Freedom of association and expression is a univeral human right, as well as an American value. You're so blinded by your need to scorn the latter that you can't even see the former.

No, no. You're assuming he actually means it. More likely is the possibility that when he says "I'm not a genius because there are 6.5 billion people with unique gifts" he knows it isn't true, but is a good way to keep the other 11-year-olds from kicking his smart ass.

Boeing built the B-17 on spec because they felt the Army Air Corps would need it, there wasn't a contract. Think something like that would happen today?

Actually, General Atomics built the Predator and Reaper UAVs the same way - in fact, the first models were sold to the CIA and the Air Force wasn't interested until after that... but perhaps that makes your point, rather than disproving it. :)

Or hexagons? Come to think of it, although the keys on a standard QWERTY keyboard are square, adjacent rows are actually slightly offset.

>If you are asking, you don't qualify.

Exactly. In fact, if you're any damn good, just break into the HR system, insert yourself, and tell the front desk you forgot your badge when you show up for work the tomorrow morning.

This now concludes your interview.

Further, police have announced that Nokia phones other than the 1100s with prime serial numbers contain no red mercury.

How do you distribute the electricity from your biomass reactor or your solar field to the cars? See previous paragraph about power grid issues.

Um, at night?

But that's not the point; the problem is that shipping H2 around is a colossal PITA. It doesn't compress well, it leaks like crazy, and it's corrosive to many metals. Even if we had magical free hydrogen, the sensible thing would probably be to convert it to hydrocarbons; the loss from that will be less than from shipping the hydrogen around.

Don't be silly. Human sacrifice is only necessary if you're installing Debian.

Yes.

Sun is really in the software business already - that's where all their value-add is. Nobody would buy a sparc to run Linux (well, maybe the Niagaras for SSL webservers, but probably not even that). They were transitioning, maybe too slowly, to a Apple-style model where they sell hardware with nice but mostly industry-standard designs as a mechanism to licence their software.

And the benchmark numbers for Nehalem are crazy. The processor wars are all over but the screaming - the only folks left standing in two and a half years will be Intel and some ultra-low-power MIPS chips for portables and the cheapest of the cheap. (Expect some real excitement when the next generation consoles come out - I think IBM has to win those, again, to keep enough volume to keep Power alive).

It doesn't matter. You dump it to a new disk array every 5-8 years. (I have files in my homedir two decades old). And while enterprise tape might be cheaper than "enterprise" hard drives, is it cheaper than 2 damn cheap ones? 3?

You want a permanent archival format, maybe something you can easily ship, tapes or preferably stone tablets may be fine, but I think the VTL (Virtual tape library) is the winner for backup right now.

No. Sad, but no:

Sun doesn't have the volume to do chips anymore. HP and Apple gave up a few years ago, and frankly I'm not so sure about IBM and AMD. Have you actually looked at real benchmarks for the Intel 5500 series (or Power, or Sparc)?

The SMT Sun machines were actually halfway competitive with x86 on throughput/performance, but not better, and single-threaded performance sucks. The Ultrasparc-VI/VII had improved but still weren't really competitive unless you needed a $500k box that was twice as fast as a $50k top-of-the-line x86. Power6 was better, but still not really competitive.

And now Nehalem is out - Intel's first real bottom-up redesign since they realized AMD was kicking their butts because nobody wanted to move onto a new Itanium architecture (which, by the way, was slow) - and it's all over but the screaming. Once the 4-socket 32-core Intel x86 is shipping by Q1 next year I'm not sure anybody else can really hang in in the processor market.

Sun has some real innovation in software, though (Java, Dtrace, ZFS, some of their new storage stuff). It'll be a real loss if IBM kills that.

The Tesla press release refers to it as a "haptic" touchscreen; that would imply some kind of (vibration?) feedback that would make it easier to tell what was what on the screen.

I'm not so sure about that in practice, but it sounds like they are aware of the problem.

It's possible to be fair, but not to be unbiased; you have to have some kind of political viewpoint to decide what stories are even newsworthy.

I think our current media model is a post-WWII abberation, and we're headed back to an era of fragmented and obviously, blatently biased news sources. I'm leaning to the idea that is an improvement.

It's similar (at least, a lot more similar than any other Linux filesystem), but less mature.

In defense of the LK team on the whole ZFS issue, I understand that part of the reason they didn't pursue some ZFS-like features years ago was because of patents. Now that SUN has open-sourced (though not in a GPL-compatible way) ZFS and is defending that against Network Appliance in a lawsuit, the way looks a lot clearer for Btrfs and company to proceed.

Actually, on that thought, the IBM acquisition of SUN should get NetApp to drop that lawsuit. Going up against SUN in a MAD patent dispute is a bit risky, but (as SCO discovered) aggressive IP lawsuits against IBM come in right behind "land war in Asia".

Why not try "-o sync"?

Honestly, if it's a spare-part-server running on a typical home LAN, and is read-mostly, odds are reasonable you won't notice the difference.

If it is too slow, then you can always go back and screw around with this other nonsense.