Anonymous Cowards teaching morality. On Slashdot, no less. Now THAT's a joke!

I'm Romanian. Your point is, again...?
Anyway, I was trying to be funny. Seems that the spirit of Christmas doesn't make people more receptive to jokes. Oh well...

I'm thinking this:
I type say 5K characters a day. That's a total of 18250000 characters a year.
If I type at the speed of 5 characters per second, just as a baseline, that's 3650000 seconds a year, almost 1014 hours spent typing every year. typing twice as fast would shave off 507 hours of focusing on typing, which I can spend on something else. I'd say it's definitely worthy.

People have an inherent need to be first at "something". They are competitive, and that goes back in history to... the very beginning, I'd say.
There's a small hill near Sibiu in my country. On top of that hill there's a small church, built of stones and boulders. The hill itself is mostly made of earth, so the boulders had to be lifted there somehow. Now people wouldn't do that voluntarily so the Church somehow convinced them that in order to show how great their love is for their brides-to-be, they should pick a boulder as big as possible and carry it upwards to the top of the hill. For decades, men of all ages would do that, both to prove their love at first and then to reaffirm it as often as possible.

A brief reference is to be found here: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biserica_Sf%C3%A2ntul_Mihail_din_Cisn%C4%83dioara. "Exist i o legend a locului care spune c fiecare fecior înainte de nunt trebuia s duc un astfel de bolovan în cetate pentru a-i demonstra puterea." Translation: "There's a local legend saying that each bachelor should carry such a boulder, before the wedding, to the stronghold, to prove his strength". Our tour guide, however, told us more, which is what I mentioned above.

Anyway, point is that people need to compare themselves to others and perfect a skill so that they rise above the mass. Nothing wrong with that, although some "skills" barely fit the definition. Like fastest 100m run on four limbs... seriously?

Fast typing, however, is an useful skill. I wish I could do that, because it would greatly help channel my literary ideas faster. I sometimes write a couple pages than give up because my train of thought goes too far ahead and I get bored of putting all that in writing.

Another Dvorak disadvantage is that sometimes you type "simular" instead of "similar".

Exactly this.
I know a (very large) Data Center belonging to a (very large) company which started replacing their HDDs with SSDs. The price difference isn't even that large; price-per-GB for a server-grade 15K RPM SAS was negligibly close to SSD price. And the advantages are really there: (much) lower heat produced, less noise, less space taken, less energy consumed. Even with a similar failure rate, the advantages are there.

Nope. SSDs are reliable enough to be used in server-grade implementations. The only issue with them is that they're highly specialized. If your regular HDDs become the bottleneck, you will need SSDs. Also, if you have some small implementations where you need fast access to read/write/modify data (some MMOs come to mind) and need to protect it against a power failure or RAM going awry, you should use SSDs.

On a more general note: I never move important data. What I do is: I copy data from old HDD to new HDD and then use KLS Backup to set up incremental back-up. I still use old HDD until it fails. When that happens, the old HDD is taken out of the system, the "new" HDD becomes the "old" HDD and a brand new HDD becomes... yes, you guessed it: new HDD :)

Unimportant data never gets backed up (e.g. installed games or large ISOs I keep for some reason, music, uncompressed video captures, etc). It goes straight to the new HDD because that's usually larger than the old one.

I feel you, man. Point is a convicted person should indeed be monitored, but by a specific government branch-only. Nobody else should be aware of what happened in the past.

This is not funny. It's insightful.

Add in plans for steampunk gizmos.

Romania, not so much, no.
Anyway, we have Okazii.ro here, which is a Romanian Ebay. However, it's a defective product and I don't want to contribute to a stranger's unhappiness.

I am not from the US.

Not supported, so no I haven't. I'll just give it away to someone I hate :)

Sadly, most of them were male, and those who weren't... could've fooled me.