It's not a republican mantra, it's a corporate mantra rubber-stamped by both political parties to abscond with money not theirs from people who have no choice in the wherefore of spending.

"One thing that I think would be a good idea for Facebook to implement would be rule-based access privileges for different groups that you can define. The groups shouldn't be visible to anyone other than yourself, of course; the last thing you'd need would be for "friends" to see that they weren't "good friends.""

Facebook actually already has this. I use it all the time. Grouped my co-workers into a group, and I can exclude them from seeing certain posts (of a more personal nature, not things about them.)

I once saw a detailed analysis, written a few years after WWII, that showed in great detail that every technology needed to build a V2 missile was in existence by 1910. But, the V2 didn't go into operation until the 1940s and development started more than 10 years earlier.

Now we have the laser as an example of another technology that could have been invented 30 to 40 years earlier. But, in fact, neither of them was invented earlier.

The point is that first you have to imagine that something is possible, and that goes beyond just having a theoretical proof of the possibility. Then you have to believe that it is possible. But, even that is not enough. You have to have someone who was exposed to the knowledge required to invent the thing who has the belief and who has access and understanding of the precursor technologies.

Then, that person, or persons, has to have the will and the resources needed to finally build a working model.

After that comes the hard part. The hard part is convincing people that what you have done is something new and valuable. In the case of the V2 the large holes that appeared in the European landscape were plenty of proof. In the case of the laser the poor guy couldn't even get his paper announcing his invention published because the people doing peer review didn't understand what he said.

The challenge is to go out and identify research that actually points to world changing new technology. If you can do that, then you are a genius and you will be doing a huge service for humanity.

Stonewolf

Getting data to and from it over the internet is a minor concern. How quickly their RAIDs can scrub (assuming they even scrub - I certainly wouldn't want to bet on it) and rebuild, and how quickly they can duplicate all the data from one pod to another when pods fail (I would hope any given chunk of data is contained on at least 4-6 pods that share no common infrastructure) are vastly more important - and with the hardware they have, it will be atrociously slow (multiple days, even in ideal conditions).

Given the low cost compared to commercial solution, why would you make the assumption that there isn't already a full copy on another one? They even say they have multiple copies running around. So you are assuming something you don't have enough information to fully evaluate and assuming it's the worst possible case. I reject all such assumptions unless someone at least acknowledges they are assuming the worst case in direct contradiction to the available information.

Redundant PSUs

What's the failure rate you see on power supplies? Does it matter if you go for cheap commodity PSUs vs name-brand commodity ones?

Fundamentally, these guys either have to be using several times more hardware than they actually need to store the real amount of data they have (and the associated costs of building, maintaining and housing that hardware), or they're not protecting the data they have properly.

What I've found is that failure rates vary greatly. That means that someone that's "lucky" (and I've seen luck correlated with things like room temperature) will be able to get away with what you'd consider an inferior design.

Perhaps it comes down to a business decision that trumps the technical ones. Such as the decision to keep a second copy around no matter how reliable the hardware was, then the reliability was less important. Sure, they'll have a lower rate of transfer for moving things around after the failure of one copy, but what's that really cost in terms of extra hardware?

An electric motor with a diesel turbine engine would be more efficient than that stupid 'battery' setup.

Sure, use a battery cache, by all means; it'll allow the engine to shut off at some point. But it'll also lose 20% or more efficiency due to the additional energy required to charge the batteries.

punishing someone for mere possession of information is the creation of thoughtcrime.

And "conspiracy" has been a crime for a while now and no one complained (well, some may have, but not enough to matter). So people don't mind thought crimes. But nothing I've seen means this act is a "creation" of a thought crime, as such things have been around for a while, just without that name.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but any free-market will result in monopolies and de-facto states unless there is a societal decision that these are undesirable.

I have a big problem with that. Prison for life is not only very costly, but you would be surprised what just 10 years is like in prison.

On another note, why does he get to go to prison for life, but all those wonderful human beings that:

- Set up securitized mortgages and played fast and loose with mortgage notes.
- Bypassed the court systems by creating non-judicial foreclosures where you could not even complain it was the wrong company or they could not produce the note
- Stole billions, still not a widely known fact, by selling the *same* mortgage 2, 3, or 4 times in different securitized packages causing multiple companies to come after you at the same time making it difficult to even determine the appropriate part to sue, let alone pay.

Yeah. Those identity thieves need to be put in prison for life at our expense, but Wall Street douchebags get bailed out with our taxes and allowed to enjoy their freedoms.

Let the bullshit continue and rich investors clean up by stealing all the property and land in the last couple of years at pennies on the dollars, FUNDED BY US!!!!

I've been running Debian Lenny in a chroot on my G1 almost since I first got the phone and it has been working perfectly the whole time. I have the terminal app set to automatically initialize it whenever I click on it. Takes less than a second to set the mount points including a bind mount for the sdcard so I can access my data and get me going. For all intents and purposes, it may as well be native. If I were so inclined, I could even start a vncserver inside of it and run the chroot as a service and use GUI apps in the vnc client that I have on the phone side-stepping the whole lack of X issue.

I use this practically everyday for a number of things like rtorrent, htop, vim, and others. Most specifically, I have some PHP and python scripts that have to run in tandem that won't work in the Android Scripting Environment and they work excellently in Debian. The only special requirements I see in making it happen is having a rooted phone with ext2.ko and the chroot binary. For anyone that could actually make real use of this, these should be trivial to accomplish. The only downside is I can't load the fuse module so encfs and sshfs don't work but I'll bet if I looked around long enough, I'd find something.

At least for me, Android with these few modifications is just as much a Linux distro as anything else is.

It's easy. If you're left-wing and anti-authoritarian then you're against unrestrained capitalism and government. From that vantage point Obama is a right-wing shill that implements the policies that benefit the health-care industry, the military industrial complex and the beltway insiders that benefit from all that.

If you're right-wing then he hasn't started lynching all the "coloreds" yet and hasn't dropped enough bombs on the non-Christian "savages" and so obviously he's the second coming of Marx.

Read/watch the link if you want to know why moderate leftists are worried that this appointment does not counteract the right-wing drift the court has taken over the years. If Obama wanted to leave a left-wing legacy then he'd have appointed a counterbalance... not a "moderate" "consensus-builder".

Another right-wing move by President Hope. I guess the lobbyists really got what they paid for when they backed Obama.

Mod parent up. This is the single most important point about the whole thing. Incidents like the above are just one INEVITABLE consequence of invading and occupying OTHER PEOPLE'S COUNTRIES.

In fact someone NOT carrying some sort of weapon in Iraq at that time would be taking a big risk. Mere presence of a weapon on someone is not justification for murdering them under ANY legal regime in the world. THe whole video displays the hysterical, hyper-cautious, over-reacting, callous stupidity of the armed forces of the USA. Kinda like cops, but with more encouragement to murder people.

http://khanacademy.org/

That is a probably incorrect entry: http://www.politics.ie/fianna-fail/10828-what-does-fianna-fail-mean-english.html