I too am a TSLA shareholder, but can't complain. Bought ~6000 shares at $17/share, sold most of it at ~$190, bought it all back at $130.

Bad investment? Hardly.

Out drinking one night, I dropped my Galaxy Nexus in a toilet. Fully submerged. Drunk me rinsed it off, powered it off, and then took it home. After sitting for 5 days in a container of rice, it powered back up without issue.

I consider that damn near waterproof.

Please provide a citation that supports that theory. Failing that, shut the fuck up.

I think PBS Frontline is a fairly non-biased source of information:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/pollan.html

So most people think of a cow as something that's out grazing, and then is taken to the slaughterhouse. ... No, not true. Cows see very little grass nowadays in their lives. They get them on corn as fast as they can, which speeds up their lifespan, gets them really fat, and allows you to slaughter them within 14 months.

The problem with this system, or one of the problems with this system, is that cows are not evolved to digest corn. It creates all sorts of problems for them. The rumen is designed for grass. And corn is just too rich, too starchy. So as soon as you introduce corn, the animal is liable to get sick.

It creates a whole [host] of changes to the animal. So you have to essentially teach them how to eat corn. You teach their bodies to adjust. And this is done in something called the backgrounding pen at the ranch, which is kind of the prep school for the feedlot. Here's where you teach them how to eat corn.

You start giving them antibiotics, because as soon as you give them corn, you've disturbed their digestion, and they're apt to get sick, so you then have to give them drugs. That's how you get in this whole cycle of drugs and meat. By feeding them what they're not equipped to eat well, we then go down this path of technological fixes, and the first is the antibiotics. Once they start eating the [corn], they're more vulnerable. They're stressed, so they're more vulnerable to all the different diseases cows get. But specifically they get bloat, which is just a horrible thing to happen. They stop ruminating.

Not true.

I won't go into details about Autoland here, as you can read the Wikipedia link below. The takeaway is that Autoland has triple redundancy through the entire control and sensing systems, and will continue to function even if it has lost 2 out of 3 of any device in the workflow.

"During system design, the predicted reliability numbers for the individual equipment which makes up the entire autoland system (sensors, computers, controls, and so forth) are combined and an overall probability of failure is calculated. As the "threat" exists primarily during the flare through roll-out, this "exposure time" is used and the overall failure probability must be less than one in a million.[5]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland#Autoland_for_civil_aviation

With regards to takeoff, I admit, this is the most vulnerable point of the flight (limited or lost forward thrust, extremely limited altitude). This will still be automated in good time though, as software won't panic. It'll be able to determine just how much the aircraft can still travel with limited or no power, and the safest area to put down.

If there was something that made your life extremely well off, would you pay more for it if the other option was to go without?

Less pain now, or more pain later.

Email away!

Disregard the sort of part.

Sort of. To get the value plan I had before the no-contract push, I had to sign a two year contract even though I brought my own Galaxy Nexus devices to my family plan. I've "switched" to the no-contract plans to get the cheaper rate, but still have a year on my contract *even though I brought my own devices and incurred no expense device-wise with T-mobile*.

It's a loan, not a cell service contract.

You can cancel your service anytime, just pay up the rest of the principal on the 0% interest loan they're giving you.

We used ROCKS, and started running into the same problems you did. We were mid-process of moving to our own custom built solution when I left to work somewhere else.

Something to think about:

If you're seeing boot storms, get a network switch that is managed and support vlans. Either programatically switch VLAN access on the switch, or use trunking support in Linux, so you have a production VLAN and an installation VLAN. This should segment your network to the point where boot storms are no longer an issue.

That's exactly what we used for configuration management and distributed/unattended installations :)

You don't multicast images to Linux machines when you're using configuration management tools. PXEBoot->Bare Image Install->Puppet system configuration upon first boot based on machine grouping/criteria.

Disclaimer: I'm OP.

While working at Fermilab on the LHC CMS data taking team, I used bittorrent to speed up re-installs of thousands of worker nodes. I was able to saturate 10Gb Ethernet links this way, and could reinstall ~5500 Linux boxes within 10-15 minutes (with only two initial OS source servers).

Yes, Bittorrent is not just for piracy.