It's not just a dedicated place of learning, it's a place of research.

Many of the top schools aren't called "top schools" because they teach well. They're top schools because they have to researchers and experts a wide range of subjects who make themselves available to students. If you have a large number of the top people in the world, and they all expect to have the highest salaries of anyone in their line of work, then you have to find a way to increase income to meet their demands. When you see a faculty to student ratio, it can be interpreted as the number of students it takes to pay one person's salary (on average).

This is all on top of providing infrastructure and a vast number of services to enough people to fill a small city (in many cases).

There are more holes in Flash than every version of Windows and MacOS combined. Updating may fix 3 of those issues at a time, while 50 more are found. Whoooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Do you understand DRM? With a five digit UID I would think so. Your posts are a bit muddled, though, let me see if I can clarify. Correct me where you think I'm wrong.

DRM is the "feature" that makes it so you only have one copy of a digital file (something that would normally be trivial to copy). DRM means, in this case, that the hypothetical digital library can only check out as many copies as they've purchased, and that the users cannot copy the files and keep them.
DRM is an attempt to make digital files media-dependent (you need the CD to play, you need the DVD to watch, etc) and is largely anachronistic, but in this case, it actually makes a reasonable amount of sense, and a DRM free digital library is simply implausible.

With a 6-digit UID, I'm sure you know this, but for those who might not have taken a university level computing class (or who took one a long time ago), I'm going to elaborate briefly on your post.

Problems like factoring products of primes (This is a big deal in crypto, but the explanation of why is hard if you haven't taken a university number theory course) and the above-mentioned Traveling Salesman Problem (The question of how I can most efficiently reach each of a given set of points, after given fixed distances between said points) are what we call np-complete. This means, in short, that the amount of time it takes to solve them goes up more and more for each item (point in TS, making the prime gigantic in crypto) you add. It's trivial to factor 15, as shown here, but non-trivial to factor (2 ^ 43112609 -1) * (2 ^ 42643801 -1).

So, yes, if it can solve the traveling salesman problem (in polynomial time. Solving it is easy, unless you consider that with enough nodes, it'll take until the heat death of the universe), it IS a big deal for modern crypto because it shows that np-complete problems (whose only REAL issue is that they are computationally difficult) can be solved in a realistic amount of time, and most modern crypto counts on the fact that it cannot.

*whoosh*

Not permanently -- they get old and ugly sooner or later. ED isn't because of your aging process, it's because of hers.

Butt in the end, it's all a load of ASCRAP...

If you suffer a serious failure on the disk itself, how are you supposed to flush anything? Even with a volatile write cache, if you have a motherboard failure in the middle of a sync, some data still isn't going to make it. A nonvolatile write cache just removes power failure as one of the points of failure.

Then use a higher-level protocol in the NAS family instead of one in the SAN family.

Cloud computing is just a little step above web site hosting. Instead of some online space accessible through HTTP, they give you a little more - a virtual machine with an external IP, for example. You get charged for the convenience of not having to: buy hardware, set up a firewall, set up an internet connection, obtain space, obtain electricity. Sometimes it is scalable so you can run exactly as many virtual machines as you need for a particular task, and it's great if you temporarily want some powerful, flexible web hosting.

While Doctorow has a point, running an in-house data center is hardly something that lacks recurring costs. Once you get past the hype, the benefit of cloud computing is that it should be possible to leverage technical expertise and management across a much larger user base. The number of people you need who really understand email servers does not go up linearly with the number of users served.

Right. Just leave your hand on that burner, then, and tell us how pain doesn't serve any useful function.

This is most certainly religion based. Everyone should bear in mind that North America was originally colonized by people kicked out of Britain for being too uptight.

The religious exiles left voluntarily.

But at least a third of the colonists were "transported" as prisoners - settlement on the Australian plan, if you like.

The plantation south with its Cavalier roots was notorious for its sexually predatory males.

The diarist Mary Chesnut would later write that Harriet Beecher Stowe had missed her most telling point by casting Simon Legree as a bachelor.

Joke, n.
1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line.

Uh, this is /.
From any ISP's perspective, most of us ARE criminals. I think we'd be hard pressed to find a single person here who HASN'T violated at least some part of copyright law.

*whoosh*
Careful there, it almost hit you.