Are you sure they're physical caps, not virtual, or ethereal caps?

The "wasted material" will be due to measurement mistakes.

You are clearly clueless. Before you can speak intelligently about a subject you must educate yourself on that subject. For you to actually understand the magnitude of such a conversion you must first spend a week as an apprentice at an architectural firm in the US, then spend a week with a construction crew as they build a new house. Then you will spend a week working at a lumber yard. After all of that, then you can come back and comment intelligently in this thread.

You mean in the same vein that every product I buy in the US that's made in China has a instructions in 6 languages? No cost there...

It never ceases to amaze me how liberals think they have the answers to all of the world's ills which are always caused by those pesky Americans, and the Amercicans should have to pay to fix other people's problems. Such a conversion would not benefit any future generations of US citizens. So you just want us to convert to SI to makes things easier for everyone else. Do you work at the UN by chance?

Election cycles are 2/4/ 6 years. Not...gonna...work.

To what end? So foreign visitors are less confused when driving on or roads? Or to drive up small town ticket revenue until people become acclimated to kph? Both are great ideas... /rolls eyees

Converting the official measurement system simply for the sake of converting, to be like everyone else, is not a valid case for conversion, especially in the country with the world's largest economy. There has never been a piece of framing lumber, iron, or plumbing pipe sold in the US labeled with metric dimensions. The total cost in actual dollars, education, retraining, wasted material, etc, to convert these industries alone would likely equal the GDP of all but the top 20 coutries in the world. The amount of lumber wasted, thus more trees cut down, during this conversion period would surely put Greenpeace squarely against such a thing. Note: construction workers and plumbers are your high school classmates who got Ds in basic math. The first house constructed after such a conversion to SI will have to be rebuilt at least 3 times before it's done right, if then. Would you want to buy this house? Would you want to buy any house built during this transition phase? How about occupy the 100th floor of a high rise built during this transition? Commute over a bridge build during this transition? Recall the Minneapolis collapse? And those engineering mistakes were made using the well known and understood English system.

The US industries currently using SI do so because it makes sense and increases the bottom line: aerospace, automobiles, electronics, etc. These industries have significant exchange of engineering documents/data/people with overseas partners and contractors who only use SI. The building materials industry in the US has no such relationships so there is no advantage to doing this, only needless cost. There are other industries who would have zeo advantage here.

This is why the White House has taken the position it has. One of the great things about America is choice. Keep an eye on what happens with Obamacare, the single largest forced conversion of an industry in US history. Then think about those problems in relation to such a mandated conversion to SI.

Civil war is citizen against citizen. This will not occur.. What will occur will be a revolution, which is citizens against the government, assuming ignornat citizens continue to use the ballot box as they have for many decades. Thankfully the framers of our Constitution realized the fledgling Democratic Replublic they'd just created could very well fail for the very reasons monarchies in Europe were failing--corruptoin, greed, power consolidation, unfair taxation, unjust imprisonment, tyrrany, etc. Thus they amended the Constitution for the 2nd time, making sure citizens had sufficient firepower to overthrow the new govt should it become necessary. It may shock some here to learn that the sole purpose of the 2nd amendment is to guarantee the ability of the citizens to overthrow the government. The 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting, sport shooting, self defense, etc, as some politicians have led you to believe in the modern era. The 2nd amendment is a hedge created by the framers, a safety net, enabling the citizens to take down and replace the government should it become corrupt to the point that the ballot box no longer functions. This is the genesis of the modern saying "soap box, ballot box, ammo box--use in that order". This is precisely what the framers had in mind.

The media reporting of this outage as occurring on May 7 is flat wrong. They're off by 4 days. Centurylink's network outage began at ~12:25 CST May 3 and ended at ~01:00 CST May 4. Following are the entries from my mail server log that show the start, end, and duration of the outage. Note the flurry of queued deliveries occurring after IP routing was restored at 01:02 May 4. You can clearly see there are no client connections between 12:20 CST May 3 and 01:02 CST May 4, about 12.5 hours. I called the DSL support line once at about 13:30 May 3 after performing local troubleshooting and eliminating local equipment as the cause. I received "all circuits are busy, please try again later." Receiving that message when calling a telco is like walking into a grocery store and finding the shelves empty. I instantly realized the severity of the outage, and gave myself the afternoon of May 3 off, knowing it wouldn't be fixed for many hours.

BTW, how does one go about modifying the headline? It needs to inform readers that the outage date/time in the referenced articles is wrong by 3 days.

May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: connect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[199.15.233.160]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [199.15.233.160]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: disconnect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 2/60s for (smtp:59.55.253.97) at May 3 12:09:06
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:168.100.1.7) at May 3 12:08:13
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 2 at May 3 12:08:41
May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: connect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Mail not accepted from Ukraine; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:18:09 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: disconnect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
May 3 12:20:30 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: connect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[173.232.112.158]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [173.232.112.158]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: disconnect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 1 at May 3 12:17:52
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Access denied; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: disconnect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: F174E6C1B3: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: F174E6C1B3: message-id=
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: F174E6C1B3: from=, size=6358, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: disconnect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: 172866C1B8: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 59450
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: setuid to nobody succeeded
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 172866C1B8: message-id=
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: processing message for nobody:65534
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 172866C1B8: from=, size=42427, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: disconnect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:29 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: clean message (0.8/4.2) for nobody:65534 in 2.7 seconds, 6202 bytes.
May 4 01:02:29 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: result: . 0 - BAYES_50 scantime=2.7,size=6202,user=nobody,uid=65534,required_score=4.2,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=59450,mid=,bayes=0.500029,autolearn=disabled
May 4 01:03:06 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: connect from smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 0C2B06C1B9: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 0C2B06C1B9: message-id=
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 0C2B06C1B9: from=, size=4713, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 7DA976C1BA: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 7DA976C1BA: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 7DA976C1BA: from=, size=2798, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 48A176C457: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 48A176C457: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 48A176C457: from=, size=2920, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: A44896C458: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: A44896C458: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: A44896C458: from=, size=2926, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 155F56C459: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 155F56C459: message-id=
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 155F56C459: from=, size=3006, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 6FF3A6C45A: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 6FF3A6C45A: message-id=
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 6FF3A6C45A: from=, size=3324, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: E2E076C45B: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:10 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: E2E076C45B: message-id=
May 4 01:03:10 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: E2E076C45B: from=, size=3638, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

TFA mentions nothing of Schmidt requesting police protection for anything.

No, this is not the same under current laws. Which is exactly the type of legislation Schmidt is talking about. And even in locales where aircraft hovering over one's propery might be covered by local trespass ordnances, one has no privacy protection under the law against video cameras shooting him/her while hovering over the neighbor's house, or hovering a half mile away above public property, such as a roadway, park, etc.

And yes, it's apparent you are indeed a crackpot.

I think you misunderstand the issue. He's not asking the govt "to spend your money". He's asking Washington to write laws establsighing the boundaries of legal use of civilian drones. If you have a problem with your money being spent to write laws, which is the Constitutional duty of the Congress, then you need a successful revolution and replacement of the US Constitution. That's a separate topic entirely and unrelated to the issue at hand.

He's not full of crap but merely wanting to protect himself and his family/houseguests.

His agenda is the same as every billionaire who entertains wifes/girlfriends/boyfriends/young Asian sex slaves, in birthday suits around/in the pool and hot tub. Fencing currently negates telephoto lenses. To get such shots one must rent a helicopter at thousands per trip, thus only the most high profile celebs are targeted this way, and only for events such as weddings, etc. Schmidt is worried about the eventual $500 or less camera equipped drone which enables just about anyone to plop cash on the counter and snap photos of any billionaire's back yard and naked activities taking place therein.

While non-gun petty and violent crime have risen as the number of firearms in private hands has decreased.

And a fact that proponents of gun control in the U.S. ignore is that drunk driving kills more people each year than firearms, by about 15%, and vehicle crashes in general kill 4,000 times as many as guns..

In 2010, 8,874, people were killed by firearms.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

In 2010, 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes
http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html

In 2009, 35,900,00 people were killed by automobiles.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf

Yet I don't see the Dianne Feinstein's of the world on a mad rush to ban alcohol, or ban automobiles. If the push to ban guns was about deaths of citizens, young children, then we'd have banned cars long ago, or passed laws to make it much harder for people who just don't have the coordination and brain power to drive a car safely, etc, etc, and we'd have banned alcohol outright, again (with the same results).

Pull the blinders off people. Stop drinking the Kool-aid. The push to ban guns is about political ideology of the left, not saving lives. Always has been, always will be. Mass shootings like this are simply a timely opportunity to push their ideological agenda again, hoping the outrage will put enough wind in their legislative sails to pass something.

The 2nd amendment to the U.S. constitution guarantess us the right to bear arms. And it puts no limitations on the types of arms.

There is no guarantee in the constitution of a right to own or drive an automobile, or consume alcohol.

Seems to me if the concern were truly for dead children, as is being claimed here, then we'd surely embark on passing legislation to once again ban alcohol, and if we really want to cut down on deaths, ban automobiles.

[snip]

What I found is that you have no clue how to do data analysis and have concocted some bogus correlations to push a liberal agenda. In 1984 and 1972 all states were red but one . That one shot just sank your bogus analysis and agenda, but I'll add some detail. I'll focus on a prime example we can all relate to of why these federal spending "deficits" into states exist and that they have nothing to do with which presidential candidate carried the state in the last election, i.e. whether the state is "blue" or "red". Since 1968 New Mexico has voted Republican 7 times and Democrat 5 times. It is blue after the 2012 election and was blue in 2008, Obama winning the state easily both times. In 2004 it was red when G.W. Bush won the state by a gnat's hair. New Mexico has the highest federal spending to taxes paid ratio of any state, $2.03 for each $1 in taxes as of 2005, and has been roughly equally blue and red over the last 50 years. Why such a deficit?

* population of only 2 million people
* Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2.2 $bn/year, $100+ million each year on compute hardware
* Sandia National Laboratory, 2.1 $bn/year, $100+ million each year on compute hardware
* 3 US Air Force bases: Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB, Cannon AFB, many $bn/year, no time to research exact $$
* White Sands missile testing range, unkown $
* Protection and management of 6 National Forests in the state, unkown $
* many other fed govt facilities

The reasons for these federal spending "deficits" and "surpluses" have nothing to do with red and blue. New Mexico has been blue 5/6 recent elections, and red in 6/6 from '68 to '92. New Mexico's current 2:1 ratio and the state's growth are directly linked to a single project in the 1940s called "Manhattan". The first nuclear bomb test of the Trinity device destroyed nothing in New Mexico but the tower upon which it was perched and some wooden shacks. But it was nuclear fertilizer for the state, spurred population and economic growth for decades, with nearly all of the money coming into the state economy for 50 years from Uncle Sam for nuclear weapons research.

To understand these federal spending "deficits" and "surpluses" into the states you must look at each state individually. It usually boils down to how many federal facilities and employees are in a state, and/or defense/govt contractors, vs population. California has a great number of military bases, defense contractors, govt labs, etc, but the state's population is over 1/10 of the entire US, 37 million people, greater than the population of Canada and 160 other countries. Thus private sector output and federal taxes are greater than the dollars Uncle Sam is injecting into the state's economy.

Which is really damn annoying. Newegg is really bad about this targeted ad bullshit. I really like Newegg but I'm really getting tired of hitting various news and other non product selling websites to see an ad for a product I recently viewed on Newegg. If I'm going to buy it, I'll buy it. Having something I'm not going to buy but merely looked at shoved in my face on a dozen different websites, simply makes me want to take my business elsewhere. I could probably defeat this by deleting all my Newegg cookies, but then goes cookies I probably need for navigating the site in the manner I'm accustomed.

There was a vast treasure trove of useful human biomedical data produced by methods 100x beyond what we would call "inhumane torture" captured from both Germany and Japan at the end of WWII. Every doctor and researcher in the Western World refused to use this data, because it was so tainted by the fact our enemies produced the data, and the methods used to obtain it. I.e. infecting perfectly healthy people with things like plague, small pox, maleria, etc. Shooting, stabbing, and cleaving people at precise body locations to see how long it took for them to die of blood loss or infection. Then devising procedures and medicines their soldiers could use on the battlefield to stay alive long enough to make it to a field hostpital, etc.

The stigma attached to the Reiser filesystems only differs to the above data obtained via atrocities by scale of the crime. Reiser killed and probably tortured one. The Nazis and the militarist Japanese killed millions. Given Reiser's personality and vindictiveness, he almost certainly tortured his wife before taking her life. Whether he commited these acts upon one victim or millions is irrevelant.

To judge this work solely on technical merit and use it if found superior for your given workload is a purely techical decision. However, as a human being and member of society, you'd clearly have to be a sociopath to actually use it. Were the remaining devs to change the name, by forking it or whatever means, and cleansing best they can of Hans' code (rewrite/etc), it may begin to lose the stigma. But given most other Linux filesystems are now better than Reiser in every way, why bother with it?

WTF have you been smoking? JFS1 and XFS predate ReiserFS by 10 and 7 years respectively. Both are journaling filesystems. There are probably mainframe journaling FSes that predate these. In short, Hans borrowed the journaling idea from others, same goes for most of his FS concepts. Hans had no original filesystem concepts of his own, none that were ever implemented or proven any good in production. Optimizing a filesystem for high performance with small files isn't a concept, but an execution and tuning detail.

All filesystem developers borrow ideas from prior work, and Hans was no different than others in this regard. In fact there is frequent cross pollination of concepts. Proof of point: Ted Ts'o borrowed from the allocation group concept in XFS and implemented something similar in EXT4. Dave Chinner borrowed a concept from the journaling mechanism in EXT3 and implemented something similar in XFS. Note the praise Hans piles on the XFS devs for schooling him in delayed allocation, which prevents fragmentation (AIUI, Resier3 was pretty horrible about fragmenting files and free space):

From: http://www.osnews.com/story/69
Hans Reiser: This is an area we are still experimenting with. We currently do what ext2 does, and preallocate blocks. What XFS does is much better, they allocate blocknrs to blocks at the time they are flushed to disk, and this allows a much more efficient and optimal allocation to occur. We knew we couldn't do it the XFS way and make code freeze for 2.4, but reiser4 is being built around delayed allocation, and I'd like to thank the XFS developers for taking the time to personally explain to me why delayed allocation is the way to go.

Hans Reiser was no visionary. Like all kernel developers, he borrowed from others' ideas, improving on some. Note that Reiser4 was to be built around delayed allocation. This interview was published in 2001. It's 11 years later and still no Reiser4. On the other hand, we've seen constant full blown development of XFS and EXTx in these 11 years, by large teams of dedicated developers. Both XFS and EXT4 steamroll the small file performance of Reiser3 by a large margin, and we've seen the introduction of a copy on write FS, BTRFS, which doesn't even use a journal. Though the true performance metrics of a mature BTRFS have yet to be realized, nor the level of fragmentation, which is sure to be an issue with COW.

You're not disagreeing with Linus' point here. You're referencing an entirely different scenario.

You: When performance isn't critical
Linus: He's always working on the kernel, as are those whose pointer code he called 'sad' here. Performance is *always* critical with kernel code.