... which demonstrates that you don't understand the problem. See, people die and will die in every production car ever made. Accidents happen, and with enough money spent, virtually every single death could be prevented, with enough additional shielding, crumple zones, and whatnot. But the result would be a car that nobody could afford, not even by a long shot.

So, in a very literal sense, every single car you've ever driven is a balance between the amount you're willing to pay and the amount of risk you're willing to assume. At what point does a death become a death due to a design flaw? Well, guess what: there is no obvious, intuitive "line" that would be easy to sue over.

An ignition switch occasionally dies? Would you *want* a car company that didn't improve its designs as it learns more about them? But on the balancing side, you literally cannot afford to pay for a car getting a recall every time an improvement is made.

There are a ton of shades of grey, and it's not callous, it's just sensible business to balance costs with safety. Doing it any other way would be the foolish way to do things.

Printing presses are also increasingly under pressure (no pun intended) by start ups like Lulu that essentially print books on demand.

If BTRFS bit rot detection is anything like ZFS' then it most certainly can check for bit rot and correct it automatically.

Actually, I remember reading a study a while back covering this very subject. In fact, having passengers in the car engaged in conversation actually improved driver alertness because the passengers would pause talking, stiffen, make a sharp breathing noise, or other indications of tension causing the driver to be on alert even when otherwise oblivious to the driving risk.

In practice, it's like having "more eyes on the road" even when they aren't driving.

Well, isn't this your lucky day, then? ZFS on Linux works now, today, without the use of FUSE. Nothing about the license conflicts prohibits use or distribution, just distribution together. I have ZFS/Linux servers in production right now, and they are quite stable. Starting with a vanilla install of CentOS, the instructions are roughly:

1) Install the yum repo file.
2) yum Install kernel-devel zfs
3) Start the ZFS service.
4) Start creating ZFS volumes....

A reboot isn't typically necessary... (though not a bad idea)

Heck, my Father in law spent most of his childhood writing his name wrong when his parents forgot how they'd spelled it on the birth certificate! He found out about it when he got his driver's license as a teen...

I mean, if a kid's parents can't be trusted to spell a guy's name right, how do you figure a secretary is going to get it right 100% of the time?

All true. These aren't present. We end up watching Hulu/Comcast most of the time, and every week or so rent or use "noncommercial distribution" for a prime movie or show. (Often, you can't even rent/buy a particular movie online, thus the noncommercial options)

Today, we watched "The day the Earth stood still"... a wickedly good movie, even if in black & white. Yeah, 100% satisfying...

Truly, I don't understand them making episodes otherwise streamed not available for viewing historically. Don't more eyeballs translate into more revenue?

While I generally agree with your sentiment, it might be nice to learn how to capitalize sentences and form paragraphs so that you you at least appear to be educated, whatever the reality. Based on your post, I'm guessing that there was really no part of this technology that you personally made up. Also, avoid profanity, it makes you sound like you are 15.

To be fair, probiotics and alternative medicine people have said all kinds of ridiculous things for decades as well. I remember all too well the "ruby infused sun water" that was said to be a sure cure for my ear infections as a kid. That's just one of many similarly silly claims, as by recent protests against scam medical practices by actual doctors purposely trying to "overdose" on homeopathics...

The value isn't in having the "right answer" - it's in knowing which answers are are, in fact, right. "Alternative medicine" types tend to babble incoherently, a practice which does, occasional, manage to burble a right answer.

Remember that old hardware is subject to a selection bias: the stuff that was crap died long ago; only the good stuff remains!

I have a ancient Pentium 3 with 512 MB of RAM that I use as a network monitor. It's done that job continuously for 10+ years and I haven't replaced it because it has literally never given me a problem. If it was doing "real work" I'd have replaced it long ago, but it does what it does fine, and uses so little power (18 watts) that I feel no need to replace it.

I was a bit relieved when CentOS 6 came out with a 32 bit version, letting me coax another 7 or so years out of it...

Not only that, but the size advantage of optical media is simply gone.

When CDs first came out, they easily held several times the capacity of a standard HDD. DVDs were much the same way. Then, a few decades go by, and little changes. BlueRay holds much less than a stock HDD, and was that way when it finally won the format wars.

Now, they have a format that doesn't even come close to a stock HD. (My laptop has a 250 GB SSD, my desktop computer has twin 2 TB drives) This new format would just *barely* cover my laptop, and would be a pain to archive my desktop on.

To be fair, passwords are dramatically better security than not even using passwords. But for the reason you gave (as well as numerous others) passwords are a terrible idea.

1) You can't (safely) use the same password in more than one context.

2) If a password is leaked, all protection the password provides is lost.

3) It's easy to forget a password.

4) You can't "lend" somebody your password. ... etc...

I'm pretty suspicious of your numbers. I sincerely doubt that it costs anything like $6 to produce a gallon of milk.

In any event, projects like the Greening the Desert Permaculture project have shown that applying a bit of intelligence to agriculture can produce miraculous results in the very worst of circumstances.

It requires a pretty significant re-think of what agriculture should look like. But it's worth it. TL;DR: Seriously, just watch the video linked above.

As a long-time PHP dev, I recognize that it's very popular to hate on PHP, and has been for some time. And there are some valid criticisms of PHP, particularly from the domain of purity. PHP is a brutish language, with lots of warts. Whether it's the lack of any sort of parallelism or threads, or the random_underscores or the random(haystack, needle) ordering of variables in functions, there's plenty to complain about.

But PHP has its strengths, too. Its translation of strings to integers to hexidecimal numbers is "good enough" for most cases. Embedding variables into new strings works "good enough" that it's highly useful. It is extremely stable - I literally cannot remember a single incident of unexpected crashing. It's array/hash thingie is a highly convenient way to organize data from semi-sanitized sources, which is largely the norm in embedded, "enterprise" development and/or vertical stack software development.

And despite these strengths, PHP offers some interesting angles that are pragmatic (non-technical) in nature:

1) There are lots of PHP application templates and starter apps that work as a starting point for new start ups. The PHP community is generally very forgiving of newbies.

2) It's uni-thread model is simple enough for beginner/intermediate programmers to comprehend easily.

3) It's already installed on every 2-bit website hosting provider's servers.

4) You can get a tremendous amount of "real work" done with PHP. You could rather easily run a US national census by website using a small cluster of PHP servers.

Once, long ago, I was a beginner programmer, and I chose PHP for largely these reasons, reasons that have sustained me well as a developer. My company, founded on this technology, has grown rapidly and well, meeting the needs of our clients.

How can I not thank the PHP designers for the free gift that I built I career out of?

Well, aren't you feeling a bit superior?

My wife is in her mid 40s and is in her last semester at grad school. Turns out that (at least our) Universities can actually somewhat *prefer* older applicants because they have enough life experience to not mess around and they "get the job done". Result? My wife is top of her class. She also graduated with honors as a Bachelor.

I took up flying lessons at 37. I learned it just as fast and effectively as when I learned to program at 15.