Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.

The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.

The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.

Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.

See, anybody who has a CS degree will be motivated to HATE boot camp guys. Employers who want more (cheaper) labor will be motivated to LOVE any force that lets them hire more people at less cost.

As a self-taught programmer myself managing a 10+ year project that's highly profitable, you'll probably guess which side of that divide you'll tend to see me on.

Your later comments about ignoring RAID controller warnings for a *year* strike me as callous. But we all have our standards, and standards vary greatly from place to place as the needs the drive the standards also vary greatly. (financial institutions care much more about transactional correctness than reddit)

After months of testing, our organization has wholeheartedly adopted ZFS and have been finding that not only is it technically far superior to other storage technologies, it's significantly faster in many contexts, it's actually more stable than even EXT4 under continuous heavy read/write loads, and brings capabilities to the table that even expensive, hardware RAID controllers have a tough time matching. Best of all, since it actually runs off JBOD, the cost is somewhere between insignificant and irrelevant.

I was wondering if you had investigated ZFS at all, and if so, why you aren't using it?

Large scale internal combustion engines are extremely efficient and can run on just about anything burnable: vegetable oil, powdered coal, agricultural dust, wood gas from trees, dried leaves, etc. Yes, you can literally run an engine on banana peels. The trick is to get the carburetor to get the balance right.

From the perspective of a generator for a hospital, it would be relatively straightforward to design a generator running an engine like this with whatever renewable fuel is most convenient and readily available locally. Large scale wood gas installations typically work with fuel pre-processed into pellets.

You make it sound like it was paradise in the 80s. It had it's suckiness, just like we do today.

1) There was constant threats of terrorism in the media in the 80s. Take a look at the "Libyans" in "Back to the Future".

2) Helicopter parents were definitely a thing in the 80s.

3) There were plenty of poor example adults in the 80s.

4) I'll 100% grant that entry level jobs are *much* harder to find now.

5) NSA and FBI watched us in the 80s. Ma Bell logged every call ever made. What was that you were saying on the CB Radio, back when the FCC actually gave a damn?

6) Granted Massive student debt, partially offset by the relative ease of getting into school. Yes, debt is a problem, especially when you pick a lame degree. It was always a problem, more so now.

7) There was no "online", so no posting stupid stuff online, and no online bullying. Bullying back then wasn't some insult posted in a chat root, it was a broken jaw. I remember well facing my bully with a stick in my hand, and being knocked flat repeatedly by a kid with 30 pounds on me, while I cursed defiantly and got up to face him again.

8) Education system was "declining" then too.

9) I'd argue that the cold war and the constant threat of total, global annihilation far outweighs a few school shootings. Or did you forget that little detail?

The only reason he airline industry is not a natural monopoly is because of the massive public infrastructure provided by the US Government FAA in public use airports and related flight control infrastructure. In every meaningful sense, an airport solves the "last mile problem" for airplanes. Why wouldn't we expect a similar investment in the "last mile problem" for Internet Service?

SouthWest doesn't own the Oakland Airport; they merely lease a terminal. Can you imagine what would have happened if Delta had owned the airports too?

I've seen this lame list for 10 years, pretty much trolling bait. But based on this, I wonder if you even know how DKIM works?

Pretty touch to crack legitimate encryption.

Not at all. You can use it, or not. If you don't use it, you essentially give permission for black hats to spoof your identity. Also, if you are an admin, you can choose what you do with DKIM.

How is being able to protect your account from being spoofed going to affect business?

Why would you need one? DKIM is done via DNS and is under the control of the record holder.

Do you actually know how DKIM works? Each of these points are either effectively made better with DKIM or are irrelevant.

Care to name one?

How is DKIM a whitelist? You really have no idea how this works, do you? Did you just fill in some boxes at random?

I'll address a single point on here, to show how DKIM works rather well even in the worst of the points:

One of the products my company provides for schools is a "mailing list reflector" that in practice works very much like your average mailing list. In order to ensure delivery, all outbound email is signed with DKIM, even though we're really just forwarding the original message to the mailing list recipients.

How is this done? Well, we use a dummy address for the "From" field like "originaluser@gmail.com " and then set the reply-to field to match the original sender. Thus, DKIM passes as we provide keys for mycompany.com, the user is "From" mycompany.com, and the end user is able to reply to get a message back to the sender without involving our mail server at all.

It's a compromise, but it works well and we've had virtually no complaints.

And, in my opinion, that's largely because of the Centrally Controlled Media in the United States. And if you think "Main Stream Media" doesn't include Faux[sp?] News, you're also a victim of this control.

... to the masses of sarcastic "I though Open Source was more secure!" crowd: in an Open Source forum, when vulnerabilities are found, they are patched. Since it's a public forum, the vulnerabilities are disclosed, and patches / updates made available. The poor, sorry state of the first cut gets rapidly and openly improved.

With closed source, the vulnerabilities merely stay hidden and undisclosed, and you have no ability to know about it, or fix it yourself. the poor, sorry state of the first cut never improves. Yes, there are some cultures that take security seriously. You have no way of knowing.

This, right here, is what "more secure" looks like: public notification of the vulnerabilities and patches to distribute.

I haven't worn a watch in well over a decade. Why should I start wearing one now?

I guess you haven't set up recent Linux distros? Using Fedora, I can have a workstation up and running, fully updated in 30 minutes. Compare with Windows with the update/reboot/install for a day. At the very least, let's talk about the current state of Linux, and not its state as of 2001, OK?

Happy MetroPCS customer here. Seriously, they rock. Coverage isn't fabulous but isn't bad either.

With today's 4-8 TB drives, it's easy to keep billions of of files on a single disk, so you could potentially keep data for many thousands of customers on a single disk. But if you do that, you quickly run into an entirely new type of constraint: IOPS.

The dirty secret of the HD industry is that while disks have become far bigger, they haven't really become any faster. 7200 RPM is still par for the course for a "high performance" desktop or NAS drive, and you can only queue up about 150 requests per second at 7200 RPM. Simple physics takes over.

Spinning disks are already a non-starter for many scenarios, and this is a trend that will only accelerate as HDDs basically become the modern equivalent of tape backup.

Have you considered starting a company around the OSS Project? It's typical for a project in your position to spawn a commercial support entity to satisfy support needs, the $$ for which is also used to develop/support the project.

Sadly, there just aren't enough places with lakes to store anything like the amount of power we'd need to store. You also have to deal with transmission loss between the solar site and the point of use. There was this proposal a while back to use massive, carved granite/stone blocks to store power but it doesn't seem to have achieved much mention beyond its initial proposal.