So you are saying then that any product who's raw materials have already been taxed and the labor to create the finished product has been taxed shouldn't be taxed? And, the profit made from sale of such widget shouldn't be taxed because it's been taxed earlier in the production chain?

Then be leery of the House majority.

... and several other vendors deliver desktops and apps to end-user devices remotely and increasingly efficiently. TFA is on the wrong side of history - IT will own and control the apps "locked down" and delivered remotely, device-independently. Administration of the endpoint device is a nightmare, and through VDI and app delivery endpoint management is becoming nearly irrelevant as these technologies improve. In fact, the end point becomes irrelevant - the always-on, use anywhere application service is coming (just don't say "cloud" because I'm tired of hearing it).

All your apps are belong to us.

Exactly. This does not mention diesel, pure ethanol, natural gas, hydrogen ICE, or any other kind of ICE besides petrol (gasoline) engines. There are plenty of other fuels you can combust inside a cylinder to move a piston.

These same people would have been dying taking those secondary roads over the mountain pass in their Thomas Guides. All this article shows is the steady hand of progress - turns out there are still stupid people out there.

... and then he'd pack it in for the day, take the camera crew out for a nice dinner at the nearest steakhouse, check into his hotel and be all fresh for the next day's shoot.

Bear is at best entertainment (think 'fear factor' outdoors), at worst a fraud. A real "survivorman" is Les Stroud, who packs in all his own gear and films everything himself, alone... and actually stays out in the wilderness for the duration.

Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?

It's called using "grade school math" to make a judgement - something that is the pinnacle of the ability of a disturbing number of people in the US's ability to master. The burden on society, costs of treating emergency room versus prevention, and cascading effects of unhealthy people in the population (lost productivity, spreading of health problems, etc) are beyond the grasp of too many people. Calculating the 'total cost of health' is 'voodoo math' to many people.

Many seem to think it's a zero-sum game - if it's helping someone else then it must be hurting me.

It's illuminating that Costa Rica has a higher-ranked healthcare system than the US (ranked 37th), and that the US is ranked next to Cuba. None of the talking heads on the right have anything to say about this. All those 'darn socialist' nations dominate the top 10.

And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?

Because the brainwashed masses believe that they have the ability and the real possibility to become the next Trump or Buffett - ya know, ya can't put a lid on the "American Dream". Also, see above regarding the zero-sum game.

Would it be easier to detect the existence of large (small planet-sized) moons around a gas giant than earth-sized planets around a star? Would not the perturbation of the gas giant be easier to detect because the mass ratios are closer (large moon to gas giant vs earth-sized planet to star)?

If so, detecting the gas giant in the habitable zone and then looking for evidence of large moons or companion bodies could allow detection of candidates for life.

I assume this would entail detailed, direct observation of the gas giant, but I would imagine that will happen sooner than detailed, direct observation of an earth-sized body.

This is not news. The first time I remember seeing this kind of feat was 2002: Balloon 1.0
This is from the time before disposable mobile phones with embedded GPS...this guy had to make his own telemetry gear - much more of an accomplishment!

I don't think you are going to get very much exploration in the private sector - there's no direct profit motive. If there's not a pure science motivation for a private sector entity, why would it toss money into space?

You can hardly take space exploration out of politics - the only reason we went into space was politicians! If it was not to one-up the Soviets (and vice-versa of course is true - Stalin wouldn't have wasted rubles on such things otherwise) we'd probably not have a few US flags stuck in the regolith.

The shuttle was a very poor compromise between NASA and the military - it ended up serving neither efficiently. Ares was an attempt to re-use some of those compromise-designed components on a follow-on vehicle which really amounted to a pork barrel project for Utah (Thiokol) and a few other subcontractors/Senate districts. We are better off without Ares as-was.

We now are keeping Orion - which could see life on top of another booster (how about man-rating some of our existing medium-lift vehicles??). But more interesting are projects like Dreamchaser - the HL20 lifting body derivative being built by Sierra Nevada Corp. They received the biggest chunk of the private sector manned spaceflight funding so far. And SpaceX has a capsule in the works as well. But those are only there because the government has created the initiative and is providing some seed funding.

Personally, I would like to see us on Mars in my lifetime, and my time is about half up. We are not going to get there because it will be profitable to do so. We will get there when the political winds make it possible to do so.

This is exactly what I am planning to do. I was trying to find a way to fit the iPad into a dash but it's just too big. This one will be perfect - I can't wait :-)

So the story goes, this dates back to some interns who worked at NetApp and then went to Sun and perhaps influenced ZFS.

The technology in WAFL is that of a pointer-based filesystem - which itself is pretty ingenious and is only now being feature-emulated (ZFS, BRTFS, etc).

One can say what they want of Netapp's pricing, but the technology is extremely solid and simple to operate compared to managing Linux or Solaris boxes running a filesystem as a NAS; the snapshots are without I/O penalty and you can take a lot of them, the clustering is *FAR* simpler than anything happening on general-purpose OSes, the support for protocols is industry-leading (FCoE, NFSv4, SMB 2.0 - they have a codeshare w/ Microsoft and do not use a reverse-engineered Samba implementation or run any kind of Windows storage server like competitors do).

ZFS has a lot of promise, but does not have nearly the performance that WAFL does (considering RAID-DP versus ZFS RAID6) and has only some of the feature set of mirroring, snapshot vaulting, filesystem and file cloning, WORM-compliance, etc. Companies don't want to bet their business on a science project of roll-your-own NAS which doesn't have the feature set the Netapps do, and no serious competitor (eg a company with the ability to financially stand behind the product) in the enterprise space has anything like the feature set.

I work for a systems integrator and I've messed with hundreds of Netapps, Sun and Linux appliances, and competitors over the years. I use ZFS at home because I can't afford a Netapp (and wouldn't want to pay the electricity bill if I could!) but if I ran an IT department I'd put my data on a Netapp FAS over a ZFS appliance any day.

ZFS is available as a user space filesystem (FUSE) and has lots of goodies including snapshots and snapshot replication for off-box disk-to-disk backup. It's got a much better feature set than LVM/ext3. I've used it and it seems stable - I've even imported and exported Zpools between Linux and Solaris without problems.

You can try to build it from source if not available for all your distros - not sure if it will compile on the 2.4 kernels though.

You are not going to find something you can 'drop on top of' a bare EXT3 filesystem and get robust, modern features like snapshots w/o some data migration.

You could also think about migrating these old physical servers into VMs and snapshot using the facilities available in the hypervisor (eg VMware or Xen).

You could also setup an NFS server or a NAS box with snapshots and migrate your data there, leaving the OS/apps to run via NFS mounts: OpenSolaris has NFS; Nexentastor, built on OpenSolaris, is free for up to 3TB and has ZFS/snapshots/etc, or you could deploy a Linux machine with BTRFS, etc.