I agree with you. That doesn't make sense, especially with what USPS employees have told me first hand. The short version is, since they are going to practically every house every day anyway, it makes sense to increase the volume per drop to offset that cost; otherwise, the per-drop cost for just one/two pieces of mail would be huge.

if you have a query that says "SELECT name, address, zipcode FROM table WHERE name ILIKE '%Smith'" and the table has 50 million rows in it, it will run about 50% faster on a hex core than a quad core CPU with the same clock speed

If you get a 50% performance improvement on a query like that just by throwing more hardware at it, then I would argue that there is something wrong with the design. For example, you could create a column "name_reverse" which equals REVERSE(name), and put an index on it. Change your where clause to WHERE name ILIKE REVERSE('Smith') + '%', and the server will use the index. If you need to do '%Smith%', PostgreSQL has some great functions for indexing and handling that too.

Not to mention basic deduplication and normalization of row values.

If you're building VM servers, like Amazon, Azure, etc, those 18 cores will be a huge boost. It means you can fit 18 one core, or 9 two core, etc, VM's in one physical machine (assuming you don't oversell CPU from the idle VM's). Compared with the cost & power consumption of creating an additional physical server, there's some real savings there. Yes, it's a bit of a niche market, but for that market, there's real savings.

The title for the person who runs a locomotive called an engineer. And that title existed LONG BEFORE the licensing board did. I don't think the government should go after him unless he specifically claimed to be a certified, licensed, or otherwise accredited.

There should be a "Sad but True" mod. You'd have 1000 points.

He resigned, because he found out what was happening to people who resigned. He was outraged; he wanted to do something about it; and he figured the best way to stop it was to crack it from the inside.

Did it not occur to them, while they were up in the ceiling, to just crawl out? "No, if I escape, I'm going to miss out playing with my new computer."

What did you replace it with?

This analysis would seem to disagree with you. According to the Ninth Circuit, only people have privacy rights, not corporations.

California Prosecutors Don’t Have A Case Against Planned Parenthood Whistleblowers

There's a huge difference between a third-party (who wasn't part of a conversation/event) recording something, and a visible participant/witness recording something, even if the recording is secret. If the reporter bugs your room, yes, a privacy violation. Prosecute. If you let the reporter in the room with you, talk to him about it, and still do it in front of him anyway, it's news, even if you don't know he's a reporter.

You asserted NYT would be equally liable if they did the same thing. Can you cite me any cases where that's happened? What about all the Dateline, 20/20, 60 minutes, or other local news undercover investigations? Those were all without permission. It seems standard operating procedure for lots of news outlets, so where are the hundreds of jailed/prosecuted reporters?

Yes, there are. These were undercover videos by journalists. First amendment issues at risk here include:

- Does the government get to pick and choose who is a bona fide journalist, and thus allowing the government to choose who gets first amendment protection for the press?

- Does the freedom of the press include the right to conduct undercover investigations, which involve NOT getting the consent of those being investigated?

For #1, if you want to argue that they're not journalists, I hope you can see the dangers of letting the government decide who is and isn't a journalist. In effect, it's the same as letting the government decide who gets first amendment protection and who doesn't. I don't think that will work out so well. Do you want a jury to decide at their criminal trial? While that is a tiny bit better, it's not much of a right if a jury can vote it away, especially if your investigation is controversial and the jurors happen to not like what you found.

To get to #2, you have to concede that they're journalists who are covered by the free press. (See #1.) Undercover investigations are older than the first amendment, and if you're going to suddenly say the press can't conduct them, you're going to upset Dateline, 20/20, and A LOT of mainstream media. In effect, it would give the government a monopoly on undercover investigations, and I don't think that will work out so well either.

Clearly, two consent laws are unconstitutional as applied to press, if not everyone.

I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't get money from any other bank; you had to go to YOUR OWN BANK to get money.

Now you kids are complaining that a bank charges a $2 fee to cover the cost of you withdrawing from a RIVAL bank. Get off my lawn!

One of Microsoft's own rules of security: If you run someone else's software on your computer, it isn't your computer anymore.

When ReactOS (or equivalent) can do most anything Windows can do.

People & businesses want a drop-in replacement for Windows, and all their software that runs on it. Rewriting (or buying) software for another OS just isn't going to happen. And WINE isn't up to the challenge for graphic intensive games or device drivers.

You have a point. Someone should send those secret demands to WikiLeaks. They'll get the info out. Oh wait...