Um no, not exactly. It basically says ChrisMaple was right, and drinkypoo has once again lived up to his name. The article admits that small quakes DO take some of the energy away from larger ones, and do delay them by "temporarily easing stress on the fault line". It merely points out that the massive disparity in energy levels means that a single small quake (or even a hundred small quakes) cannot permanently avert a much larger one. If, however, you keep repeating this "temporary" fix, you end up with a long-term solution.

The rest of your comment is bang-on though. Small quakes are of no concern.

It's amazing to me that this single statement can get modded "troll" on a website dedicated to people who supposedly are tech fans / experts.

[quote]I'll believe that the moment an oil multi's board moves into the area where they're doing some fracking.[/quote]

That's just silly. Not only is it an absurd thing to ask of them, it would prove absolutely nothing. You know full well that if such a thing DID happen you'd call it a publicity stunt and remain opposed to fracking anway ... so why make such a dishonest claim? Hyperbole?

Yeah, that was also my take on it, just from the bit of reading I did on it. Kept seeing that "thousands" claim but absolutely no evidence for anything even close to that number. Thanks for the confirmation.

Damn. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Target the perps properly, you're racist. Put on the kidd gloves and you don't care about the poor children. No-win situation.

This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?

Hrm ... let's see ... do we spend the money on a one-time cost which reduces workload by 90% ... OR do we spend the money on the start of a recurring cost to investigate and prosecute a small subset who have little meaningful impact on the end result.

Yeah, no, totally, your idea rocks.

Yeah I think the article is overrated. Alcohol has been around for a long time, and so has the ability to process it AND its effects on brains.

See this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...

If I had to bet, I'd bet on the trucking companies replacing their drivers with robots first before the bus or taxi companies do.

Buses are too messy - dealing with too many unpredictable people and vehicles in complex scenarios. Taxis would be even worse (buses have bus routes, taxis don't).

In contrast imagine being able to run trucks nonstop using robot drivers that don't need sleep, robot drivers that are safe and reliable enough to make the insurance companies to charge lower premiums. Maybe every Xth truck on the route has a human (who doesn't drive) just in case a truck encounters a problem that needs a human around. The trucking companies can pick routes that are more robot-truck friendly. Can't do that for taxis, and maybe hard for buses too.

When a robo-truck crushes a kid on a "no pedestrian" highway, that's a lot less bad PR than a robo-bus crushing a kid in a city or residential area.

You forgot:

- Had the "study" somehow concluded that boys were better it would have never seen the light of day, rendering all such studies meaningless due to selection bias.

Systemd is headed towards a horrible slide-show inexplicably created as a PDF?

And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.

This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better. Overwriting / deletion might have been a concern prior to modern filesystems which incorporate easy and cheap snapshotting, but nowdays that part of the argument just doesn't fly. Corruption is still a concern but, again, that's a risk you take with any backup solution too.

There's no such thing as a guaranteed backup. If you're very rich and very paranoid, you could certainly rig up a "backup solution" that involves copying your data every 5 minutes to 50 different offsite locations in 50 different countries, plus having some cheap third-world-labour transcribe all the zeros and ones to a paper copy for storage in an underground vault. And even that's not 100% because a really big asteroid will result in unrecoverable corruption. In the end it all comes down to how much you're willing to spend and what level of risk you're willing to accept. For most of us who aren't running IT departments that equation comes down to something like "ZFS RAIDZ2".

Try this on for size then. My current laptop has 3 x 1tb drives internal, but they only spin up when I need them to. My many OSs (several flavors of linux, 2 versions of windows, plus BSD) all run off of a single 480gb mSATA Crucial M500 SSD, attached to a cheap M-SATA-to-USB-3 adapter.

All the features you're looking for, plus the portability of being able to use your personal setup on any other computer just by plugging in to a USB port.

Ah, yes. Confucius say, the path to mastering pedanticism is paved with low UIDs.

I prefer a buttery biscuit base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Many of these exploits and xss-worms would not have been effective if people had implemented the suggestion I made more than a decade ago:
http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.se...
http://osdir.com/ml/security.w...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/P...

Plenty of people suggest libraries to sanitize stuff, but when people keep creating new "GO" buttons and never a single "STOP" button - how can you be sure you've disabled every possible "GO" button? With my proposal, a "STOP button" could even disable future yet to be invented "GO" buttons.

Anyway since the Mozilla bunch supposedly have a better idea, how about getting on with it: https://developer.mozilla.org/...