Duff

It's a gimmick to attract attention. It's the verbal equivalent of Ozzy Osborne biting the head off of a bird on TV, except lamer.

The question then becomes, are you an accessory to a federal crime by enabling someone to gain unauthorized access to a computer system?

Schools are breeding grounds for this sort of thing.

Combine psychotic parents, "cyber bullying" (a crisis de jure), morals clauses in contracts, "think of the children" attitude, and sometimes tyrannical administration, and you get crazy stuff like this.

That's the passive-aggressive way.

If you're not ideally suited to something, refer someone who is. I've wasted alot of time dealing with vendors who played these sorts of stupid games -- it's really frustrating, and lowers my overall opinion of the vendor.

The running cost is just part of the equation... those servers are depreciating away and generating no revenue!

You hit it on the head. I used to have to deal with alot of litigation-related preservation of data... we started calling discovery "Mutually Assured Destruction".

The lawyers basically try to make things more and more onerous in order to encourage a settlement. It's amusing, as long as you aren't accountable for the data!

Deliverable-based consultants always have a high hourly rate, because they are rarely fully booked. A freelancer is often 50% or less utilized, especially if they do short engagements. So in reality, they are making ($100k-taxes-insurance-overhead) per year.

The whole point of hiring a consultant is to get someone who knows what he is doing to do specific work and leave. The alternative is paying an employee $40/hr to learn, do work and take care of overhead activities, and keep that employee around for an extended period.

Offshoring has overhead costs too -- depending on what you are doing, the "total cost of ownership" for an offshore developer may or may not justify taking that route.

I think that you're trying to swim in dangerous waters.

Do you think that your variation would be considered OK if you were talking about a racial group? Or short people?

Personally, I'd want to stress that this is an event where you can hack and have fun. Just say some variation of "We have an awesome event staff on-site to serve you! Cold beer, hot wings, etc on us!"

I'm a guy who in more of an IT role with alot of women (probably a little less than half the people here) -- so I guess I come from a weird perspective. My sister is an engineer/designer, so I've heard her perspective on this as well.

The issue with this kind of behavior is that it intimidates and/or repels professional women. It doesn't set an appropriate tone.

If you were a woman with a degree in CS who was potentially interested in seriously participating in this event, would you want to to hang out with a bunch of beer-swilling jerks making passes at barmaids? Do you want to be one of a small number of women serious about hacking, feeling inadequate around the girls with tight tops with the beers? Probably not -- but that is the picture that the event organizers were painting.

It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect.

Crafting the perfect apology is fine, but you need to consider whether there is value in doing so.

Are the people whom you are offending by acting like a fratboy really going to believe that you have "seen the light"? The apology these guys wrote basically says "sorry, we thought this was funny"... which is really just creating more problems.

I'd argue that this affair validates a rule my grandfather had: When you say something really dumb, the smart move is to stop talking.

Think of it from a teacher's perspective: you do your job, when out of nowhere some nutcase or religious zealot comes out of the woodwork and tries to get you arrested, and failing that, pressures the school board to have you dismissed.

Right or wrong, this teacher will be tainted and have his or her career ruined, over the use of a book in the classroom. Ender's Game is a book that has been widely used in high schools for at least 15 years.

This is why teacher tenure is necessary.

This is similar to the announcements from Intel about advances in lithography. Intel announced the 32nm process technology in 2009 -- that process gives them a platform to refine and improve their technology.

So now, a top of the line Xeon is faster, has 10 multi-threaded cores, includes AES acceleration, and uses 20% less power than it's predecessor 3 years ago... thanks to that base technology.

If you're running a business that generates/consumes alot of storage, this announcement means that you need to start thinking about how to deal with a petabyte of storage capacity with performance characteristics similar to what you have today. (for 1/30th capacity)

Try parking in Queens sometime.

"American" small cars have a reputation that is not so good.

I'd argue that right now is about the dumbest time to buy a used car -- nobody bought cars in 2009 or 2010, so there is a shortage of off-lease or similar vehicles.

The smart money keeps the car they have until the market settles.

Huh? There are literally millions of people in NYC getting by just fine in NYC making $70k or less. You're not going to live a white-bread suburban dream though.

The funny thing is, NYC has a great public transit system in Manhattan (and an OK system in the boroughs) and lots of access to free or cheap cultural activities. I grew up in Queens and went to the beach, dozens of museums, concerts, etc with my mom.

The vast majority of people, in all sorts of places, and at all sorts of income levels lack the ability to pay for a $15,000 dental procedure.

For an intern, I would guess that $75k is a better salary in New York. You need a car in California.

Huh? Rifles in a closed indoor environment are pretty scary to me. They are inappropriate and intimidating to anyone who isn't a gun geek.

I haven't seen them in an airport lately, but National Guard soldiers are in Penn Station in NYC. They are armed with pistols, and spend most of their time flirting.

If they are doing a drill or the threat level goes up, they are armed with rifles, and the cops have sub-machine guns. Fortunately, they are unloaded, so you're less likely to have an incident where they start shooting at some deranged homeless guy. Being deafened by some idiot shooting a rifle down there would suck.

I have a group of friends who have master's degrees in art education (from a private school), and are stuck being substitute art teachers and waiting tables, because there are few openings for art teachers.

In their minds, they did the "responsible" thing. They got good grades, went $100k+ plus in debt, and are waiting tables at age 28. The problem is, they didn't do the responsible thing -- they used alot of someone else's money to learn a skill of very narrow utility. Now they need to pay the piper.

People lack a critical eye. It's amazing to me that people advise high school kids the way that they do.

Frankly, I don't know how people do it. My wife and I make a good buck, own a modest home and drive one 5 year old car. We don't owe anyone anything, and we save alot, so we're "broke". I don't know how people fit a $400 student loan payment in, while living a non-frugal lifestyle.

Whenever you buy stuff "Let the buyer beware" applies. I'm sure your brother has stories about unwary customers who paid ridiculous amounts of money for awful work that he had to fix up.

A smart customer isn't an expert in cabling -- you just need to know enough to question the person you are dealing with. Or ask more than one person. Or ask google. The whole business model of Futureshop is to be a convenient, one stop shop. Their vision of a satisfied customer is someone who walks out the door with anything that the store thinks they need.

I can do rudimentary carpentry, but I know what I can't do. So when I needed to have a new front door hung, I got a couple of quotes. The prices ranged from $250-$1,500. I think I paid around $600 to an old school carpenter who did an awesome job.

At the grocery store, a banana is a banana -- it costs $0.89/lb, and the store's CoGS is $0.69/lb. Car dealers are different -- they don't make money on the car, they make it on the other stuff that the salesman peddles. Thus, no price list.

Software is the same way. Salesmen are there to spot opportunities and get a solution out to the customer. You may sign up for payroll services online, and not realize that for an additional $X/mo, you can get some sort of expensive regulatory requirement handled as well.

If you're dumb, and buy a $200 HDMI cable, how is a web form going to stop you from making poor decisions. A typical startup pricing page has 3-5 plan options.

These days, most folks posting here have a backup regime for their PCs.

At this point, isn't the pharmaceutical industry playing games with supply by limiting the production of many medicines?

Even a common OTC drug like guaifenesin that has been around since the 50's is difficult to find by itself, except in the newly patented time-release formulation (ie. Mucinex). (Although it is an ingredient in many cold medicines.)

That's the idea of natural law. The concept of "owning" something in nature that is not scarce is not a natural concept.

The notion that property has value is pretty much a universal concept.

Making a decision is one aspect of negotiating, but it isn't the most important one.

Establishing the scope of the negotiation (ie. what does each side care about?) is what inexperienced negotiators typically miss.

Smart legislators understand this, and use time to defeat opponents. That's why you see so many 11th hour deals.

Trip Advisor seems to successfully do what Yelp does, minus the extortion and general suckage.

A: Because they get other jobs that meet their income requirements.

People who make it through law school usually aren't idiots. So if they fail to achieve a satisfactory career in Law, they move into other areas. Attorneys work in government as political appointees, lobbyists and policy people; they work as corporate managers; they run businesses in areas other than law, etc.

Also consider that the barriers of entry for lawyers are high. Referrals are a huge source of business, so it's difficult to start a new firm without alot of capital.

It's a hard problem to solve, because you're selling disk based on capacity. Problem is, capacity is easy to figure out, but capacity at a specific performance profile is hard.

In an enterprise datacenter, a "fast" Tier-1 or Tier-2 SAN runs anywhere from $10-40/GB/Year to the end user. A "cheap" (and much slower) Tier-3 SAN runs anywhere from $1-15/GB, depending on utilization, availability, etc.

I don't think even those rates are possible with Amazon (with the exception of S3 object storage), because they don't know anything about their users. In the enterprise, you segment your users based on anticipated peak performance requirements. Amazon has no idea what your performance profile is -- and no idea whether it will change tomorrow.

AWS is a shared service, so as they add more customers, the overhead costs of administering the service continue to drop. Their priority is to keep growth going at a steady clip.

AWS is also a very granular service, so Amazon gets near real-time metrics re: usage, demand, etc for a variety of services. That allows them to analyze changes in usage patterns and correlate price signals to actual consumption of services.

My guess is they adjust their pricing to control growth. Too cheap, and demand will spike, requiring Amazon to grow the environment too quickly. Too expensive, and they'll have trouble making the continuous capital investments that they need to make while still making money!