Also, while the incident was terrible, people really need to have a sense of perspective. The risk that any given person will be involved in a mass shooting is vanishingly small. If we really must do something to "save the children," there are some much better places to focus. For example, this is from the US Federal Govt. CDC website:

      From 2005-2009, there were an average of 3,533 fatal unintentional drownings (non-boating related) annually in the United States — about ten deaths per day. An additional 347 people died each year from drowning in boating-related incidents.
      About one in five people who die from drowning are children 14 and younger. For every child who dies from drowning, another five receive emergency department care for nonfatal submersion injuries.

Nobody "needs" a swimming pool, and there's no Constitutional protection for swimming pools. Why don't we ban private swimming pools instead of writing new laws about about guns or games. We'd save more lives that way.

Damn! I just migrated all my stuff from a Linux server to a FreeBSD one. I've been extremely impressed, but now you make me wish I'd gone to OpenBSD.

Have you bought any recently? I'm not sure about the "cheaper than gold," part, but I agree it will only increase in value in the future!

Don't use btrfs. My approach (I only have 8Tb) was two low-powered linux file servers. The "main" one was running btrfs over a mixed set of disks with a nightly rsync to the backup server. A power outage that was more than my UPS could handle resulted in a corrupted btrfs filesystem. After a couple days of trying to fix the btrfs filesystem, I gave up and restored from the backup server. Fortunately it was using LVM and ext4.

Now I have the "main" fileserver running LVM and ext4, and a backup server running FreeBSD with zfs. The two are in physically different locations, and I use rsync with --only-create-batch and a USB hard drive to move changes from the main server to the backup.

I know I manage to fire a few thousand rounds a year without killing anybody, family or otherwise. Eliminated lots of dangerous cans and bottles, though! Every single person who has visited my place and shot some of my guns has claimed it was great fun, and none of them killed anybody, either.

And that somehow makes it OK? What kind of argument is that?

So there's the solution: no need for yet another complex system in the car that can fail. Just stop selling cars with automatic transmissions. That would have all kinds of benefits. People would have to pay more attention to driving, which would result in fewer accents of all types. Overall gas mileage would improve. Maybe some people who shouldn't be driving, anyway, would quit trying to. Manufacturers would focus on making better manual transmissions..... the list just goes on and on.

Exactly. This "nanny state" we live in, where all the normal people pay to try to keep stupid people from hurting themselves is not making things better. There's only one result from trying to make things idiot-proof: better idiots.

Fine in theory, but I've tried that with several different mid-range displays. The rotated sub pixel orientation plus the variation in brightness from top to bottom makes working with text unpleasant. Maybe an IPS display would be better, but I haven't been able to afford one.

More importantly, most 16:9 monitors are 1080 pixels tall, which gives you just 1080 wide when turned 90. That's barely better than the old-fashioned 1024x786 that wasn't wide enough a decade ago.

Don't kid yourselves. Since Capone, there's only been one crime in the US: hiding money from the government. The bodog takedown had nothing to go with gambling. It was money laundering, and the US federal govt. doesn't let anybody get away from paying their taxes. The case law is actually very clear on gambling: if you have any winnings from illegal gambling, you must report them to the IRS and pay taxes, and that tax report will not be used to prosecute you.

As long as big businesses give lots of money to the Federal govt, they'll be allowed to do whatever they want, and will be bailed out if they run into trouble.

Are you kidding? Whittling requires knives, and only terrorists would have such dangerous weapons.

This story just reminded me how long it's been since I saw a Natalie Portman/hot grits post!

Did you read about the revolutionary new idea Facebook had, recently? They're going to split the RAM and storage off from the CPU to make it easier to upgrade each, independently. Wonder if they're going to start calling the disk DASD, and add a DAT box to help the CPU address the real memory?

You probably can't find one, any more, but I bought a used HP ScanJet 5, and installed BSD on it. This page has a lot of info on the process: http://www.berklix.com/scanjet/

It's still working far better than any other scanner I've used.

I'd like a way to use these "cloud" storage services to make a really safe encrypted filesystem. Imagine that 95% of my data was on my own fileserver, but a critical 5% of the data was only stored on a "cloud" server (mirrored across several, for safety and performance). The FBI confiscates my server and a judge orders me to give them the passwords. "Fine," I say, "the password is 'pass1234,' good luck!"

You could probably do something with RAID-5 over loop-mounted files to simulate this, but I'm not sure that would necessarily ensure that no files were recoverable without access the off-site part.