Thanks for the info. I was contemplating booting into Windows to run the fix, but it sounds like I might be better off using the live CD. I hadn't run the initial fix, so I'm debating if it's worth it to run it now and then run it again later when they release this fix, or just wait for the new fix.

Is the update that rewrites the data going to be a problem on a LUKS encrypted volume? From what I saw it looks like it only supports NTFS? I also have an NTFS partition on the drive though. I guess I'm just concerned about it borking the LUKS partition.

I hadn't heard about the original firmware update but was wondering why my read performance had gotten so much worse over time. Here I was blaming it on btrfs...

...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?

The Snapdragon 805 and newer has hardware accelerated VP9 decode.

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)

Not that far from the truth.

If terrorism is a way to guarantee people do your job for you, then perhaps we have discovered the secret eighth habit of highly effective managers?

Try Virtualmin. It has a web gui interface to configure things like vhosts, along with mod_fcgid, php, etc. It installs and sets up a bunch of extra crap as well that you probably won't need, but it's so quick that might be worth looking at anyway and just remove what you don't need.

No—I was limiting the scope of my concerns to this particular tax grab attempt and the corresponding infrastructure upgrade that it would fund. I apologize for the confusion.

Does "saving the country" not count as something to accomplish? You've got me confused here.

...Someone from the back row shouts out "Because our AdSense profile has determined you were visiting websites about cigarettes recently, your health insurance premium has gone up by 5% and you will probably die slightly sooner. Remember, [i]f you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!"

Is it cynicism if you're just using a Markov chain to predict what other Slashdotters will say?

(Although obviously this is auto insurance, so I'm sure someone can translate the threat appropriately.)

The best explanation of asymmetric crypto (not taking authentication into account) that I've seen is mixing two colors of paint to create a third color. Each party can derive the other party's color by "subtracting" their color from the shared mixture. But an intermediary has no way of determining which two colors were mixed. This is an example that pretty much anyone can understand.