If there is research to do regarding what service to choose, how does comcast have a monopoly?

Well... Comcast could be the only wired internet service provider in an area, BUT they might only offer service that is so expensive and slow, that someone has to choose between Comcast, cellular, and satellite.

If your mother just wants to check her e-mail and download a few pictures every once in a while, then the ever-increasing speed of Comcast's cheapest tier is wasted, and saving a few dollars by going with something like T-Mobile's $30/month 5GB cellular plan might be cheaper and just as good.

I do not believe that "bork" is a legal term with any validity.

Umm... It sounds funny, because it's Latin. Lawyers just *love* Latin words.

quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

Those regulations were instituted because taxi drivers and taxi companies were doing incredibly unethical things that were causing damage to both people and to the economy.

But that doesn't stop them, or later politicians, from abusing the power they've given themselves, to start squeezing every dollar they can get out of it, and/or to raise huge barriers to entry to keep out competitors and give their buddies a practical monopoly in the industry.

For example, NYC strictly limiting the number of medallions they sell, until they're valued at over $1 million each, paid for by the hacks who might pull in a whopping $50k/year working long hours, in dangerous conditions, in the highest cost-of-living city in the US. Or mandating a single, specific model of vehicle for all cabs, with their own customizations that drive the prices into the stratosphere. etc.

If the drive is huge and making a backup takes forever, you might be less inclined to keep a backup and more inclined to hope it doesn't fail.

Long gone are the days when you had to sit back and not do anything on your system, waiting patiently while the data was backed up, so as make sure everything would keep up, and not to interrupt the tape/CD-R/etc.

When my system is being rsync'd to the backup drive, the only thing I notice is a small lag when I click on a file, and a HDD LED that's blinking like it's trying to signal me that the Russians are invading.

Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails.

Buy two.

If you're worried about the drive failing, a RAID-1 setup will take care of it, while doubling read speeds and halving seek times.

If you're worried about user error or other accidents, have one offline in an external caddy, and just periodically power it up and rsync all the new data to it.

I've been doing the later religiously for the past 10 years, upgrading my external drive every time I upgrade my internal drives. In all that time, not one hard drive has suddenly failed on me, instead bigger drives drop in price and become too tempting to ignore, so old drives go in the trash. But besides being insurance that my many years of acquiring content won't poof into smoke and leave me at square one, feeling like a crippled baby learning how to walk again, the external drive has been extremely useful in making my hard drive upgrades, and OS upgrades, a much simpler operation.

It's just so damn incredibly cheap and easy to keep a reasonably up-to-date backup of EVERYTHING you have, that I can't believe people would choose not to do so. The prices on "cloud" storage are astronomical by comparison.

Time-cube meets ancient Egypt...

It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.

More technology can dramatically reduces the time and manpower needed. With the technology they had, it's hard to figure out how they made the huge structures they did, with the numbers of people they had, in the time-frame they had to do it.

The Egyptian pyramids are a much harder problem than something small like stone-henge. It's the difference between someone building a wagon in their garage, and an assembly line turning out automobiles. There are strict limits on how much time they had, how many people could possibly have been on-site, and with the limited technology they had, the numbers just don't seem to add-up to make what they did, possible.

more than just one person

Hmm, this story only has 4.4X as many comments as the SoylentNews story.

I count 4,661 registered users on SoylentNews, and I'd bet nearly all are /. refugees, probably most are still visiting both sites, at least on occasion.

When having a heated argument with an angry mass audience, it's best to keep your points oversimplified, obvious, easily confirm-able by many people, etc.

And even when you do that, it's a numbers game... there's still a pretty good chance you'll get shouted-down, buried and hidden by negative mods. It happened to me just a short while ago.

To see the discussion on this topic go the other way, with ignorance and bile rising to the top, see the story on SN a few days ago:

http://soylentnews.org/article...

My point being, don't bother with discussion of the intricacies, minutia, and relatively small benefits around here, when surrounded by angry villagers with lit torches and pitchforks.

That's all fine and well, but inittab doesn't have enough smarts to start and stop myriad interdependent processes in order. It also doesn't offer you any way to specify how to handle the respawing of various processes with different requirements, etc., etc.

It would be fine with me if good old init got upgraded, and would do the job well, but it hasn't been, instead, at least twice, groups that wanted to improve it, started over from scratch, and they have something that works.

With a few thousand servers, basic, system level services (that have run fine for months) will be crashing unexpectedly (somewhere on the cluster) every day. And that even with absolutely nothing wrong with the systems. And when you "simply [re]start" it, it will continue to run for several more months without any trouble at all. At least, on heavily-utilized clusters.

And be slow as shit and not work properly, which was the state of video in the browser under linux since... forever, pretty much. I was about to say Flash fixed it, but it has all those problems and worse, sadly.

Video in the browser on Linux worked great with MPlayerplug-in... Vastly better than using the proprietary browser plug-ins for video on Windows.

It was great, but Flash destroyed it, and took both platforms a decade backwards... Flash finally got the "hardware acceleration" that other browser plug-ins had from the start, but still sucks.

you can simply run /etc/rc every minute via cron and it'll sync what's running with what's supposed to be assuming things have been /sbin/service stopped.

A "crash" does not involve anyone running "service X stop" so you're providing a solution for a problem nobody wants nor asked about.

(And if they haven't been cleanly stopped, you need a specialized tool that understands how to *TEST* the service rather than rely on subsys.)

And that specialized tool is... wait for it...

THE SERVICE'S OWN INIT SCRIPT!!!

That's right, you can iterate through service "$X" status on everything, and do a restart on anything that has terminated, but that's just a hack, and something that can be done infinitely superior within the software handling the service startup... namely, upstart or systemd.

I hate Lennart Poettering and PulseAudio as much as anybody, but SysVinit is broken, and systemd is a fix. Angry zealots repeatedly denying that there's a problem, is probably why it's taken so very long before a fix finally arrived.

grep -ve '^$' -e '^#' ldap.conf

Wait, why would I would the system init function to be monitoring and restarting services? That's an unwarranted scope expansion.

Did you say that when web browsers started rendering images, and included javascript support?