Hmmmmm. Are you disagreeing with me? Because there is not one thing you wrote that argues against my point.

People who do a lot of bullying can put a lot of effort into it. Insane? Hardly. It gives them more popularity, improves their mood when they're suffering by pushing the suffering on someone else, gives them the joy of controlling their environment (the bullied), and there is very little chance they'll receive much punishment for it if any. It's quite rational behavior. Awful maybe, but hardly insane.

Also, if you're bullied and you don't get enough support from family or good friends to believe things will ever get better, losing hope is a rational response when there isn't enough evidence to suggest any is coming.

bullies are not an accessory to the death, if they were you would have killed yourself, but you didnt, because you knew it was wrong.

No, neither of you did because you weren't pushed enough. This makes you luckier than others not superior, as you'd like to believe.

Everyone has a tipping point. All it takes is to destroy all of a person's hope.

Ahhh, sea kittens.. I just had a bowl of these myself.

Real pictures, real gold, real pollution, wrongly implicated source.

Every nation has waste, and most have electronic trash. It doesn't all come from the US, as implied.

Here's an excellent example. This Article says the waste comes from the United States and Europe. If you zoom in a little to read the label, it comes from "World Bank" 9032, which is in Sudan. So scrap electronics in Africa (as portrayed by the other photos) did originate in Africa.

There's actually a really strong market for reduction of electronic waste, where they do recycle precious and scrap metals from them. That market depends on skilled workers using real equipment, not scavenger kids processing them by hand, and losing valuable scrap in the dirt.

So I guess us thin people have to hold on to the money and the guns, or we're screwed. ;)

But yeah, apartheid as a counter-example did spring to my mind shortly after I made my post. D'oh!

That's strange. Here in the US the majority of people are overweight.

How can a majority be persecuted?

I've had this debate time and time again with some evangelical Christians. I put to them the reality of a person never introduced to their faith. A man who conducts his life in every way a manner consistent with doing good works as prescribed by Jesus without ever actually knowing that Jesus existed at all. I ask if in their faith, that man is damned to hell for is ignorance of their faith. More often than not, they actually come back and say outright that the man would be damned to hell as 'the only way to heaven is through Christ'. By the same token, growing up I was basically taught that being baptized was pretty much the only hard requirement, and that everything else was, for lack of a batter word 'negotiable''. Christianity would allow forgiveness for a multitude of sins, except for faith in Jesus as divine.

Even the current pope has come out now with the respectable message that a man's will to do good matter even if they consciously choose to be an Athiest, but there are a *lot* of Christians who do not feel that way.

Besides, I'm not confident in the integrity of the specifics of the words of Jesus surviving history intact. He may have never made such a claim until someone posthumously put words into his mouth. He may have made no personal claims to divinity and such claims are really the belief of another. So much of those words spent a long time as oral tradition before being put to paper, and even then there's opportunity for thins to be changed as they were transcribed and translated.

I said 'in practice'. In theory, there are specifics. In practice, the terminology is hijacked by project managers as they see fit more often than the specific set of things are implemented.

Of the last published top500 list, 7 out of the top 10 had no GPUs. This is a clear indication that while GPU is defintely there, claiming 'Most of the actual processing power' is overstating it a touch. It's particularly telling that there are so few as overwhelming the specific hpl benchmark is one of the key benefits of GPUs. Other benchmarks in more well rounded test suites don't treat GPUs so kindly.

This isn't to say that ARM *can't* be there, but thus far all of the implementations have focused around 'good enough' performance within a tightly constrained power envelope. Intel's designs have traditionally been highly inefficient in that power band, but at peak conditions, it is still compelling.

I recall one 'study' which claimed to demonstrate ARM as inarguably better. It got way more attention than they should have. The reason being is that they measured the performance on the ARM test, but just *assumed* TDP would be the accurate number for x86. There are very few workloads that would cause a processor to *average* TDP over the course of a benchmark.

The thing that really *is* stealing x86 thunder is the GPU world. Intel's Phi strives to answer it, but thus far falls short in performance. There continue to be areas where GPU architecture is an ill fit, and ultimately I think Phi may end up being a pretty good solution.

Whether it was 'waterfall', 'agile'', or whatever, every project that I've worked with that seemed to put more effort into using the most hyped phrasing to describe their process than into actually developing the project has been doomed.

I liken it to religion. The spirit of most holy texts is quickly lost in the actions of adherents as they focus on the specific content rather than the message. For Christianity, specific belief in the divinity of Jesus seems to often be more important than adhering to his teachings. Similarly, in Agile, managing to map words like 'scrum', 'sprint', 'epic', 'user stories', and so on to what you do is more important than internalizing the original intent behind those words.

Projects that don't make a lot of effort to 'conform' to any specific renowned fad tend to do well. They also tend to do the sorts of stuff Agile advocates without using the words.

Being called 'Agile' doesn't mean that it is in the spirit or letter of 'Agile'.

The reality is that 'Agile' is in practice more of a brand than anything else. Project Managers love to apply the terminology to their projects. This does not mean they actually meaningfully follow a consistent set of behaviors, just that they use similar sounds words.

'Agile' is like 'Cloud' and 'Web 2.0'. While each phrase may have coined with a particular specific concept in mind, they became more hype than anything usefully descriptive.

    Yup, yup, and yup.

    I had RoadRunner a long time ago. I had a Linux firewall box between the modem and my switch that ran the house. At the time, you were allowed one machine. This was before the plethora of consumer NAT boxes hit the market.

    Their DNS servers were awful at the time. Literally, 10 to 15 seconds to get a simple name resolution for popular sites.

    I started up bind on the firewall, because the other machines were up and down all the time. I just started it, and didn't think much more about it. That was intentional, usually because I was making changes all the time. :) After a couple weeks, I found my connection was down. I called support, and after a long phone call they finally told me my account was suspended for a violation of the ToS. It took a few more phone calls to find someone who knew why.. They found that I was accepting connections on port 53 and cut me off. Their logic was "It's a server. Buy commercial service, or it stays off.". My logic was "This is the fix to make the service work right". I lost.

    I finally agreed to stop bind, and they had my residential service back on the next day {sigh} I ended up setting up a box at work to resolve from. At least they weren't blocking it from leaving their network.

    I've heard of people getting cut off for having consumer NAT boxes listening on port 80, even though it was just the management interface for the box.

    It seems they've all softened the rules, but ya, if you say "I'm running servers from here", that's a huge red flag and they will say "You need commercial service."

    What the hell is he doing with 209TB and racks of machines anyways? It sounds like he's downloading all the porn on the Internet repeatedly.

-1: Nightmares