This is about the most insightful comment I've ever seen from an AC. It's right on the money.

Making the assumption that every server out there primarily relies on write throughput?

Default settings may not apply to your scenario. News at 11.

Not sure you're trolling, or just so immeasurably blind / stupid that you can't find an option that is on the first page of the settings.

No you merely demonstrated what I was saying, that people have a cognitive bias that gives "green" projects a thumbs up while holding other projects heavily accountable for even externally related issues, such as an earthquake and a tsunami knocking down a nuclear reactor. But it's ok that a dam didn't hold water right?

Nice try but the cause of a dam failure is NEVER water. That is the primary engineering case. It's like saying the cause of a bridge failure is a car driving over it, or the cause of a building falling down is that it contained office workers.

Dams are designed to safely spill floodwaters.

Actually this is another example of the halo effect. Fukushima was negligence because they didn't account for a large than normal tsunami, but Banqaio was a natural disaster? Hell no.

Good lord. Scientific consensus != an appeal to a random authority

Arguing from scientific consensus is NOT saying, "You should believe what I say because some other dude said it." That's an appeal to authority.

Scientific consensus is saying, "You should believe X because other scientists have tested all this stuff that you'll probably never have the time and equipment and whatever else you might need to test, but the vast majority of these scientists working within the scientific method using good procedures came to conclusion X, and I'm telling you X right now, so you should believe it because it's supported by a whole bunch of scientific evidence and procedure."

We can't go out and re-test every scientific discovery ever made ourselves. Not only would we not have the time (even in our entire lifetimes) or equipment, etc., but it would also be a collosal waste of time for every human to do this before believing any scientific idea taught to them. I'm NOT saying one shouldn't question ideas and think critically (and occasionally retest things, particularly if anomalies occur or if the consensus is not yet strong) -- but we can only make any progress by building on the ideas of others, not spending our lives testing things we already know to be the case.

Utter BS. Sorry, but do you think everyone before Copernicus or Galileo or Newton or whoever your hero is was a complete idiot?

Aristotle was a valued SCIENTIFIC authority for centuries because most of what he said agreed pretty well with empirical evidence. Contrary to your naive perspective on the history of science, people didn't continue "believing" in Aristotle just because he was Aristotle -- they found that what he said was in most cases pretty accurate, and much more accurate than a lot of other authorities.

In fact, arguably it was the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle and other classical sources that led the world OUT of the "Dark Ages", in something known to historians as a "renaisssance" that occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries, which actually paved the way for the later "renaissance" and "scientific revolution" by encouraging (proto-)scientific investigations.

Of course people appealed to authority. People still appeal to authority. But this whole myth that there was this bunch of ignorant Bible-thumpers or Aristotelians refusing to accept plain empirical evidence is just stupid, ignorant, and wrong. Learned people for many centuries have been doing experimental science, and the reason nobody bothered to serious doubt Aristotle until the 17th century or so is because most of what he said worked, just like most people bought Newton's theory of mechanics until Einstein came along because most of what he said worked.

And when the first real cracks started to appear in Aristotelianism, learned people started finding new methodologies and new conceptions that fit more with the facts (first a move to mechanical explanations in "natural philosophy," then a move toward mathematical models as the ideal "truth"). But people were doing experiments all along.

By the way, I'm not trying to downplay the break with Aristoteleanism, which was actually much more significant to intellectuals in the 17th century than the relatively minor squabble going on in speculative natural philosophy regarding mathematical models of the heavens (i.e., what we now call the "Scientific Revolution" with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton at the head). But the break with Aristotle was not because ignorant fools refused to do experiments -- it's because Aristotle's ideas had held up so well for so long in experiments, and it was only some very recent experiments, along with some new ideas and approaches that were pointing out some of the flaws.

By what strange theory does Slackware support systemd? And how is the conversation being "held back"? At least on LQ, I think it's been discussed to death to the point where there's really nothing new to say about it.

I can say one thing for certain: you do not know that anything concerning systemd in Slackware is likely or not. Hell, *I* don't.

Well, that argument is nonsense, and it shows what's wrong with the naive falsificationist view of science. First off, there's no "reasonably" about it, because often big advances in science require a break from some fundamental previous assumption -- hence, something that was "unreasonable" according to knowledge at the time. So, scientists really would need to systematically list "every possible cause" and then disprove them.

Which is of course ridiculous. There are infinite number of possible explanations for any observation. Scientists do NOT operate simply by seeking out hypotheses to falsify -- even Karl Popper didn't believe that. One needs a method for choosing what hypotheses to test, and that method is never exhaustive -- it depends on accepted science, i.e., stuff that's been "proved." Otherwise, we'd spend most of our time testing nonsense for no apparent reason. ("Today I hypothesize that the apple fell off my desk due to the work of tiny gnomes! Let us test my hypothesis in the lab!")

Instead, science mostly revolves around solving problems within established "research programs" or "paradigms." The base assumptions are taken as established, and most scientists work on various minor puzzles and tweaks within those core systems of knowledge.

As for "proof" -- this is one of those things that turns quickly into a really stupid argument. When we use "proof" in the real world, we mean that we have something with significant supporting evidence. What counts as "significant" will vary depending on the circumstances. But what "proof" basically never means except in these stupid arguments about the nature of science is "prove for all time in a mathematical sense that ends with QED." 99% of the uses of the word "proof" in the English language refer to something else, namely testing an idea to see whether it corresponds with any other evidence you find.

That's what scientific experiments do -- they test things. And when enough tests come out positive and the theory is accepted, it's "proved," probably much better than anything is "proved" in a court of law (which uses the same word). Of course it's not proved in an abstract mathematical sense -- that use of the word does not refer to the real world, only to abstract systems of logic. When we talk about the actual empirical world, "proof" means something else -- and scientific pedants who keep going around saying science doesn't "prove" anything are simply mistaking two different meanings of a single world that means different things.

I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.

Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.

Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.

I assume you're talking about this study, with further commentary here? This story was then reported by some outlets as saying that MSNBC was most "opinionated" by far (e.g., here).

If so, your use of the word "opinionated" is very misleading, and the study did not even address issues of who is "more biased."

Read the study. It's basically about the difference between type of programming. The cable news networks used to present much more of the traditional anchor looking into the camera and saying, "And now, for our next story..." -- that's "factual reporting," according to Pew.

What this study found was that cable news networks have increasingly moved to "opinion" or commentary-driven shows, with pundits talking or debating, rather than just "reading the news." MSNBC has a LOT of these shows, and much more than CNN or Fox. But that doesn't mean they are more "opinionated" or "biased" -- it just means that they have more commentary-focused shows (probably because it's cheaper to get some idiots to talk ABOUT the news than it is to put actual reporters out into the field and do research).

In any case, this says nothing about bias. It's possible for an "opinion" show to be relatively balanced, for example if guests are invited from across the ideological spectrum and treated with respect. It is also very possible for "factual reporting" to be incredibly biased -- for example, imagine a network that reported every single negative story it could find about a Democratic politician and every positive story about a Republican, but never reported the positive Dem stories or the negative Rep stories. (Or the reverse...) All of the reporting could be "factual" here, but the selection of stories could lead to a much greater overarching bias.

(I haven't really watched either one of these networks in years, so I don't have a personal stake in these arguments. But aside from a different Pew study that found a somewhat greater bias in presentation of candidates in 2012 on MSNBC than Fox, I'm not familiar with any Pew studies that have actually found greater OVERALL "bias" on liberal vs. conservative issues on MSNBC.)

They should just replace the cabin air with helium. The reduced fuel consumption can pay for bigger seats.

It would help if there were alternatives. High speed rail is just as fast or faster for many journeys once you factor in time wasted getting to the airport, going through security and all that crap.

I'm lucky in that JAL fly the route I travel and offer bigger seats and food as standard for the same price as the shitty British carriers who pack you in like a sardine.

But Hydroelectric is incredibly safe when you look at all other forms of energy production. It certainly has never displaced as many people or killed as many people as nuclear.

Oh wait!

The halo effect describes cognitive bias people have about others based on an impression. It applies to industry just as much as it applies to people. Look at the full lifecycle cost of anything and nothing is really without issues, especially hydroelectric power which currently wins top prize as worst accident by death toll ever though the Chinese government list it as a natural disaster.

In the typical open source fashion people thinking they're experts will blindly criticise someone's decision without understanding it. How about you start with blivet-gui is not a partition manager and then work onwards from there with your understanding.

Blivet-gui is a standalone implementation of the storage manager used during the install process. Yes it can partition, and in the true open source fashion it uses another program to do so (parted), but that's a small subset of what they want to use it for which is more like be a one stop shop for all disk management, volume management, and RAID management.

Please put the pitchfork away.