Except that given the size of todays drives, there's no good reason NOT to separate them out into individual filesystems, tailored to the server requirements.. ESPECIALLY separating the root filesystem from anything else that is likely to fill up. Perhaps /usr doesn't need its own filesystem, but in that case you better put /usr/local on one instead. /var, /tmp and /home also should be on separate filesystems, since filling up your root partition is a great way to drop your server...

The one partition that I've had mixed feelings about these days is /boot, but only because OSs like RHEL/Centos and Fedora have been exponentially increasing their partitiion size requirements lately (100M->200M->250M->???) and not having the old IDE disk size limitations for booting makes combined root/boot more feasible. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to multi-patition a workstation (and in fact, I don't - just root, /boot and maybe /data (symlink /home and anything else into it)), but unless you're trying to cram a recent full-size Linux build into a tiny server, there's no reason not to take 10-20G out of your disk space for your system partitions, and then use the reast as needed. Heck, I just spec'd out a couple of servers where I swapped out 15K 72G drives for 10K 300G ones because they were cheaper, and I don't need the spindle speed (and only looked at 72G drives because that's the smallest they come in these days!). That's ~4x the space on a system that already had more than enough...

Based on your argument, they should cut the taxes on the low and middle class to at most half of what they currently are, since that's about what the wealthy are currently paying. If Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, says that it's not fair that he pays less in taxes than the middle-class people who work for him, why are you arguing? Or are you one of those few wealthy elites who is going to suffer from the tax changes that would otherwise benefit the vast majority of us slashdotters?

I don't like paying taxes any more than you do, but it's something we all have to do to contribute to our communal well-being. If you really don't want to pay taxes, go buy yourself a private island and run the entire thing autonomously. I bet you'll pay a lot more in "upkeep" and "maintenance" than you're currently paying in "taxes", and get a hell of a lot less for it. I'm not saying that all of our tax money is being used in the best way possible all the time, but I like having roads to drive on, emergency services to call if there's a problem, and all the other benefits of living in this country that are paid for by taxes. And while there's a ton of services that I currently DON'T use, that doesn't mean I won't pay my share now so that (in theory) they'll be there for me when I do need them. But it's a crime, morally and ethically if not legally, that the wealthiest members of our society who have the GREATEST ABILITY to pay their taxes, also have the most loopholes to get around paying them. If they don't want to pay their share, how about we strip them of their citizenship and let them move to some other country whose tax laws are probably a lot worse for them than even the proposed changes here. And since IIRC there are laws about taking money out of the country, they'd end up paying a lot of that in taxes when they left anyway.

To anyone who makes over $1M/year and claims that raising their taxes is unfair, SUCK IT UP. Those of us who make a LOT less than that are finding perfectly good ways to live our lives within our means, and if you can't afford to live within yours, CHANGE YOUR LIFESTYLE.

From the NANOG (North American Network Operator's Group) email list circa 1999, in response to a major backhoe incident, it was suggested that the following signs be put up over buried fiber:

Warning
Underground Fiber
Cutting fiber may be dangerous to your supply of Porn
and may cause network engineers to starve.

It was true then, and it's true now... :P

After seeing the Yahoo decision yesterday, I thought of the following idea. Now with the latest Google decision, I think it's even better:

All major Internet search companies (at least those based in the US - oh, right, that's pretty much all of them, isn't it?) should use IP geolocation to block access from Italy. Just redirect them to a page that says something like the following: "You appear to be attempting to reach us from Italy. We're sorry, but your courts and elected officials have chosen to make it impossible for us to do business in your country, so you can't use our services anymore. If you think this is unfair, please work to have your government change its policies towards search engines and global public content sites. Until then, good luck finding things on the Internet!"

If the people of Italy get cut off (not to mention the Italian police, government, military, etc.) suddenly lose their ability to search the Internet, it's going to have an impact. Depending on who uses it for what, it might even topple the government (wouldn't that be ironic!)...

That may be true, but there's the minor fact of having to find out a person's identity before you can sue them, and given the inability to map an IP address to a person, this is going to start impacting the initial discovery phase when "john doe" lawsuits are filed to determing who to actually sue. Yes, once they sue someone it may be possible to meet the burden of proof, but what if there's 3 equally plausible people who could have been responsible? If they sue one person, he can claim that there's only a 33% chance it was him, and 33%

The point is, unless you already KNOW who committed the infringement, and are just using the IP address as additional evidence against them, you're by definition taking a shot in the dark and hopefully suing the right person. And TFA is pointing out that some judges in Britain (at least) are starting to realize this. Large corporations have huge resources to put into going after people they sue, and yet they're firing buckshot into the crowd and seeing what they can bag, instead of using their resources to make sure they go after the right people. And judges HATE being used, which is what's going on, and once they realize what's happening they do things like this to put a stop to it.

Agreeing to an ISP's ToS means you have accountability to the ISP. In no way, shape or form does that accountability transfer to a third party with whom you have no such agreement. The ISP can take action to (for instance) terminate your account for violating the ToS regardless of who uses the connection to do so. Third parties cannot (and should not be able to) use that as "proof" that you (the account holder) are liable to them for anything.

Again - the infringer is a PERSON, not an IP ADDRESS, and there's often no good way to link the former to the latter. Police investigations do so as secondary evidence, meaning that they use other means to determine that the link is indeed valid. File-sharing lawsuits often have NO evidence other than the IP address, and without significant additional evidence there's no way to determine that an ISPs records (if any!) are actually valid, and even if they are and map the IP to a specific subscriber, there's again no way to prove that the subscriber was in fact the same PERSON as the infringer.

The problem with your argument is that while you have a valid point about copyright infringement causing harm in some cases, a) much of the current IP law is hampering other forms of economic growth, especially where patents are involved; b) you are arguing that the best way to improve the economy and create jobs is to create new laws to prosecute, imprison and disenfranchise (look it up if you don't know what it means, specifically with regards to convicted felons) citizens for violating copyright in a CIVIL manner; and c) by posting as AC you look like a troll at best, and a shill at worst.

The ENTIRE point of copyright (and other IP laws in general) is to encourage people and companies to invest in creating things in exchange for TEMPORARY control on their distribution. Copyright, with all of the extensions, is now for the most part a PERMANENT thing, given that it is possible for people to live their ENTIRE lives and not see copyright expire on something that was created before they were born, and as a result may people don't see the benefit of it, especially given how much easier it is to copy and distribute works in this day and age. And until the laws are revised to reflect that reality, and not the desires of the big companies to retain control, people are not going to respect the laws. Add something like this to the mix, and people are going start treating copyright law like they did Prohibition, until eventually the whole thing comes tumbling down. And it's one heck of a lot easier to transport unauthorized copies of digital media than it was moonshine!

If you leave your terminal unlocked with a root shell open, it's your fault when someone hacks it. Sudo caches the fact that you've typed your password, and anyone who knows to type 'rm -rf *' in a root shell probably knows to type 'sudo rm -rf *' as well. The only thing sudo prevents is people who don't know what they're doing from doing something bad by accident, and people who do know what they're doing from doing something important quickly...

I think you're mistaken - as the Chief Traffic Engineer for the DOT, and the person who had already rejected the request for the light, he clearly has a license to practice assholery, and is simply doing his job. OTOH, it seems to me that the state of North Carolina ought to start eyeing his salary as one way of helping reduce their budget shortfall...

Typing speed is to programming != piano key speed is to pianist. A better analogy would have been to ask about a hunt-and-peck composer, and frankly there's probably tons of them out there. I'm sure a composer who primarily plays guitar might only hunt-and-peck on a piano, but so what? I agree that you probably need a rudimentary typing skill to be a a reasonably efficient programmer, but efficiency != quality, and writing code fast may lead to more bugs that have to be fixed than someone who has to think about what they're typing and fixes them as they go...

If Republicans don't want net neutrality, ISPs should start de-prioritizing traffic to their websites unless they pay up. Better yet, start charging candidates extra money to allow access to their sites - it's not censorship, it's just good business. After all, if it's OK for ISPs to limit traffic to specific sites, why not target those who have the greatest need to be available?

Um, the trick is that the lawyers in question weren't defending anyone - they were representing the plaintiff in an attempt to win money/concessions from the defendant. And while a defense attorney is supposed to defend their client to the best of their ability, even they aren't allowed to outright lie to the court about something they know to be false.

That being said, I'm not sure if the OP would have prevailed at trial, but cases are supposed to be dismissed either because of facts that are not in dispute, or rules of law that require the case to be dismissed. If the only issue is that the facts are in dispute, that the whole purpose of a trial.

My biggest issue with this ruling is the judges statement that attempting to suppress protected speech is a legitimate use of the courts. This very much sounds to me like a legal maneuver to "protect" the interests of the lawyers by a) not acknowledging that they did something wrong and b) not taking away a source of revenue by discouraging lawyers from taking cases where they know their client is in the wrong...

The original article talks about "write-only languages." I see the proposal to allow Unicode source as creating "read-only languages" - hard to write, impossible to debug, but fairly easy for someone to read, even if they're not a programmer. This proposal isn't about giving programmers more power to code, it's about making it easier for non-english speakers who aren't coders to read the code that their programmers write.

Real programmers understand the fundamental limitations of a parser/compiler, as well as the need for a consistent set of reserved words and symbols...

Personally, I would have called 911 and reported a possible bomb placed on my car, and gotten the bomb squad to come out and blow it up. What's the FBI going to do then, charge him with being a responsible citizen? I mean, really - could anyone blame him for doing what the scaremongering overlords have been telling us to do for the past 10 years?

And, not only would it have gotten rid of the device, but it would have been big news - there's no way the FBI could have kept it quiet(ish) then...

I think Penn & Teller illustrated this best - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo