Murders and Assassinations?

I'm pretty sure that only applies to the sales and legal teams. Engineering, test and support either aren't paid enough to care about doing their jobs right or too understaffed to get the work done.

Don't worry, the oracle stack is on it's way out. The main problem is the fact that it's already a part of a mission-critical system for our customer, so change comes slow.
A part of our AAR/Lessons Learned discussion regarding this particular scenario involved realizing that oracle knew the 'relationship' was over before we did and stopped giving a shit about making us happy after they had our money.

I work on a team that builds and operates an enterprise service bus that runs partially on the Oracle Weblogic/OSB stack, along with other JMS brokers such as fuse/talend AMQ brokers and Solace messaging appliances. The Weblogic/OSB portion of the ESB is by far the most brittle and expensive piece of software in the system. We're working to remove the cancer that is oracle software from our network, but since it's an operational system critical to our customer's business it's taking time. We spent about six months working with thoroughly incompetent oracle support staff in an attempt to get the OWSM security modules to perform some basic encryption/decryption and SAML token validation without any success. A significant portion of that time was spent just waiting on oracle support to provide patches for all the roadblocking bugs we encountered. When the patches were finally delivered, they were provided to us completely untested 'as-is'. The first patch delivered wouldn't even run because there were class files missing. We wrote our own security module using WSS4J and java callouts in about three months after we gave up on oracle ever getting us functional patches. A few months after that, oracle performed an audit and attempted to extort additional licensing fees from us for using OWSM. We had never used OWSM for anything but development and testing, and had removed it from our systems entirely by that time. The most satisfying call I've been on working this project was listening to my PM tell the oracle goons to go fuck themselves while they were issuing legal threats via conference-call. After that incident, Oracle wanted to "repair our relationship" and sent a team of what they called "customer service specialists" to meet with us. What they actually sent was a trio of arrogant used-car salesmen. We met with them and after introductions and a system overview we started discussing what it would take to get Oracle to actually fix our laundry-list of open SRs and enhancement requests (If you've never worked with oracle support, an Enhancement Request is what they call a bug they don't plan to fix). They responded to this by bringing up a new project being worked by another team at our company that they were starting database license negotiations with. They suggested that if we could grease the wheels and guarantee that database licensing deal went through then they could put pressure on support to fix the issues we had with weblogic/osb. Their "customer service specialists" were demanding a quid-pro-quo before they'd consider giving us the support we had already paid for. That meeting ended just as poorly as the OWSM shakedown attempt. Our weekly oracle phone conference is openly hostile at this point.

That hasn't worked too well with the NSA. I can't imagine that a private corporation with a financial incentive would be able to restrain themselves from attacking their competetors once they were given the go-ahead to start lashing out when their network gets DDOSd.

Yeah, I think at this point even she realizes this will be her last job as a CEO, so she's not gonna give it up without a fight.

Yeah, I can't see any way that the school could have a copyright claim to the pictures unless they were paying the student to take them, and unless things have really changed since I was in high school, "student photographer for the school yearbook" is not a payed position.

In what country? Here in the USA, groups called corporations have more rights than individuals, including the right to make unlimited bribes ... i mean campaign contributions.. to whatever politician they think will legislate them a tax-break.

Are you referring to the hundreds of millions of people killed by 'free market forces' such as starvation, preventable disease, and war-profiteering?

Are you suggesting that the USA is a socialist country? Because we throw a larger percentage of our population in cages for no good reason than any other country but China.

Not really. Please provide me a source that has manipulated the numbers in a way that presents the price of American healthcare in a positive light.

Your French cousins must be idiots. According to the World Health Organization, France has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. On top of that, your cousins already have access to American Health Care. All they have to do is come over here and bring a ton of cash. Unless they're independently wealthy, France and never speak ill of their healthcare system again after they saw the bill from an American hospital.

Canada is the only country with a single-payer system that is looking for private sector solutions and that's because they're also the only country with a single-payer system that made it illegal for private corporations to compete with the goverment to provide healthcare. Canada is literally the only country in the world struggling with the problem you mentioned. European countries generally have large private health care industries that make significant income performing optional and cosmetic procedures. Medical tourism is a thriving industry in Europe. Germany alone makes about €1 billion in revinue per year on medical tourism. http://www.medicaltourismmag.c...

For some reason, pretending that a single poorly implemented health care system is representative of all single-payer systems has become an American past time.

In case you hadn't noticed, compromise became anathema to congress somewhere in the early 2000s

"(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)" It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.