It's also common for people replying to posts to not read properly. I said manufacturers AND retailers lie, and in any case Apple is often the manufacturer and the retailer in this case via the Apple store. And you don't have to prove in the absolute sense that the defect was there, if you go to a County Court to make a claim against the retailer under the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, it's up to the magistrate to decide on the balance of probabilities. Generally, if you have used the item in the way it was intended and there is no evidence of physical damage, and it has not lasted a 'reasonable' period of time, they will find in favour of the purchaser.

It's handy that modern filesystems are mostly copy-on-write anyway.

With 8 TB drive sizes I would think you would want double parity and some kind of hotspare. The rebuild times on that could be glacial.

Hey, Bennett. Have you asked the /. editors if you can be made an editor so those of us who want to block your stories can? It would improve the S/N ratio on the comments for your stories.

Presumably if the Incas aren't around anymore, their ancestors aren't either...

While you probably can't just fix it with a rake, I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to restore it at all. Get some engineers out there -- at Greenpeace's expense -- and have them figure out a way to put dark rocks on top of light sand.

It's kind of like those boy scout leaders that knocked over the rock formation at Goblin Valley. People were calling for them to spend the rest of their lives in jail over it. We've been putting rocks on top of other rocks for thousands of years -- the better solution would have been to have them pay to get a construction crew out there to fix it.

"The 9 trillion dollar bank bailout."

Gad.

Do you realize what tech we could build with 9 trillion dollars?

We could go to alpha centauri for lunch, and be back just in time for dinner.

What a human and monetary waste of potential. Whoever approved that are enemies of the human race

It does bother me that the biggest money on the 'web is being made by middlemen - google, helping you find content, but they don't produce any; facebook, helping you talk to your friends. It is like banking - necessary, but annoying that the bankers always wind up richer than the buyers and sellers they are "helping."

Or would that just be considered a gag gift?

I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.

But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.

I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.

There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?

It's a common theme, but it begs the question -- do we just live in a state of anarchy now, where the "order" the police provide is merely illusory and most people are law abiding because of social convention, etc? Or does policing actually provide some kind of utility function to maintaining order?

I wonder about this, but I also wonder what the secondary of effects of harsh punishments would be. What happens if the police end up being just deliberately ineffective?

It's not like they don't have myriad ways to be ineffective that are basically impossible to control or punish -- evidence lost, conclusions not reached, investigations short-shrifted.

Maybe some or all of these happen now, but could they get worse and what would the larger effect be?

It doesn't seem to be in Windows 8.1 from my experience on a Surface Pro 2 -- it's a nice display and very high resolution, but it's scaling options leave a lot to be desired.

I can only imagine the same phenomenon would be true on super high resolution screens, although a lot of people seem to like 4k monitors, but it's hard to know what these would be like in day-day usage.

Incredible pixel density is nice, but it seems like (IMHO, anyway) that UIs and applications need to have a lot more flexibility about how they work with very high resolution displays.

What are your feelings on birth control? Similar?

My understanding is that he can. Congress could then override the veto with a 2/3 majority of both the House and the Senate, but at least the President would be on record that he refused to approve the bill.