Racist much? IBM is not somehow a triumph of Western civilisation, whatever that is. IBM is a triumph of 20th century America, a melting-pot of people from all over the world.

Eh, neither. RAID != backup.

The only way out is backups, at which point RAID doesn't give you any extra data security.

RAID is for performance.

The IPCC doesn't do research. It "reviews and assesses" the science in order to "provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences".
http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.htm

Did you miss the part where I was indicating sarcasm?

And I have an iPhone, and I haven't tried to jail-break it. Once someone buys something, they're free (in my mind) to do whatever the hell they want to with it.

To sum up:

You're a good doggie, but you're barking up the wrong tree.

I kinda-sorta give you a pass because it appears you are US. But the US is not the only country that is hire and fire at-will. It's not a USA vs. the rest of the world situation as you make it out to be.

You are so wrong about the McDonalds thing. It is used as a propaganda tool (as you are by spouting it) by corporations who want to get liability limiting legislation passed by painting her as greedy. She just sued for her medical bills (tried to settle for 20k but McDonalds refused). The jury awarded her punitive damages when she won (I think she also got 200k for actual damages). The jury decided to PUNISH McDonalds (which is what punitive damages means) for flagrantly putting people at risk so that their bottom line would benefit. The amount of punitive damages was 2.7mil, which was 2 days worth of McDonald's coffee sales. I hope you are getting paid for being a corporate mouthpiece.

Yea, men are more capable of stopping a bullet or 2000 pound bomb than women and children are?

Really? Thats news to pretty much everyone on the planet I think.

I guess thats why they let women into the military now, because men and women are equally adapt at defending themselves against cruise missiles, laser guided bombs and depleted uranium bullets than all that stuff back in the early 40s.

You've never held a weapon have you?

First, learn to spell, and then maybe people will take your seriously. "Airbii" only makes you look stupid.

If you're coding in lots of explicit memory reference deletes, what you're writing is not C++ but C. A C++ codebase would use RRID and automatic memory management to obviate the need for any explicit memory management. My last C++ project at work contained zero (yes, zero) calls to delete/free() out of around 20000 lines of code and a year of development/testing.

You're making the same mistake you're accusing C++ developers of making - you're viewing C++ through Java lenses.

Well, you need to take GP's point to its logical conclusion - use references everywhere. The problem with C pointers is that they have overloaded semantics - they're used for pointing to heap memory (which is the only place you need NULL) as well as for call-by-reference (for performance). C++ obviates the need for pointers in both instances. No, I'm not saying I never use pointers in C++, but they're rare, as rare as say, the "static" keyword.

Allow me to elaborate.

> In theory they can't lay off a ton of people in the US without pushing the H1B's out the door first
Wrong. Only applies if the more than 15% of the company is on an H1B.

> their most cost effective workers
Wrong. Microsoft does not (and cannot) pay employees differently based on visa status. In fact, thanks to annual visa renewal fees, visa-stamping travel reimbursements, green-card processing fees, "premium processing" fees (where do you think USCIS gets its money from?), H1B employees are per capita more expensive to hire.

Yes, I used to work for Microsoft on an H1B.