Oh it only has the one server in it. It's serving double duty for a file server, an HTPC, network, amp, UPS and some shelving for home routers and stuff. It's just a convenient way to stack all that stuff together and power it.

How are you UPS'ing for 6 hours?

Images are a sparse data set though. See the preponderance of techniques which rebuild a nearly complete image from 1% of the pixels.

If you took those negatives and tried to write densely packed information to them, how recoverable would it be then?

More importantly: it's a regular, repeating sequence that would visible separate variable data.

Even with no knowledge of what a tab is, it would be obvious in analysing the data that it was doing something special. Anyone with some knowledge of DNA's structure would be able to infer the rest.

My purchase of the year last year was a 42u rack for $1 off ebay.

Though technically I think the seller got a better deal, because I had to navigate that thing down the narrowest stairs ever before getting into an elevator it couldn't stand up in. I think basically I paid them for the removal bill.

You must live in an amazingly quiet RF area, or have paper-thin walls.

With 802.11n I don't see transfer speeds higher then 1.1 mb/s, presuming only 1 device is online.

It's been shown that all these "helical" polarization schemes are degenerate forms of MIMO essentially, and can't achieve speeds better then what MIMO antenna configurations can.

At short distances in quiet environments, you can do a heck of a lot which will never, ever work anywhere but in that experiment.

There is some level of quarantine - the liberian government blockaded in the slum area where a clinic was raided, and sealed off about 50,000 people. That's probably about the limit of their efforts.

But frankly, you're also ignoring what's been actually happening: such an ambassador catching Ebola in one country, knowingly returning to another (via air travel), then staying in a hotel without telling anyone being treated in secret by a doctor, who also doesn't tell anyone, goes home, and spreads it to his wife.

Queue a couple 1000 potentially infected, by a vector which would be utterly missed due to plain old corruption and idiocy.

So what do you do now? Expand the quarantine? Do you even have enough troops to do that? And in the meantime, what about all the regular issues such as food and water, sanitation and normal completely curable diseases which will take hold.

That's also just Linus reacting to stuff he thinks he's right about. And well, he frequently is. I don't really approve of the way he structures his rants sometimes, but the dude gets things done.

And is in fact, how SystemD is put together and intended to be expanded, for better or worse.

Will you take the futures option the other way? That the current prices are going to stay at the level they are for say, the next ~20 years plus or minus 10%?

I don't know who you think is investing in this. People are just buying helium because they need it. The smart people are investing in gas mining because that's always profitable, and the big companies building huge helium liquefaction facilities are absolutely betting the price is going to rise in the near future.

Apparently the free market thinks you're kind of an idiot about this.

Zipping a file takes energy to power the CPU. Unzipping does too. In both cases, global entropy has been increased.

Yes I guess that is why a gas we can only mine tiny quantities of from natural gas reserves is currently being sold off for party balloon use.

Helium is being sold off at any bid price on the assumption that the stockpile is unlimited and needs to be liquidated. It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.

A great watch is expensive and made in Switzerland. That's how watches work. Nothing about them makes any sense because the product is fundamentally not about time telling technology, except in an abstract "it's pretty awesome this is just gears and springs" sort of way.

This is not a good smartwatch at $350. It's a bad sportswatch - because it doesn't standalone from the iPhone, doesn't have GPS, and yet is in the same price bracket.

My personal opinion is that on deeper analysis the whole smartwatch thing is a deadend which is being pushed because it's looks achievable, rather then innovative. But there's some fairly obvious problems with what Apple has on display - and they're the same ones as every other smartwatch.

Seriously, the number of people talking about how this isn't a problem, while simultaneously - gleefully - discussing what they'll do if someone tries to take their room, or someone won't let them take their room, pretty much dismisses any counter-argument to the idea that there isn't a problem.

There obviously is.

If the plane has an emergency in any place that's not "on the ground and stationary" your chances of being a survivor are pretty much zero anyway.

But if we went with the Fifth Element approach, you could design planes which could eject their passengers in parachuting buoyant pods or something.