Almost. If you're serious about archiving low volumes of data, use these: http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

The can be read in standard BD and DVD players, and the drives aren't expensive. I picked up a DVD-R one for under $100, and a pack of disks for $45.

Then I found I have so little data that I want to preserve for a long time, I've never bought a second pack of disks. :-)

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

Modern Li-ion batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 85%.

And some of the high-power, super-fast-charge Li-* batteries coming into production have efficiencies in the high 90s.

They have to. One of the limits on the charging and discharging rate of the batteries is the inefficiency. That lost energy doesn't just disappear. It turns into HEAT, INSIDE the battery. If you can dump 3/4 of a high-capacity battery's capacity into it in a couple minutes, without melting it down or setting it on fire, it's because the battery didn't turn much of the energy into heat. (Ditto on pulling it back out quickly.) That means it went into chemical storage, rather than loss.

The next topic is "general warrant". One of the reason US revolution took place is because of unhappiness due to King George's general warrants, allowing to search everyone without reason. The outcome was 4th amendment which clearly defined that persons and their private life are untouchable, unless there is suspicion, affirmed by the government servant and approved by the judge.

Spying on the population was also a big driver behind the THIRD amendment:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

While forcing the colonists to provide housing and upkeep for the soldiers sent to oppress them was an economic issue, there was more to it than that.

A soldier "quartered" in a colonist's house also served as a spy for the crown and its army. He eavesdropped on the conversations of the family and visiting friends. He had the opportunity to view their records when they weren't home (or even if they were). He reported anything suspicious to his unit. His presence inhibited getting together with others to hold private discussions, especially about opposing (by protest or otherwise) anything the government was doing. He was a continuous walking search, fed and housed by the people he was investigating.

It seems to me that law-enforcement and intelligence agency spyware, such as keyloggers and various data exfiltration tools, is EXACTLY the digital equivalent: It is a digital agent that "lives" in the home or office of the target. It consums the target's resources (disk space, CPU cycles network bandwidth) to support itself. It spies spying on the activities and "papers" of the target, reporting anything suspicious (or anything, actually) back to its commander, to be used as evidence and/or to trigger an arrest or other attack. It is ready, at a moment's notice, to forcefully interfere with, destroy, or corrupt the target's facilities or send forged messages from him.

Spyware is EXACTLY one of the most egregious acts (one of the "Intolerable Acts") that sparked the American Revolution. I'd love to see the Third brought back out of the doldrums and used against these "digital soldiers" the government is "quartering" inside our personal and private computing devices.

There was a concerted attempt to take over another group and fundamentally change their goals and message. That is s hijacking.

The fact that they were not strong enough to fend off the attack doesn't make it any less of a hijacking.

I agree apathy played a part on their demise, but the religious right parasites played a large part as well.

My irritation with the religious right is with their hypocrisy and complete unwillingness to accept the lessons of both the Reform Party and TEA Party debacles -- that their views represent a MINORITY in this country. They, too, are unable to achieve their goals on their own and need to coopt the agendas of others to succeed.

I was at one of the very first TEA Parties in downtown Chicago. It didn't fizzle out because of a tendency towards apathy and the difficulty in sustaining a high level of outrage. It was hijacked by the right-wing social agenda crowd and they killed it.

TEA stands for "Taxed Enough Already", and in the beginning of the movement that was what it was focused on. Too many taxes. That WAS the issue.

Then came the right-wing social agenda crowd injecting anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and several other topics that had NOTHING to do with taxes and big government.

The original TEA Party movement was LIBERTARIAN, not "conservative". They were very much for keeping the gov't out of people's lives -- including out of the bedroom and NOT enforcing any social agenda.

What happened to the TEA Party is the same thing that happened to the Reform Party. Remember when Pay Buchanan hijacked the 2000 Reform Party Convention in Long Beach, the police had to be called and the Convention settled by the courts? They showed success where the Christian right-wingers never could, so they got co-opted and died because their soul was sold.

A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.

The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"

This was a reference to an incident in a humorous science fiction novel: _Bill the Galactic Hero_. The protagonists are sneaking around and are discovered by a cleaning robot and challenged as security breaching interlopers. One of them "bashes the robot on the braincase with a spanner", causing it to say "WONKITY!" and stagger away, rather than reporting them to security.

= = = =

When I was working on a typesetting system for newspaper publication, I heroically refrained from having it very occasionally insert "fnord" into the text. (See _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ for the joke, which is FAR to complex to explain here.)

Yes, PLEASE.

Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]

Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )

Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.

On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.

(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )

If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal.

Sounds like the Liberty Wing, Libertarians, and the Tea Party.

Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)

The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)

So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.

Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.

Wait an extra day or two and I'm sure the breeze will be enough to cool you off. :-) Or, leave a little earlier and drive at night. Hurricane warnings come DAYS in advance.

Stop and go traffic for hurricane evacuations are for people who wait to the last minute to go over the causeway.

I think you need to do a little research about the way electric cars operate in stop & go traffic. There is no idling like with an ICE. It just shuts off when you stop.

Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.

They did. They still do. That's most of why they keep losing.

If they pick a "centerist" (alias "democrat lite") why would anybody on the right bother to vote?

Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triples the damage awards.

I hate the keyboard and trackpad on this Toshiba Satellite S75. (It's just as bad as the ones on the Lenovo Z710, too.) Overly-wide, ultra-thin, chicklets, with no clearance for fingernails. Brush the trackpad while typing and half a sentence is highlighted and instantly overwritten by the next keystroke, making it disappear. Typos up the wazoo. In nearly a year I haven't been able to get used to these designs.