Awesome. Well played, sir, well played.

Yes on the cheapness, not so much on the reliability but, you know, the cheapness makes a lot of people overlook the reliability.
NAND Flash is the best, for now but it's only an interim. With technology, everything's an interim solution until the next solution comes out.

You mean there were females there? Then it definitely wasn't a LAN party.

Perhaps - as many of us are aware that existing law already exempts political calls anyway. The proposed bill wouldn't grant them any more access than they already have. There are MANY reasons to oppose this bill and I suggest that people should contact their congressman/woman to voice their concerns - but not for the reason you raise here.

Clarification - Gene Amdahl, formerly of IBM, is the one that brought LPAR to the masses - Amdahl marketed it as Multiple Domain Facility (MDF). IBM was grudgingly forced to follow suit as customers quickly embraced MDF and it gave Amdahl a competitive advantage until IBM responded. IBM's implementation didn't (and still doesn't) include all of the features that MDF had, namely "L-shaped domains (or LPARs)". L-shaped domains allowed the customer to create an LPAR with a mix of dedicated and shared processors - something most customers found quite valuable (and still ask for). IBM *did* create VM back in the 60's though, and it's most modern variant, z/VM, is still running strong. Besides running the older "traditional" workloads of native VM apps and virtualizing VSE systems it's a popular Linux consolidation play in many shops.

As to those that were commenting on the disappearance of the mainframe, IBM's 2011 second quarter shareholder report tells a different story. On the hardware side of things mainframe revenue increased 61% compared to Q2 2010 and shipped capacity increased 86%. That's a pretty healthy growth rate for anyone.

Same here. I'm surprised they didn't detect this shortly after it was plugged into the network. But then, we are a Bank and process money so security is a big issue. This guy is just working in health care supporting, you know, human life and stuff so security probably isn't as big an issue there.

I think the IT guy was being awfully nice to the guy (too nice); here we would have carted the server away and had the Dept Head explain why the guy shouldn't be fired.

Ahh, Slippery Slope, welcome back old friend. First - for the smoking thing, what the hell did they do with all that money they got from the Big Tobacco settlement that was *supposed* to be for health care costs ($206 billion over 25 years, shared by the 50 states)? Oh, right, that got redirected into roads and fisheries and all other kinds of stuff having nothing to do with health costs. Scam! If it's *really* all about correlating behavior to health costs (and it's not, but let's play along) then what about taxing people based upon activities? How about a $5 surcharge for every ski-lift ticket, because people that ski are far more likely to have some sort of trauma injury than those that don't. Golf is notorious for what it does to your back and the long term care prospects for those with bad backs is *very* expensive - $10 surcharge on all greens fees (and $15 if you rent a cart, you sedentary bastard!). You ever see what happens to somebody that falls off a bicycle? Oh man, my Iron Man sister got totally messed up when she fell off her bike while training - busted teeth, fractured ribs, all kinds of messed up skin. People that ride bikes are just accidents waiting to happen - so that probably requires, what, $100 annual fee? I mean I love my sister and all but why the hell should I be paying for her health care just cause she thinks it's fun to run/bike/swim? Oh yeah, swimming - did you know that people drown? Well, those people are dead so I guess there's no health care costs for them - but what about all those *millions* of folks getting attacked by sharks (I saw it on TV, so it must be true)? Some of them think WE should pay to sew their arms back on - or whatever it is that got bitten off. Not sure how to tax that one, though - if we tax swimming suits then some of them will just swim naked . . . and, depending on who it is, that could be a really bad thing. Have to give that one some more thought.

Finally, according to the CDC in the year 2000 (cue Conan and Andy) there were ~85K non-fatal gun injuries. That's a lot of shot up but not dead people expecting somebody to patch them up. I figure $500/year per gun should help cover those costs, right?

Or . . . do you really think that the root cause of all of our high health care costs is solely on the shoulders of smokers and fat people?

" Let a = 0.999... then we can multiply both sides by ten yielding 10a = 9.999"

No. 10 times 0.999 does NOT equal 9.999, it equals 9.990. Kind of a big deal, really.

Well you can still probably garner a lot of attention by just putting "I'm a latex guy" on your resume. :)

No, they just hate militant gays - you know, the kind that live in Forts.

Oh my, this is fantastically hilarious. Doofus traveling alone with GInormously valuable cargo - dude, hire a serious escort! Pirates blow up ship and get nothing - maybe, next time, just go for a crazy ransom amount and you'd at least get something. Lose-lose for everyone except for ccp. Seriously, a kestrel solo in Jita? That's not safe with just crap for loot. I sure don't miss Eve, but I do miss stories about Eve like this.

Read. The. Fine. Article? What, are you crazy, this is the 21st Century and NOBODY reads articles anymore - everything they need to know is supplied to them via a catchy headline and maybe a tweet from somebody "cool" - because anything that can't be conveyed in 140 characters or less simply isn't worth knowing. I mean if all these people typing "waaaaaa" had actually bothered to read the article they'd know these guys have moved on, invested in themselves, and are taking the risks themselves but making big bucks as a result. Good for them. Ooooh, gotta go, somebody just tweeted me that LiLo is getting released today - I sooooo have to know who's going to do her makeover.

Look, why should MS reverse their model and pay money to bug-finders when their current model has people paying THEM to find bugs?

Perhaps the OP needed greater emphasis . . . "build AND sell". There, that better? HP can build OS's (or at least buy those that do) but the SELL part, eh, not so much.

I would agree that having Apple and Amazon *competing* on prices would be a good thing for the consumer but unfortunately that is not the case. The license arrangement that Apple forced on content providers that wish to sell through Apple requires that they do not provide that same content at a lower price to anyone else. Immediate effect for me was receiving a notice from Amazon that my NYTimes sub was going to jump from $13.99/month to $19.99/month! Fortunately there's a grace period so I have until September to decide if I want to accept this near 50% rate hike or not. There can be no competition when content providers are strong-armed into accepting these types of deals - and all of this is bad for both the consumers AND the providers.