deirdres

Basically anyone who washes their hands frequently (ie all medical personnel, food handlers, etc.) or does manual work with ungloved hands (including home gardening) can later in life have fingerprints so abraded as to be unidentifiable. Using a lot of hand lotion, as anyone with dry hands might, also tends to flatten the ridges. Any requirement for fingerprints as a biometric can render systems inaccessible for entire classes of people - it's a growing problem in banking for the elderly, for example.

Very true! But it's a lot warmer and the day/night seasonal change is not so extreme.

I'm told (by tax specialists) that nowadays the situation is that you pay the taxes in whichever country has the higher taxation rate, but nothing in the other country. That will be fine - I'm ok with paying higher taxes when I'm getting better services, like a good public health system that works for everyone.

In 1999 I was earning $135k from a US-based job while I lived in Italy. Thanks to the tax treaty, I did not pay US income tax on the first $85k of that, but I paid Italy for it. I paid BOTH COUNTRIES on the remainder. Lost over 55% of my income to taxes that year. I was not thrilled that a lot of it was going to the Berlusconi government.

Ah, but the weather... yes, I know it doesn't rain as much as people think (I've been there at all times of year) but it is awfully dark for awfully many hours in the winter.

Both of us had good-to-great health insurance in the US thanks to our employers. But there's the rub: it's tied to employment, and if you lose your job for any reason, you either do without or pay (very expensive) COBRA. In Australia, everyone has Medicare (public health for all ages), and we currently also have supplemental insurance ("gap coverage") from my employer.

Having met a number of Netflix employees (and knowing one extremely well), I don't think this is actually true. YMMV.

Sexist, homophobic, etc. speech or behavior is less and less tolerated in most serious office environments, not least because it opens up a company to harassment lawsuits. That being the case, I wonder what all the very big serious companies that sponsor the Linux Foundation think about the level of harassment that is apparently tolerated in the communities they sponsor.

Forcing adults who would automatically think "trucks for boys, dolls for girls" to think about their choices is, in itself, valuable. As a child I was given dolls because I was a girl. I had absolutely no interest in dolls. Nor in trucks. I wanted building toys, animals, and dinosaurs.

If the child is too young to express a preference, you don't need to choose between (eg) dolls or trucks - baby toys need to be primarily something that can't hurt the baby. If the child is old enough to express a preference, you can ask the child or their parents.

For those who missed today's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9121015 because it got downvoted (wrongly) for being a duplicate: accompanying blog post and video now available: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-02-27/linux-profiling-...

The previous discussion refers to the slideshare and did not include the new blog post and video.

For those wondering "Who is this guy?" - you can look up his engineering qualifications and contributions elsewhere. My experience of him personally, in two years spent looking across our desks at each other, is that he has intelligence, integrity, and empathy equal to few in this industry. His retirement is a great loss to tech. As a friend, I wish him well in whatever he wants to do in his life.

LOL. Exactly. When you don't have any good response based on the merits of the argument, attack the presentation. This tactic is very familiar to those of us who call out sexism or racism: "You should be nicer when asking for your problems to be taken seriously."

But, ultimately, what happens in tech is as much about people and personalities as it is about actual technical merit. To delude ourselves otherwise is dangerous. When someone claims to be arguing from technical merit, look very closely at their history and probable motivations. There's always more there.

There was a good deal of discussion about this in an earlier thread about the slide deck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7291877

Video now available: http://www.joyent.com/blog/what-linux-can-learn-from-solaris...

At this point in the history of the CDDL, it's very much open to question what anyone's motives were at the time it was written. It is likely that the various parties involved - even within Sun - had varying motives: Sun, like any other large organization, was not monolithic in its opinions nor even its behavior.

Whatever the CDDL was designed or hoped to do, the ultimate question of what it /will/ do may someday be decided by a court. In the meantime, Oracle - which is notoriously well-equipped with lawyers - apparently believes that the CDDL-vs-GPL question does not prevent it from porting DTrace to Linux. If someone disagrees with them strongly enough to… well, do what, exactly? …that will be entertaining.

In the meantime, why does anyone bother to argue about whether Danese wrote the CDDL, didn't write it, knew what Sun was really after in writing it, or tap-danced naked down Sandhill Road while writing it?DTrace is coming to Linux, CDDL or no CDDL. That ought to be cause for rejoicing, not flogging the dead license horse.

That's covered in Brendan's recent talk at SCaLE 11x, also currently on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310719

We're actually planning to print some of those at full size as office decoration.