Here in the US some states have some of the only sane consumer protection legislation in existence solely in order to protect against nefarious gift card issuers. Most states require issued gift cards to be honored as if it were cash for all transactions regardless, and I think New Jersey or Pennsylvania or one of those states made it illegal to charge a service fee within the first two years since issuance.

This whole "fuck rich people" movement is really starting to get on my nerves. Rich people are not the problem, it's all of the tax loopholes companies take advantage of that is the problem, why not do something about them?

Oh wait, that's right. Tax loopholes and corporate tax law are far too complicated for the average American to understand, so they need a common enemy to crowd against...cue the rich person destroyin our 'conomy...somehow.

The same way that people who get themselves pierced and tattooed up who then wonder why nobody will hire them as an investment banker. It's all about presentation: if your company looks like its being managed by a bunch of 15 year olds, then I'm just going to assume that it is being managed by a bunch of 15 year olds. But hey, stick it to the man, trying to put us down with his suits and business casual and looking presentable for clients and whatnot, right?

Having a multibillion dollar company pretend they are still a Stanford startup is kind of like trying to pilot an oil tanker as if it were a 30 horsepower inflatable boat. Hence, you get situations like that godawful instant message...thing that takes up a quarter of your screen and disallows you to see contacts that are actually online.

But HEY! At least our employees feel like they are empowered and important and we still get to have a fuseball table in the conference room, right? I truly cannot take a company like facebook seriously when I see tours of their facilities and their infrastructure engineers are walking around in volcom t-shirts and skateboard shoes.

When AT&T, et. al. are in a position where they are the DeBeers of wireless bandwidth. I think instead of actually spending money to upgrade infrastructure, they would rather just continue to artificially limit the amount of available bandwidth so they can keep it grossly overvalued. Gotta keep those profits rolling in for the shareholders somehow.

The day HP died was the day I read an article where the journalist asked HP's HP-UX team if the company was ever going to do anything new with VMS. The team's response was "What's VMS?"

Rest in pieces, HP.

Maybe I wrote that in a way where people not familiar with the area would not see the racial overtones.

In Philly, when you ask "Who is poor and lives in North Philadelphia?" you're only going to get one particular race as an answer.

As a Philadelphian, I can vouch that a flash mob in Philly is not the same thing as a flash mob that you see on AT&T advertising campaigns. While a flash mob may make you think of a bunch of people dancing in unison to some obscure pop culture reference in a large public area, a Philadelphia flash mob is a band of nearly feral minority teenagers whose parent wants to get their drink on and expels them for the night from their section 8 houses in North Philadelphia. They then flood down in droves to the Center City business district and Old City/South Street area, where they attack people at random.

I am sorry if that comes off as bitter and slightly racist. I was involved in one of these on South Street a few months ago...the fear you feel is absolutely indescribable when you realize that kids as young as 10 were raised in a way where they feel assaulting and robbing people at random is an acceptable Saturday night activity.

But just think about the valuable real-word integrated collaborative work experience they receive! Surely that should be worth more to these corporate cannon fodder^H^H^Huniversity students than any amount of money or time spent with loved ones, correct?

How precisely do you spend $5000 on an aluminum figure about an inch and a half in size?? I could turn out all three of those on a vertical mill in one afternoon with about $5 worth of aluminum.

Like everyone else who has ever run any sort of public facing sever in the last 10 years, I also get a disproportionate number of scripted brute force attacks that come from China. From what I understand, it's almost considered a hobby over there. Mr. Joe Citizen works for big-state-sponsored-foreign-run-computer-company, and at the end of the day before he leaves he sets his desktop computer to nmap and brute force as many addresses as possible all night. What they do when they finally get one, well...I'm not really sure, never had one get through. 99.99% of the attacks are generic brute force attacks that use generic usernames that no sane sysadmin would ever allow on their system anyway (admin, ftp, phpmyadmin, faculty, staff, etc.), and most of the scripts they use are almost always run with their default configuration, so basic security precautions stop them cold.

He doesn't care, they're a drop in the bucket. Remember: Facebook users are products, not customers.

Don't you know? Terrorists are super smart completely invincible secret agents that can escape any jail and break into any nuclear fuel processing facility in the world and take whatever they want and they can't be stopped by anything known to man. Therefore we can't recycle it otherwise we're putting America's children, or something...at risk. Also because Jesus.

This is a civil case, where most of the time the defendant is assumed guilty and needs to prove themselves innocent. I can file a civil lawsuit saying "Harold Halloway stole my car, burned down my house, and raped my dog and I want $1,000,000,000 from him in restitution", and it is up to you to prove that you didn't do any of those things.

Step 1: Structured query databases exist for four decades, show they are perfectly capable of scaling, load balancing, and anything else you want them to do.

Step 2: Microsoft writes a structured query database, it can hardly do any of these.

Step 3: "Rararara structured query sucks lets support some half-baked DB idea and as soon as there is a breakthrough buy it up."

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Profit!