DOS activities or they too may be facing ruinous financial penalties. I haven't followed this case at all, so for all I know like Jammie Thomas, Rosol may be his own worst enemy and perhaps his demeanor in court led to this outcome. Juries really don't like arrogant defendants who insist that they did nothing wrong when the jury feels otherwise. I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of jurors are non-techies and some are actually tech hostile. These kinds of people also get easily swayed by prosecutor arguments that some great evil just happened that must be prevented in the future because they don't really understand what happened. Juries also sometimes get this subgroup of people (roughly 10% of the population by my estimation) who see the entire world in black and white and are obsessed with punishing rule breakers as they see them. These are the people who want draconian punishments for trivial offenses (ie. they'd support the death penalty for people who let a parking meter expire as "That will teach them not do that again!"). Sometimes on juries they are adamant that the "evil doer" has to get a very harsh sentence and if the other jurors really don't care, want to go home, and agree at least that the defendant really is guilty, the other jurors will just agree to large punitive damages so they can get on with their lives. It's difficult to get punitive damages reduced and there's no incentive in the US system for juries to really find a fair verdict. The system just wants them to all agree on the verdict and if 11 people give in to 1 stubborn crazy person, the US system accepts this as the cost for how the system works. The prevailing dogma that gets drilled into all law students and the American public in general is that the US jury system is the greatest of all possible systems and is the cornerstone of our democracy, so nobody on the legal side dares to question whether it really works as it is supposed to or not.

Let me be blunt here. So an indie band that nobody has heard of (Grizzly Bear) and a different indie band that nobody has heard of and which broke up over 20 years ago (Galaxie 500) are complaining that they aren't getting enough money via Spotify. Gee, I don't know, is there any chance that maybe not enough people give a crap about their music to actually listen to it? Grizzly Bear and Galaxie 500 have their supporters, but the truth is that they just aren't all that big. They were mentioned earlier, so I'll use them as an example. If Iron Maiden wants to complain about what Spotify pays them, I'll listen, but if two no name indie bands, one of whom has been disbanded for over 20 years, want to cry about their payments, well, I'm not so interested. Groups like Grizzly Bear and Galaxie 500 are going to starve if they have only royalties to survive on. It's harsh but true.

I work in IT for a US based Fortune 500 company. I am internal support but sometimes I have to talk to customers when they issues related to one specific product I support. I deal with your type of company all the time. Too much actually. When you have to ask here how to convince the top dog that ONE person is insufficient for a company your size, the war is over before you began and you have lost. Even if by some miracle you do convince the CEO to hire one more guy, I can promise you that your CEO places zero value on your work and it's just a matter of time before you are looking for another job anyway. If your CEO valued your work or was smart enough to at least somewhat understand it, he would already have thought of the "What if I get hit by a bus?" scenario and would long ago have gotten a backup to work with you and learn the job. You'll either be outsourced (yes, your CEO may be stupid enough to try that) or replaced by some work visa holder who will be half the worker you are but he'll work for half the money you get too. You're done here, buddy. If your company placed any value on its IT staff, you would already have the help you need. Let me guess this too because I've seen this too many times as well - you love (well, you did when you started at least) working for a smaller company because they have made you some pie in the sky promises about future stock options (they probably won't pan out) and you have nothing good to say about large companies because you can't take the bureaucracy. Honestly, most small companies aren't all that great to work for. Some are for sure. But I see your type of company all the time in my work because we sell our software to companies like yours. The odds are about 90% that things are never going to get better or that if you do get another person and your company grows, two of you won't be enough to handle the growth and you won't get a third person.

I was thinking this too. Also, I shudder at the thought of some, say, 14 year old kids getting their hands on a cheap device that can do this and thinking it's "fun" to stop random cars while hiding behind a bush with no thought given to the consequences. I've read about kids throwing heavy and dangerous objects from heights onto unsuspecting people/cars below them. I'm sure this will appeal to the same people.

You have a good point, but at least it's better than all those people who can't read properly and post articles in a panic saying "This article says X!" when in fact the article says "not X". We can figure out that "rocket" is a bad word choice and get around that but it really sucks when people claim and article says the exact opposite of what it really says because then we get tons of comments about how bad X is and how they can't believe that someone would actually do that and then a few posts follow up (and mostly get ignored) telling people to actually read the article where it is actually against X, so the submitter blew it. It seems to me that quite often about 90% of the posters never read the article in the links, so when the idiot submitter misrepresents what he submitted, that becomes what the article is about in the minds of most people here.

This.

What amazes me is that even after the recent stolen Bitcoin news, the prices have actually gone up. I'm still predicting that there will be a really major theft or attack against Bitcoin that will absolutely devastate it. It will be something stupid involving trust where nobody thought that another party would do something, but they will do it, and it will be devastating. Then everybody will cry and moan saying "Why didn't we protect against that?". Of course, I could be wrong, but I have no skin in this game so either way I'm not losing or gaining whether I'm right or wrong.

There's a somewhat lengthy and hard to find (too lazy to look now) article on the Internet where some magazine did essentially a minute by minute recap of what the black box told about the infamous Air France crash. That happened basically because (inexplicably) the captain put the most junior of his 2 co-pilots in charge when flying through some very bad weather. After the crash it was determined that the co-pilot was not properly trained for the conditions he encountered and Air France has made changes to pilot training in simulators as a result. It was a jaw dropping series of events where a quick decision had to be made and in every case, the wrong decision was made. Had just one such decision been different (ie. the captain took a later break, the more senior of the 2 co-pilots was put in charge, the plane avoided the storm it flew into, etc.) we wouldn't be talking about this as a crash. The plane would have safely reached its destination. So I'm not sure that mentioning this particular flight is a good example. It was an amazing perfect storm of bad decisions all of which had to be wrong for the plane to crash and unfortunately they were all wrong. Another good thing that came out of it (besides training changes) was that it was quickly realized before the black box was found that likely the infamous defective air speed tubes were to blame (indeed, they started the sequence of events that led to the crash) and those began to be replaced. I believe that all Airbus planes have had those tubes replaced with better models from another company. The co-pilot basically panicked and misunderstood (due to inadequate training) the situation he was in and he put the plane into a stall, causing it to crash. Neither the other co-pilot nor the captain (he re-entered the cockpit about 1-2 minutes before it crashed) realized the plane was in a stall until it was too late to correct it.

Well, around here there is a massive reading comprehension fail in submitters so that may be a big part of this submission. For example, if someone somewhere writes an article that says basically "Not X. Definitely not X. It may be A-W, Y or Z but it's definitely not X. Anything but X." then the submitter will post and scream "X! They said it was X! The sky is falling! It's X!!!". It does get old.

You have no way to know whether the program has or has not caught anyone. You may be right or you may be wrong. But your argument is weak because you believe that your guess cannot be wrong and it certainly can.

Midnight In Paris is a horrible example. First of all, like it or not, Soon Yi Previn was legally an adult when her relationship with Woody Allen (now her husband) started. Secondly, the charges of "child molestation" leveled by Mia Farrow were not taken seriously by any court and were merely the product of an angry woman who continues to try to stick it to her ex-boyfriend to this day, most recently by claiming that his biological son with her might not really be his.

I can tell you aren't really a player, at least not anyone who's ever played in tournaments. You're actually quite wrong in that statement, unfortunately. All Judit Polgar proved was that she could compete at the top levels with male players, but she never even came close to being a world championship candidate. What she did is roughly akin to a woman competing in the men's tennis tournament in Wimbledon and getting past the first round but losing handily in the second. Judit is really good and lots of men wish they were as good as she is, but she's never been a serious world championship candidate. Earlier this year she was ranked something like 52nd in the world, which doesn't even put her within a light year of being a serious candidate for the world championship. Anand, who I agree is clearly on the decline, would easily defeat her in a tournament. I'd be shocked if she won more than 1 game in such a mythical tournament.

Ah yes. I love when British or Aussie wankers like you post that. Allow me to educate you out of your ignorance.

Imagine, if you will, that the MLS (Major League Soccer - the top US professional league of what the rest of the world calls "football") announced that it was the greatest team in the world and that the EPL champion was a bunch of chumps who it could easily defeat. You would laugh. Rightly so. What European league do you think MLS is probably equivalent to? Maybe the French league?

The fact that you don't know due to your ignorance is that the best players in the world in baseball play in the USA in MLB. The gap between MLB and the best other league, which is Japan, is probably akin to the gap between MLS and the EPL. So there actually are no other leagues/teams that can realistically claim to be world's champions. That's why it's called the World Series - it truly is the best of the best. There are players in MLB right now from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Asia. The cream of the cream play in MLB. They don't toil in the other leagues. Again, the only other professional league that has a decent number of MLB quality players, and it's probably only 1-2 per team, is the league in Japan. I'm deliberately ignoring the top minor professional leagues in the USA as the best of those players will be in MLB eventually, but explaining how that system works would take more time than really necessary.

If you don't like American football and prefer rugby, that's your business, but rugby is actually a pretty crappy sport. If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport. I have zero doubt about that. In fact, I wish that someone would field a team out of our best professional football rejects and compete internationally.