Oh, that's nice. They provide the servers (on *their* terms), which- as you say- are the cheap part, and want the ISP to bear all the bandwidth costs. One of the links in the Slashdot story is dead, but here's a currently working version.

Netflix- who have a position that is (at best) dominant and plenty of exclusive deals- were *choosing* to not provide access to customers whose ISPs hadn't signed up to conditions that suited *them*. Netflix say:-

But as the article points out

In short, they were trying to leverage their dominant market position to make ISPs look bad and force them- and ultimately *all* that ISP's customers- to pay for the costs involved in supporting their *oh-so-generous* free caching servers under the terms of the agreement.

Also remember that Netflix themselves tried to use their dominance of the market to bully ISPs- and ultimately that ISP's customers (whether or not they used Netflix or ever intended to ever use it) into subsidising the bandwidth required for *their* HD service.

It's very definitely true that two wrongs don't make a right, but let's not shed any tears for the other guys who are just as bad.

While flipping through a novel on an e-reader? Really?

Treacherous heritage?

Do you really think you'd notice a pattern of extra trailing spaces behind the last words of certain paragraphs of certain chapters?

Check out the NX-bit. ARM has the same concept, though it's called something else. Only memory allocated for the program image can be executed. Data and stack are not executable.

Discussing the requests openly, either within or beyond the walls of an involved company, can violate federal law

Any act of congress that purports to deny our freedom of speech is not a law at all, but a usurpation. Congress has no power to trump the constitution.

-jcr

I wouldn't think so. That feels more like a promotional discount (like a coupon). You can't sell them, transfer them, or even use unless you're spending even more money through eBay. Taxing eBay bucks would be like taxing the use of the coupons they print out for you at the grocery store register - those are only "worth" something if you're in the store buying more goods later, at a slightly lower promotional rate.

How about the technical release notes for RHEL 6.4

They at least warn that Corosync won't start Pacemaker in a future release--that's normal; we have the pacemaker init.d script running it, not the Corosync plug-in. Removing it during release would be a mistake, though.

They don't mention that they've removed crmsh and added PCS. They do give this warning:

Status, but not configuration. Nothing about configuration input, which was previosuly handled by crmsh but now is handled by pcs. pcs isn't even installed by default; you have to figure out that you need it, then install it. crmsh is removed by default when you upgrade.

How wonderful that they've been so clear.

The product wasn't fully supported. That's fine. Supplied as-is.

I want the product supplied as-is.

What I don't want is a product supplied as-whatever-the-fuck-happens. It's not functionally complete? It's not supported? Not guaranteed to work? Okay, we can manage that risk. It works for us, and then you rip half of it out and throw something completely different in, during a "stable" system release? Not okay.

I get that something might be "not complete or production ready" and I might come back like "Hey this breaks when we touch it this way" and get "... okay. We'll do something about that, eventually. We have other priorities right now." What I don't get is putting stuff out there as part of a "stable" distribution, marking that it's not supported, and then yanking the rug out from under people who use it. If it's "not supported" then you're at risk of it caving underneath you; you shouldn't be at risk of your asshole distributor coming back and causing the fucking cave-in on purpose.

Our company policy is non-existent and SOP is insane. We'll leave it at that. I've suggested jumping off RHEL repeatedly because it's such a shit heap, but I get arguments about how "the industry knows RedHat is a good product" when it's really not.

The fact is this "technology preview" is a critical feature for a huge business case--fail-over servers. You have to supply 99.999% SLA, so you have 3 servers, and when one fails it transfers its IP address to another one and there's barely a flicker. Yes, they broke that; and when they wrote the release documents, they didn't mention that they removed an entire configuration system.

On Ubuntu you have the guarantee that they won't fucking break release. They won't break release. They. Won't. Break. Release. Oh, shit, bzr isn't a thing anymore? Well, the current releases of Ubuntu that have bzr won't lose that until they've gone out of support cycle! LTS is supported 5 years? Everything in LTS is going to be there, working as-is, for 5 years! Guaranteed 100% absolutely! It won't be there in next release, so start migrating your shit off now; but it won't vanish overnight!

I blame the documented policy for being stupid and risky. It's inferior. It's like a car engine made of brittle iron versus de-sulfated iron: one of these is definitely better than the other. It's not a matter of "well one's a V8 and one's an I4, so you should understand that one of these has more power"; one of these will crack the block relatively easily, and would be acceptable if it were made of de-sulfated iron instead so it wasn't a brittle piece of shit.

What part of "we don't support this -at- -all-, but there will be no updates in current production stable release that break it" is hard to understand?

RedHat's tech preview include any sort of fail-over mechanism. That means you have to chose between the risk of running without high-availability and the risk of RedHat breaking your shit. When you do dev testing, and you find it breaks, you now have to deal with the risk of protracting your update cycle longer than would have been necessary if they had taken the liberty to ensure that updates will specifically not break what once worked. That means you're forced to take on greater risk no matter what you do.

RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant beta testing field.

"Cruel and unusual punishment" is an appeal to emotion.

It's a fact both that children have less life experience and that highly addictive and dangerous substances are difficult to learn from and adapt to. Heroine will addict you in 3-4 uses (not 1 like people say), and after fairly short-term use will put you in a situation where withdrawal can be fatal--not to mention your brain is screaming for it. I know folks who have been through it and gotten out of it as young as 12-14; their anecdotes are always the same: it's only their emotional support network of family and friends that pulled them out, otherwise they'd have never gotten off no matter how bad they'd wanted to.

The same can be said of student loans--18 year olds don't know anything about finances, and hell even most seasoned adults who have trudged all 30 years of a mortgage don't get it. How anyone thinks deferred loans are a good idea is beyond me. Maybe it's because people put too much value on education--more value than the sum total of their life, not to mention a stunted career unless you're in some form of education-driven skilled labor (i.e. medicine, law, higher level engineering/mechanics i.e. rockets and planes). Experience-driven skilled labor (automechanics, IT, management) benefits more from entering the career field early, taking college slowly, taking a broad-base education, and taking minimal and short-term debt.

It's not fallacious to assume that children and young adults are less experienced and more vulnerable. It is in fact a powerful strategy to market wares to the naive and build psychological attachment so that they become a profitable adult market--it's called 'grooming'. Drug dealers would do best to market their wares to young teens and turn them into addicts just like cigarette companies used to. This isn't an appeal to emotion so much as an acknowledgement of a fact.

Likewise, I specified that we're applying certain rules to things we determine to represent a wide social threat. Highly addictive substances are important; substances we're uncomfortable with but that represent low risk are not as important. Executing drug dealers for selling marijuana to kids is an appeal to emotion--especially with arguments about gateway drugs and their future forays into cocaine and prostitution to support their habits. Citing a problem that represents a societal threat to the adult population and tracing it back to the impact of indoctrinating young, mouldable minds is simple strategy.

As for cruel and unusual punishment, we live in a world where a highly immature and uncivilized segment of society has used a huge appeal to emotion to convince people that folks don't really fear pain or death. Execution is not a deterrent to murder, and the infliction of pain (called "torture" even if we're talking about something as banal as caning, which is little more than a short, painful beating) is thought to be a horror. For our trouble, what we do is shove people into prison for eternity instead of executing them; and, when we do execute them, we do so by injecting them with anesthetics so they feel no pain as they die peacefully.

How cruel it would be to take a poor man who steals a loaf of bread, beat him two dozen times, and send him home to his family. He might be sore when he returns to work the next day to barely earn money for food and rent. What we should do, what we do instead now, is send him to jail for 45 days, 60 days, 90 days. When he comes back he will be behind in rent, and his family will be starving, possibly evicted already and on the street; he likely will no longer have a job; but at least we're not so cruel as to drive screams of pain out of him by vicious application of the cane! No, we're much better sentencing him to a life on the streets where his best options are petty theft--or, perhaps, to become a drug dealer and have a chance at affording a home again one day. This is the superior, civil method of dealing with criminals--not that barbaric display of cruelty our ancestors used.

Watch what fallacies you call. You might want to look a little harder to see if perhaps you're standing on that very island.

Really? Because AMC and Regal are both charging $12-$18 per ticket, plus outrageous prices for popcorn and soda. Matinee child tickets are even almost 170% of the quoted standard price you gave, never mind adult ticket prices for evening fare being over 250%.