12 volts is horrid. Really. I have a friend that works in the car audio 'boom boom' industry and he really laments 12 volts. He has to run 0 gauge wire for items that bolt onto a fold down back seat of an SUV... how big a bus bar will we need for a full rack of 12 volt junk?

The limiting safety factor on voltage is breakdown of insulation. The limiting safety factor on current is wire diameter (and to a lesser extent, length). We've converted a good deal of our AC to 240 just to increase wattage capacity. Don't go the wrong way guys.

Also, if you are redefining racks:
23" already exists.
If you must make a new size, make it metric. Also make the rack units metric. And saying 1RU = 2.54 cm is not making it metric.
If you are standardizing everything else, come up with one (not neccessarily new) standard for 'how things are connected to the rack' (one thread, one style hole, one style thing to adapt thread to hole) so I don't have a drawer full of 18 different types of hardware for the things. (ok is this rack 8-32 or 10-32 or 12-24 or M5 or M6. Oh wait the rack kit wants square holes so I need to put this server over in that rack instead... but the nas array wants round unthreaded holes so it has to go across the room)

Even better: Raid 6, with hot spare, cold spare on the shelf, and a unit that supports regular self-consitancy checking and automatic failure notification. My primary nas even has a wireable relay trigger, which is hooked to turn on a $20 spinning red light (old cop car style) sitting on top of the cabinet when there's an alert.

It's also powered by two ups's (one for each power supply) and supports network controlled shutdown on both.

If you can, order the drive packs (we got 2 packs of 4) from different vendors to minimize the chance of getting the same 'lot' of drives. Look at the amount of storage you need and get the minimum size drives... because they rebuild faster you are at less risk of a multi failure. I'd much rather have 12x 1 TB drives than 4x 3TB drives.

(And if you scoff at Raid 6, I've had a second drive fail hard during the rebuild when the system detected a probable failure on a drive and started to rebuild with the hot spare at 3 am...)

Also, backup backup backup.

If you need speed of course, you want raid 1+0. That's fine, my rule of thumb is:
Start with one hot spare, one cold spare.
After each 3rd mirror pair, add another hot spare. (so 6 total in use drives needs 2 hot spares)
Add another cold spare after every other hot spare.

Cold spares should be testable and tested. I will swap them out with the hot spares once a month.
But I'm paranoid.
Also:
Backup Backup Backup. RINB.

Also: HARDWARE RAID CARDS.

I can't stress that enough. software and semi-software raid is a joke.

And I believe these hunters should be arrested and that their hunting licenses should be revoked. There's a line. You don't step over it. They did. I don't care if the vehicle was on private, public, federal, or international territory. The aircraft itself is private property. You only fire against items of private property of another person a) with permission of that person, or b) if you have a reasonable fear of your safety.

When you generate these faked bounces they are generated through your receiving mail server. Invariably, some of those bounces go back to spam trap email addresses that are used in forged headers, causing your ISP's mail server to be black listed.

I have plugged in a customer 'milter' in our mail server to block this 'feature' from working. (bounces that the server doesn't create get routed to /dev/null.)

I think this is along the lines of... if you have a safe, they can, with a warrent/court order, force the safe open. And find incriminating evidence inside. It's not the same thing as forcing you to incriminate yourself. They are just looking at this as a container that's locked. If you have a safe full of documents, they get a court order to access them, and before they get to them you 'accidentally' set fire to everything in the safe, that's obstruction of justice. Essentially they are trying to treat electronic evidence no different than physical records.

A game I play (Final Fantasy 11) has taken their servers, etc... offline for at least the next week, starting Saturday evening their time.

Also a lot of extraneous power usage (lighting monuments, for example) has been shut down as well.

As I said the flashbacks didn't bother me. Maybe it was the setting and my tolerance is higher. I dunno.

Interesting thing most of the people I have talked to have missed. They've commented that CLU looked a little off, especially in the eyes. So the conclusion of many is that the tech just ain't quite there, however something occurred when watching (I was looking specifically for this bit).

When Flynn is having his storytime with his son at the beginning of the movie, he's also digitally restored to a youthful appearance. And he looks fine to me. There's none of whatever it is, and I agree it was there, that made CLU slightly bothersome to look at, at least for me. Therefore I believe that CLU's slightly off appearance, trigger to the uncanny valley as it were, is intentional.

I will admit there is another possibility, which is that it was there, however the more real backdrop of a young kid's bedroom vs the high contrast shiny of the world of the ghosts inside of the machine muted the effect enough to not be bothersome. That the setting compensated for the flaws in the composition, as it were.

Simple, buearucrats would rather have no answer than give the wrong one, therefore any investigation undertaken by the government would take at least a month to get rolling well.

Another trick we've seen (in fact they sell these things for an insane markup, and there's installation videos on youtube) is to bypass the meter on one phase. Pull your meter, put a shim across one side, (both sides will stop the meter entirely) and put meter back.
Shims we've seen: Various wires, usually smaller than 20 gauge, soldered directly to the attachment points or meter.
Plastic with wire wrapped around it
spoons or knives, steel, tin, and silver.
The actual shims that we can buy for various purposes; they cost $1.50 a piece. The website (with text lifted verbatim off one of those capacitor 'power factor adjustor' box sites) sells the shims for $199 each, with a video linked of a girl doing the install with high voltage gloves she got off ebay that have little white circles on them, meaning 'failed test here' (shudder).

If it wasn't for common sense audit type things (hmm there are people living here, lights on at night, but no service at this address) then hooking a house into power without a meter is here and there is actually pretty trivial and not likely to be noticed (22 building apartment on the other hand, much more noticable).

Well, most people who steal electricity generally ARE idiots, so yah.

The line crews do regular inspections of the system and we occasionally find more 'smartly done' thefts, but it's rare, and usually they are very dangerously wired.

I work for a electric (and gas, water, sewer, cable, internet, phone... talk about 'triple play') utility, though not on the electric side. We can do isolation down to an area, though it's hard. Mostly we find people stealing power by looking at billing patterns. Most people steal power with a bypass at the meter of some sort. There's one company I can't find right now that sells a device we use to short past a meter. They cost us $2 a pair. These guys sell you one (cutting your energy bill 'in half' by cutting one phase out of the meter) for $199.99 + S+H. They give you wonderful videos on how to do the work, tell you to buy gloves on ebay for cheap (The gloves in the video have little white circles on them, indicating that they have failed safety tests at those points...) Then there's the people that use 22-gauge wire, cheap steel spoons hammered flat, etc. We've had more than one burn their house down doing this. As an added btw: We tested a couple of those 'power factor correction' devices. They do in fact change the power factor. They do not in fact lead to any noticeable savings because houses power factors are pretty even anyway. We came to the rough conclusion that the employee that had electric heat, water, electric dryer, and primarily used her electric oven and range to cook

My (Great depression era) house has lots of odd plugs. I've got the combo-duplex (double T 120 outlet), 4 different types of 240 outlets, including a nema 2-15 ungrounded, not counting the stove and dryer. I also have a "1-15" ungrounded 'strip plug' where they just ran two slots the right distance apart and you could plug anywhere along its 18" length in the bathroom, but it's not live. It is part of the mirror molding though so tough to remove. I've slowly been putting in grounded receptecles where I can, and using gfci gorunded where I can't (can add normal gorunds 'past' a gfci ground outlet if there is ground wiring from outlet to outlet, and still be 'to code', but I've not done that because it's either 3 wire all the way or 2 all the way). I've converted all the weird 240s (which were for window AC or heater units, house has central air now) to 120 since they had good wiring and were run using standard 2+1 12 gauge wire. All my new outlets are shuttered, it costs like 50 cents more per. There's also a 240V twist lock plug (not socket) run out under the deck.. I traced it back and it runs near the main breaker box, but is rolled up. I think someone intended to put a generator in at some point and never got around to finishing it up.