I thought I already knew of most newage sewage, but this is an entirely new pile of wackiness. Well played.

Sorry, but this is more pro-Persian propaganda. Even if the Persian Empire had been so terribly great and liberal, which it wasn't, modern Persians are not their inheritors.

It's actually more pathetic than Muslims referring back to their greatness of a few centuries past. You are reaching back thousands of years.

Quoting a translation of the Behistun inscription is also rather pointless. That said, if you think that makes an argument stronger, we should switch to quoting the original Old Persian, oh, and the Spartan and Athenian evidence in Ancient Greek. I'm certainly educated enough to handle both languages. How about you sport? You have an actual fucking clue there?

When Americans use it, they use the spelling of another dialect of English. It is not a matter of where they grew up, other than the fact that the mistake is more likely to occur, if they were brought near people who employ another dialect. It is not a free variant in the American dialect.

bee-boo-bee-boo-cushshshshshshsh

Well, actually, the Parthians were the nuissance. The Persian Empire had long since fallen.

That said, the surname of the family that gave us the now deposed (and deceased) Shah of Iran, Pahlavi, is the Old Persian word for "Parthia."

A truly tremendous refutation, not so much a smack down as a tsunami rolling over a small island.

I think you may have missed the sarcastic subtext of the original post. There's a recurrent myth in the modern world, especially in technologically developed societies, that "natives" or "primitive man" or whatever somehow lived and still live "in tune" with nature or in harmony with it or whatever. They all supposedly respect the land in a way we don't, are inherently wise, spiritual, blah, blah, blah.

You are, of course, correct in pointing out that hunting species to extinction is a very natural thing to do, though it depends on how you define things. The original poster was poking fun at the myths using the terms as propagators of the myth would themselves define them. Arguing what's natural and what's not is a different issue.

More often than not, past and "primitive" societies would have exploited or would exploit nature as thoroughly as we do, anyway, were it not for limitations of populations and technology.

I'll let the pros handle the serious stuff, but I can tell you that java on windows is most emphatically not common for high-volume consumer websites.

Having different servers handling different pages types isn't awful, as far as I know, and the OP didn't say as much. The problem is that they grossly miscalculate how many servers they need. That's troubling and may explain why I have never known of a great sys admins coming from eBay. Moreover, if they were smart on the systems end, they have a system with the agility and flexibility to adjust quickly, which it doesn't seem they do.

I think part of the problem may simply be that eBay started so long ago, that it's stack doesn't look at all like the younger, big consumer web apps.

Little-to-no caching is just crazy on eBay's part. There's a reason people are so interested in further developing things like memcached: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached .

Anyway, I'm not an engineer. I know a lot of details about web companies' applications, and I have a basic understanding of what everything does and the major reasons why. I'm fortunate in being able to ask the pros a lot of questions, since I have worked at web companies for the last 4 years. I just figured, in case no one else answered your question, I might be able to say something to help you eventually find the full answer.

exactly

Maximum dystopian computing panopticon nightmare event horizon now imminent.

nicely articulated

Can you go over to CafePress and turn that into a bumper sticker or a coffee mug or something? I would totally spread the word.

Declarations like Dion's or Arrington's make me want to class the writers in the same set as so-called Futurists, and as some very clever Slashdotter put it last year, Futurist = 1 part Fail, 1 part Sci-Fi writer.

Sadly, success in business seems to be 9 parts marketing, 1 part actual intelligence or talent at best.

While criticizing the media for its usual stupidity, we shouldn't forget the equally stereotypical self-aggrandizement of hordes of old programmers who claimed they foresaw the problem way back in 197X and how no one would listen to them.

I can't tell you how many gray-haired Cobol programmers tried to make themselves out to be prophetic heroes in last few years before 2000.

The lesson to be learned? Most people are idiots, and the rest of us are somebody's idiot at least some of the time.

I agree with your post for the most part, but your comparison is flawed. An individual following another individual around and taking pictures clearly intends something entirely different from Street View. It's not enough that two actions are similar, though in this case, the similarities aren't massive, but let's say they are, the intent needs to be similar as well.

Not funny, just stupid. When people use it to justify government activity they are misunderstanding the constitution, which exhaustively and explicitly enumerates the powers of government rather than the rights of citizens. They even added an amendment so the slow witted would pick up on that. So, the government must prove that any powers it exercises are both legal and necessary.

How is it exactly that this fallacious notion is somehow valid, when applied to individuals?