Amazon is a possibility for some research (and there are PIs who haven gone that route). There are a couple of problems:

1) If you use EC2 24/7 and need a ton of data storage and fast data transfer capabilities it's no longer that cheap.

2) Sending potentially sensitive data off to amazon servers isn't a great idea. Even if you have data that is supposed to be de-identified, there are PIs who will intentionally or unintentionally screw up and put sensitive data on your cluster. It's one thing if this is inside an academic lab. It's another thing entirely if it's beamed over the internet to uncontrolled machines.

3) The amount of data being collected these days is mind-bogglingly huge. Even a couple of years ago when I was more directly involved in HPC, data sets for things like genomics data where gigantic. They could collect several TB of data per day and it was rapidly increasing. Transferring all of that off to amazon takes a lot of bandwidth and time. Keeping the cluster closer to the data collectors can be a win.

It really depends what you are going to use it for. If it's your desktop PC, consumer grade drives are fine. If you are going to use the SSDs for scratch storage on a supercomputer or the journal devices for Ceph, you probably are going to want high write endurance drives.

Oh, a DOS doesn't need to be launched, that would imply you are trying to circumvent the courts. Merely have the plugin send a DMCA take down notice to the content provider every time it detects that an unauthorized derivative work has been made and shared.

Interesting read! After reading through all of the comments here, my take on this has been that relative to something like facebook, neither men nor women in general like editing wikipedia. I'm pulling statistics from different years, but I think this is roughly in the right ballpark:

World Population (2010):
Female: ~3.42 Billion
Male: ~3.48 Billion
Total: ~6.9 Billion

Active facebook users (2009,2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~1:1.35
Total: ~1.28 Billion
Female: ~0.74 Billion
Male: ~0.54 Billion
% of all females actively using facebook: ~22%
% of all males actively using facebook: ~16%

Active wikipedia users (2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~12:100 (rough center of survey according to article)
Total: 0.000131 Billion
Female: 0.0000157 Billion
Male: 0.00011528 Billion
% of all females actively editing wikipedia: 0.0004%
% of all males actively editing wikipedia: 0.0033%

So when you get down to it, there just happens to be a very slightly larger fraction of the male population that is willing to invest their time in Wikipedia. When by and large, people in general don't do it, I think it's hard to make any kind of generalization about whether or not there are specific barriers for either men or women. The bigger trend imho is that there are barriers for everyone.

I work for Red Hat as of the Inktank (Ceph) acquisition, so I haven't been with RH very long. As far as I know he really is leaving for another position. It's entirely possible that there are other reasons, but figure the guy has been with RH for what, like 10 or 12 years? That's a long time in this day and age. I'm as curious as everyone else where he's going though.

I disagree, though only to a limited extent. There is a legitimate net good that can be accomplished by connecting people who need goods and people who make goods. What form this takes has changed dramatically over the years, but it's important that people ultimately know where they can go to get something they want/need to improve their lives (be that medicine, food, entertainment, etc).

Having said this, I generally agree with you that advertising has numerous dark sides and often manipulation is involved. There is some spectrum where providing information turns into attempting to manipulate people's minds. You run into the same problem everywhere though including places like Wikipedia (which I think is a fantastic benefit for society), so it's not unique to advertising. I think the best you can do is try to teach people to understand when they are being manipulated and hopefully it will some day cease to be profitable enough for folks to continue doing (one can always hope).

I have to disagree. We bought a 2012 volt and other than the terrible central console interface absolutely love it. Of all of the cars we've owned over the years (A mix of domestic and imports) it's by far the best. I imagine if we owned a tesla model S we would love that even more, but our Volt cost us roughly what a nicely appointed Camry or similar vehicle would have cost. Chevy did a really good job.

What I really want is for both parties to split and maybe even get some kind of runoff voting scheme in place. Looks like the tea party has a non-zero chance on the republican side. Now we just need a credible progressive group to come forward and do it on the democratic side.

The positions matter less than ending the corruption.

IMHO, and in a very general sense, preventing things like this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

This isn't directly related to Lessig's superpac, but it's part of a general trend where personal gain in politics trumps ethical conduct. It doesn't matter what the issue is (in this case health care, but it could be zoning issues, or tax subsidies, or anything). This is blatant corruption on both sides of the isle. It's almost as if it doesn't matter where the money comes from (unions, hollywood, large corporations, drug lords, etc) so long as the people in office can derive the maximum profit. That couldn't be right though right?

Yes, because clearly the best way to win over the population there that doesn't support terrorism is to subject them to things we would ourselves find objectionable.

See this thread:

http://lists.ceph.com/pipermai...

One of the questions when you go to large scale is how do you deal with backup in general when you have multiple PB of data. That's partially where some of the new tiering features in firefly will come in for cold storage. Having said that, we are definitely more disk friendly than tape friendly right now afaik.

Wait, we are expected to be respectable now? That wasn't part of the deal!

I switched to Cinnamon a couple of years ago. It's not perfect and it eats more CPU/Memory than it should, but it's good enough that I mostly don't miss gnome 2. I'd suggest giving it a try and see what you think.

My mouse suffocated you insensitive clod!