I'm kind of wondering where they would all go.

If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.

It's officially not released yet, and the seller linked to is in Japan and gouging anyone who can't wait another couple weeks. I'm not sure how or what stock they got a hold of.

According to Intel, list price is $377 boxed or $366 Tray. Not $540.

Are there vendors that actually support RAID across otherwise independent SANs?

Like if you had SANs A through F, each with a 10 TB volume and you used SAN controller Z (which has no disks of its own) to take those 10 TB volumes and turn them into a single (say RAID-6) volume.

I've done this for laughs with a NAS4Free implementation, using its iSCSI client to mount LUNs from 3-4 different storage devices and then combining those mounts into a RAID LUN which I then exported via ISCSI and used on a client.

It seems like an interesting idea, and put together right seems like it might offer some relatively interesting redundancy versus some of the replication and mirroring options I've seen vendors advertise.

Personally I've been using Ceph for the last few years myself. It has to be one of the best DFS's I've ever used. It includes security, speed, easy to expand by adding additional nodes. The free part was great. I found it looking through the repos one day. You can even tie it into other projects such as Hadoop (at least I recall reading it had a plug in a couple years ago).

Great product!

There are some things that reasonably can be ascribed the quality of being a worthy candidate for ridicule.

Certainly the notion that a representative democracy would copyright its laws and attempt to control their distribution for profit or any other motive is worthy of ridicule.

AFAIK the motivation is almost always financial, usually in collusion with some big legal publisher who gets exclusive rights and kicks back to the state. But it's not hard to imagine some kind of conspiratorial intent to restrict information to protect the legal class or bury details.

About the only rationale that makes any sense is to try to maintain an official reference presentation. The state could actually format and print a small run of the code and annotations themselves, which anyone could copy, but that would probably be a non-trivial amount of overhead, so they outsource it to a publisher in exchange for exclusivity.

You're forgetting more functional reasons -- like pain relief?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if more than a few long-time lab rats ended up with orthopedic issues from decades of standing in lab environments.

It's not a stretch from that to morphine synthesis to treat back pain.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

I blame airline consolidation.

Fewer airlines, each hiding out in their fortified monopoly hub airports, means less gate competition and less gate competition means airports can probably charge less for gate access. It's probably even worse, because with fewer airlines overall a lot of airports worry about losing their hub status and probably charge even less to the big carrier left providing service or provide other accommodations which save the hub carrier money.

This revenue pinch causes them to turn to commercial providers to install and run their wifi networks or if they run their own, to charge for service.

Flying sucks.

An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.

Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase

Yeah. I mean, there should be, just purely from an economic perspective you should see evidence of this. So we started looking. And surprisingly enough, as I speak here today, in 2013, we have more bees in America than we did in 2007, before Colony Collapse Disorder was observed and named. There is virtually no effect--there has probably been some effect on the price of pollination services, but it's not dramatic. And it's probably only for almonds, the only early-season crop that is pollinated. Not for the other crops pollinated the rest of the year. And this is surprising, given all the discussions of CCD and honeybee health.

We've found there's been no effect of Colony Collapse Disorder on the prices of queens.

It does make a person wonder how many university organic chem labs churn out drugs on the side, even if its only for self-consumption.

I would imagine by now that the precursor chemicals for relatively easy synthesis are controlled, but I would think a good PhD in organic chemistry would merely take that as a challenge and attempt a more complex synthesis which made the precursors.

Hell, if they were clever they may even be able to some of it (or even all of it) as a legitimate project if it somehow advanced the synthesis know-how. I think I've read that the total synthesis of morphine is ridiculously complex but that it would be highly desirable to develop a synthesis that avoided any kind of opium base.

The big difficulty is that salary gets really complicated, really fast. It helps many people, but building the system that is equitable would be difficult, and all the positive outliers could be harmed in the process.

SCENARIO: Money is a little tight but applicants are plentiful. We interview lots of people, and three of them look very qualified and are willing to work for a certain wage in a tight range. All hired. Three months later the group discovers a unique need, needing a developer on a specific tool with specific skills. They'll be hired at the same job title, but because the group need a specialized skill immediately, they will go through a headhunter and ultimately pay a premium for that fourth worker. Now, because all four have the same job title, the critical question: should the company go back and increase the three other workers' pay to the same pay rate of the fourth worker with the specialized skill? Should they refuse to hire the specialist at a rate above the other three?

In some fields it can make sense to standardize pay. Most skilled trades operate this way. There is a standard rate in a region for a Journeyman with specific certifications. Trade unions can help fight for specific benefits. You know that this class of tradesman has a specific skill set and can be hired for $27/hour. You need four of them. All of them are treated as interchangeable.

In other fields it can make far less sense to standardize pay, mostly because there are many variables. Unfortunately software development is one of those fields where it is complicated. It would be really convenient -- both for applicants and employers -- to have such a scale. This is a Java programmer with seven endorsements certified at grade 27, so pay is automatically $x.

But unfortunately for this field, technology is ALWAYS changing, so the scale would be difficult. You were certified in version 3.2, but the system has moved on to version 4.1. Does that individual lose the old certification? If they take the new industry trade group's course do they now have 8 certifications instead of seven? Do certifications expire over time, or transfer between technologies? With the huge number of technologies out there, does that mean we'll have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of different certifications for the trade union? How are individual certifications weighted, and how are they equivalent? Is a master Direct3D 12 certification the same value as a master PostgreSQL 9.4 certification? Is a PostgreSQL 9.4.4 certification valued differently than a PostgreSQL 9.3.9 certification? If someone has certifications in other specializations, must those apply in the cost? With the rapid pace of an enormous number of technologies, what prevents someone from getting hundreds of certifications? Such as "I've got 47 certifications, one for each version of the software released over the past two years"? While it works good for slower-moving trades, it does not work so well in software.

Sometimes I feel it would be nice to have programming trade unions. There are many features like collective bargaining for benefits that could be nice. But for actual salary levels, union-based standardized wages would be a nightmare. It would add a convenience factor to ensure new workers have certain minimum competencies, but it unfortunately adds maximum values as well. Nobody wants to know that they could be making more due to market pressure.

By establishing fixed buckets of pay levels, it establishes both a minimum (yay) and a maximum (boo) within a region. If you've got any kind of specialization or exotic skill -- and many of us do -- those same pay buckets that help many people also hurt the top performers.

It's what collection agencies do with lawsuits and what many mortgage holders have done when going after homeowners.

The collection companies have gotten bad press from filing bogus lawsuits with inadequate documentation. Like sending summonses for their suits to the wrong address, resulting in bench warrants being issued to people who never got the notices and ignored the default judgements that resulted. I don't think most county level civil courts did much about it, though.

The mortgage industry I think earned more heat from bankruptcy courts when they showed up with bad documentation that basically couldn't prove they owned the mortgages. I think some judges got annoyed with the mass litigation many engaged in and started discharging the mortgages unless they could provide accurate documentation, but I think it only happened after a few savvy defense attorneys began to understand the maze of paperwork and lack of legal documents (ie, pen and paper notarized paperwork) that actually proved the plaintiffs owned the mortgages.

IMHO, there ought to be a set of steep progressive penalties imposed on both counsel and plaintiff who file serial/mass litigation with flimsy or substantively inaccurate documentation. Like the first one is a slap on the wrist, the second within some window of the first is a $10,000 fine and the third in the same window is a $100k fine, risk of disbarment to counsel and perjury charges to the plaintiff. You need these kinds of penalties to restrain counsel and clients.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

If they want an easy, comfortable patient relationship they should have gone into dermatology, not oncology. Dying and cancer go hand in hand, and I would expect such a profession to be better skilled at handing those issues than the general public. As a medical practice, they should be willing to engage allied professionals like psychologists or social workers to promote more realistic goals.

By the time we had that meeting with the oncologist, the suffering of my mom was was really evident. I didn't think she had much of a chance of recovery and another round of chemo would have been very difficult for her and difficult for us.

This is a larger topic, but the US doesn't do dying well and it costs all of us dearly in desperation measures. The patients and their families pay in pain, heartache and treasure and the rest of pay in treasure. Recognizing a point when recovery or meaningful life extension isn't possible and switching to palliative care makes so much sense. Plus it often gives patents and their families some time to use the the health/energy they have left for living versus making them sicker from treatment before they ultimately die.