I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.

Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were above the article - deceptively close to the subject. Searches returned some pretty funny results.

Well, the benefit to using Intel for "everything" is that at least their drivers are open source. I have a brand new i5 laptop for work. While they are handed out with windows, they do allow you to use any OS that you'd like (unsupported). Using Linux with the i5 machine showed intel for Proc, Wireless, and graphics, and I didn't have to mess with or agree to use "non-free" drivers to operate the machine's wireless or to run dual 24-inch 1920x1200 monitors with no problems.

Of course, I'm a 2D kind of guy for work, but when the machine "just works" with almost any OS that you can throw at it, I'm happy.

Indeed, I was VERY careful to be aware of where my phone was for the remainder of that trip, and I be "aware" while getting off the last train and walking to my truck.

I would not add "skilled at practical self defense against multiple attackers with nothing to lose" to my resume. I was in that situation when I was 18, and 75 lbs lighter, and I wouldn't want to play that game again. I have "good" health insurance, but it's not worth $700 to get a new set of teeth, and I also have homeowners, auto, and phone insurance. At that point, I'd let 'em have it. Hell, I might show them how to use it.

My bigger question is if this was common "step 1" to stealing a smartphone. The person was able to display a (cheap) phone and state that their battery was dead. But, if I had my phone die, I couldn't call anyone because I don't know any phone numbers!

I came to the conclusion that future protocol would be to ask if it was an "emergency" and offer to dial 911 for them MYSELF while they waited. Otherwise, no, you're not using my phone.

It's also worth mentioning that the rich just get thier drugs by making appointments. If they are paying $500 cash to their psychiatrist or neurologist for thier "ADHD" or "Migraines", you can bet that they will walk away with prescriptions for amphetimines (adderal), or narcotics (morphine, oxycontin, etc). It just happens to be "legal" for the rich if they pay someone to tell them that they need to take it.

If you're poor and do some meth or heroin for basically the same reasons, you're going to jail.

Big Pharma made a ton of money pushing Valium to women in the 60s/70s for "life's everyday stresses". Turns out that it's highly addictive and creates dependency. It's also highly abused, even today (and the analogues - Xanax, Ativan, etc)

I had somebody ask me to use my smartphone at a light rail station in a reasonably nice part of Denver (at 11pm). I politely refused, but I couldn't help but wonder if this person was out to 1) just make a call, which was obviously not an emergency, 2) call some sort of pay-per-call or txt number that would put $20 on my phone bill and the person would get a commission, or 3) just start running, or pull out a weapon, and steal my phone.

Is this a common tactic for stealing phones?

I couldn't help but wonder if I should have let the person use it (I'm about 6'5, 265lbs, with a 36 inch waist, I exercise, etc - so it's not like I was picked out as being the "easy target")

In the end, I concluded that I was right to refuse a stranger access to my $700 "pocket computer" which contains all of my personal information, and costs about a hundred bucks a month to keep services to, in addition to the cost of the device.

Maybe we don't want to be "spotted". Er, I mean "Maybe THEY don't want to be spotted".

Have you ever considered that these systems might be connected to other systems?

If you're in a low area of Florida, near a coast, river, ocean, etc (determined by GPS), during a wet/hurricane season (determined by date/time, humidity and temp sensors), crossing standing water (determined by moisture, humidity sensors, on-board cameras, input from differential and traction control sensors, engine speed, load, and RPM, emergency warning systems via radio), and going less than 25 MPH (speed sensors, GPS, cameras, etc)... then perhaps the system could be bypassed for those occasions when you needed to cross a foot of water over the road.

Maybe it also just has an "off road" mode that would disable it (after a nice lawyer screen).

If you're actually poor, and you have a medical EMERGENCY or something that you could go to the emergency room for (a child's fever), do you really think that your credit is the first thing that comes to mind? If I can go and get my broken arm fixed, or my child's fever treated without paying on the spot (or through insurance), and I'm really broke, how do I act when the (enormous) bill arrives?

If I were worried about where food or shelter was coming from, I'd toss it in the trash... I'd never pay.

I had (some) money, and I was insured. When I went to the ER after tweaking my back moving, I was "rewarded" with a black mark on my credit report because I needed more insurance paperwork, and at the time I was covered under my parent's insurance and in college (with many mailing addresses per year). This was almost 20 years ago, but still... Something like "could not contact payor" (I never got a bill, nor did my parents), and a $275 mark on my credit for some vioxx and advice to rest, was my "scar" for trying to deal with a hospital ER and our insurance "systems".

$50k seems excessive, but...

We paid ~$900k for a tiered SAN with about 100TB of (fast) capacity. We paid another 350k+ for the ability to back it up (quantum / tapes), and we paid about 100k in fibre channel switches, HBAs, and the rest of the package. We also funded a DR site with almost identical hardware and licenses for $600k (plus high speed data dupe to the DR site links). So if it costs "IT" 1.9 million dollars for SAN storage hardware, back-ups, off-site HIPAA-compliant tape storage, backup media, and associated hardware (NOT including time for deployment, admin, backup, enterprise level backup software and servers, restore, cooling, power, security), how much do you think is fair? That's the "raw" cost of about $20k/TB in this particular instance for just the hardware.

My current job said it best: "What we need is not new *people*; we need new *ideas*.

Wouldn't you know it, they are willing to pay for both!

Exactly this. I had signed a "non-compete" agreement with an employer, and I wanted to move. Not only did they officially void the non-compete, but they also told me that it was "essentially impossible to enforce" - particularly in a right-to-work state.

It was intended to intimidate. It failed.

This is one major reason that companies (even very large companies with "money to spare") are moving towards virtualization with incredible speed.

I'm not going to go digging for numbers right now, but the statistics show that something like 100 percent of Fortune 100 companies use virtualization, and perhaps 85-90% of Fortune 500 companies.

The larger virtualization solutions will actually take the servers that are idle, migrate them to another host machine, and power down/suspend the "extra" machine(s) that was/were being used during their core business hours.

Virtualization also allows for spikes in cpu/network, and then can take that power back when everyone goes home (a print server, an intranet web server, a domain controller, etc). So, physical machines actually DO get turned off when they aren't being taxed, and with more and more "software defined networking" the interconnects between systems can be scaled and moved also.

Now, I don't know how the big players are using this (e.g. Amazon, VMware, Rackspace, Google). I can't see inside their datacenters, but one would think that something like AWS would have a huge stake in saving power by turning off idle instances and moving VMs. Not only for the power savings from the server directly, but for the (approx) 30-40 percent more energy that it takes to cool the physical machines.

It's also worth noting that larger companies are putting their datacenters in areas with plentiful (cheap) power. Places like Washington state, with hydroelectric power and a cooler average ambient temperature, allow for a huge savings on power right off the bat. Add things like dynamic scaling of server and network hardware, lights-out datacenters, and better designed cooling systems (look at Microsoft's ideas), and there is a huge power savings across the board.

How much energy does the NYT use to print paper copies of the newspaper, distribute and deliver them, harvest the trees and process the paper? Now compare that with the energy that the online NYT uses. Which allows for more people to view the publication for less energy? I'm positive that it is the electronic version.

Of course! This makes perfect sense, especially when many new computers are shipping without optical drives!

The typo in "violets" for the op made me think of this classic Gilda Radner SNL skit:

Emily Littela: And in other news, there's too much violins on TV. There's too much violins on television. They should put the violins on at eleven after the kids are asleep.

Chevy Chase: Um, Emily, that's violence, not violins.

Emily Littela: Never mind.

Oh course you do realize that if he did think that it wasn't real, and was armed with any rifle, body armor does very little good.

There is an advantage to trying to do things civilly first. Papers, knocking, waiting for him to leave home, etc is actually in any police forces's best interest.

An ar-15 with 5.56mm green tip (mil surp) ammunition will destroy body armor and kevler helmets.

An ar-10 or M1A or ak style with 7.62 will make someone with body armor "extra dead"

Both can easily and legally hold 30-100 rounds per magazine in about 49 states (by civilians).