In the past 10 years, I have never turned on my water tap and had no water come out. In the past 5 years (which is as far back as I have log files from my UPS), I've experienced 2 power failures lasting longer than a few minutes (I recorded 7 outages lasting less than a few minutes, but some of those were when I unplugged the UPS or turned off a breaker to do some electrical work), one was a regional power outage, and one was caused when a car accident took down a utility pole.

However, I experience regular internet outages, the last one was last week, and lasted for 3 hours, cable TV was fine, but internet (for me and a neighbor down the street) was out. It took 30 minutes to get someone at Comcast to realize that there was a problem, but they had no idea what was wrong, nor any ETA for a fix.

So I *wish* my internet connection was managed as well as water and power.

I think you mean a 10-mllion-a-year-aire with a net worth of $150M:

http://www.celebritynetworth.c...

Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a separate region (other than during testing).

Coloc space is not cheap, so don't forget to factor that into the costs. Running a datacenter in the office is even more expensive due to the costs to add the needed redundancy (power, cooling, internet) to an office tower.

The point only stands if you pretend that there's no real difference between an unimmunized person and a immunized person with 0.3% chance of catching the disease, and if you ignore the science behind herd immunity.

Because no vaccine is 100% effective, even if you're immunized, you can still catch the disease.

Further, some individuals are unable to be vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions (allergies, compromised immune system, etc).

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.

While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time, it will get there and when it does, computer drivers will be safer than human drivers. Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over). Their car has already surpassed my own record, it's only been about 150,000 miles since my last accident (a car changed lanes into me, while the accident was not my fault, if I'd had computer-like reflexes and perfect awareness of my surroundings to know that the lane beside me was open, I may have been able to avoid the accident by sudden braking and/or making a quick lane change)

Then why is Google spending so much money on fiber to the home? As RF frequencies increase (since there's only so much bandwidth available at the lower frequencies - a 100Mhz channel at 900Mhz takes up relatively more spectrum than a 100Mhz channel at 10Ghz), cell sizes decrease due to lower propagation and penetration of the higher frequencies to a point where it takes a Wireless access point at every house (or possibly in every room in the house) to provide equivalent throughput to wired infrastructure.

Which is why the metric system has separate units for mass and weight/force.

But that's not the case with the pound, it is used for both (sometimes, but not always more specifically as pound-force or pound-mass)

Don't believe Wikipedia? How about the NIST?

The real world is not always as simple as what you learned in 5th grade science, when your teacher said "The pound is a unit of weight, not mass", he was correct and incorrect at the same time due to the ambiguous nature of the unit.

quote>Why would they use a measure of WEIGHT instead of a measure of MASS?

Ton is already ambiguous, but since it is a USA media article, its safe to assume that they meant what is also known as the short ton, or 2000 pounds. The pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg, so it is, by definition, a unit of mass.

It's not like they "forgot" that users might want to add new books, the inability of any updatable storage was a design requirement to prevent it from being used for espionage or as a channel to inadvertently bring malware aboard a ship.

Though it seems that there are so many ways for a person to smuggle a MicroSD card into a secure area that an eReader is probably not a huge concern.

We have are 12 dev/test servers that I didn't bother to patch because they'll be decommissioned in a month or two along with the rest of the datacenter they are in, and even though they support SSL connections (with a disposable cert from our private CA), they are generally only used with HTTP and have no private data to protect, and are almost completely unused now.

If someone wants to spend time trying to steal the server's private key or steal user data from the server, that's fine with me, I'd rather have them spend time on my disposable server than someone's real server.

Yes and no. Technically, the airport is part of San Francisco, but it's geographically separate from SF -- you leave the city of SF to get to the airport, then you're back in the city when you're at the airport.

Public transit funding is only "absurd" if you ignore the huge subsidies that go to cars.

30% of SF residents have no car, still a ways to go to catch up to NYC's 55% but that number is growing.

CIty planners have already spent decades planning low density communities across the country, But it turns out that people still need to go to the office -- telecommuting still hasn't fulfilled it's promise of letting workers stay at home, even Google with unlimited technology resources still ships its employees 40 miles from SF to GoogleHQ. It's a lot easier to get people to the office when they live and work in the same high density city than when homes and businesses are spread over a large low density area. You can see this when you look at the difference in transit effectiveness in San Jose versus San Francisco.