Agreed. Any critics should take their camera and fly to the next hot spot and take their own photos...nothing to stop you, other than not wanting to risk your own blood and treasure, and probably come home empty handed because it's damn hard work, including getting access to timely shots.

Would you like pictures of the rebels when they grab Gaddafi? It would make a great photo. Should you be a cold, dismissive jerk to the rebels and then ask them to take you with when they go to grab him?

When a photographer alters or stages their photos, they get fired. They compete for who gets access to the most timely, dangerous, subjects. War photographers DIE doing their job. Tim Hetherington (who directed the documentary "Restrepo") was killed in Libya recently. Kevin Carter, famous for the famine photo of starving toddler with a vulture landed nearby, committed suicide at age 33, leaving a note that said:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners ..."

A convoy of journalist-observers with a candidate en route to register for an election was massacred by the local warlord in the Philippines in 2009. The details are despicable. The Magindanao victims able to be identified are:
Alejandro "Bong" Reblando
Henry Araneta,
Napoleon “Nap” Salaysay
Bartolome “Bart” Maravilla
Jhoy Dojay
Andy Teodoro
Ian Subang
Leah Dalmacio
Gina Dela Cruz
Maritess Cablitas
Neneng Montano
Victor Nuñez
McDelbert "Macmac" Arriola
Jolito Evardo
Daniel Tiamson
Reynaldo Momay
Rey Merisco
Ronnie Perante
Jun Legarta
Val Cachuela
Santos "Jun" Gatchalian
Joel Parcon
Noel Decena
John Caniba
Art Betia
Ranie Razon
Archie Ace David
Fernanado "Ferdz" Mendoza

To deride conflict photographers takes a lot of nerve if you haven't done it yourself.

If you were black or Muslim you wouldn't be in Friendswood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendswood,_Texas

Although seriously, ignoring this current story, Friendswood is a really nice city with good schools and I'd happily live there if I could afford it. (I live nearby.)

That makes sense.

I would also agree with the logic further up; even if the article is correct, this is the same as a malicious lie about you being circulated, behind your back, before the internet. At least now, you can use the same internet to check the credibility/reputation of the source of the lie versus the subject of the lie.

I was told a judge once instructed a jury as follows: when an attorney is grilling a witness, you get to decide if the attorney impeached the witness, or impeached themselves (by making baseless insinuations).

We don't have any data yet. The oldest Backblaze pods contain hard drives that are not quite 4 years old, so we haven't seen any old age mortality yet.

Here is another totally random thought: We pay $1,400 / month / cabinet in physical space rental plus electricity, which comes to about $5 / drive / month / cabinet. Even if the old (smaller) drives last forever, there will come a moment where it is just a good financial decision to copy all the data off of them onto denser drives because in some number of months the savings in physical space rental and saving electricity (assuming energy use is fixed per drive) pays for the new drives. If a new hard drive is 10 times as dense, it saves Backblaze $4.50 / drive / month in physical space and electricity rental. In 22 months it pays for the $100 replacement drive. (I did that math super quick, so let me know if I'm off by a factor of 10.)

(Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze) - We no longer deploy new pods with JFS, but over half our fleet of 200 pods are running JFS and we are perfectly happy with it. We worked through a couple bugs related to large volumes, but after that our main reason for using EXT4 going forward is that in our application EXT4 is measurably faster than JFS, and it is reassuring to be on a filesystem that is used by more people so it (hopefully) has more bugs fixed, etc.

Earlier we were totally interested in ZFS, as it would replace RAID & LVM as well (and ZFS gets great reviews). But (to my understanding) native ZFS is not available on Linux and we're not really looking to switch to OpenSolaris.

ANOTHER option down this line of thinking is switching to btrfs, but we haven't played with it yet.

(Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze) All SATA drives are inherently hot swappable, including the ones in the Backblaze pod. We have tried it, it worked the few times we did it. But for normal operations, we shut the pod down completely to swap drives. The first reason is that because the pods are stacked on top of each other and the drives are replaced from the top, we have to slide the pod out half way out of the rack like a drawer. It feels kinda wrong to slide servers around like that while the drives are spinning, so we avoid it (I have no proof it actually causes significant problems). Another reason is that with the top of the pod open, the cooling airflow isn't the same and some of the drives in the center start rising in temperature. This isn't fatal, but it puts you on a "timer" where you want to get the hot swap done within a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes) and get the pod closed back up again. Finally, it just seems safer to let the machine come up cleanly with the drive replaced. For our application it doesn't matter at all, no customer can possibly know or care if one, two, or ten pods are offline during a reboot.

(Disclaimer: I work at Backlaze) We have 3 RAID groups inside each 45 drive pod, each RAID group is 15 drives. So you need 3 drive failures out of one single 15 drive group to lose data. So... when the FIRST drive fails in one 15 drive RAID group, our software automatically stops accepting any more customer data on that particular 15 drive group and the management software puts the file system sitting on top of that RAID gruop into read only mode. This may seem obvious in retrospect, but we found writing to drives causes them to fail or pop out of RAID arrays at more than 100 times higher frequency than just keeping them spinning and reading the information off of them. So by doing this the customers can still restore data from that pod, and we're pretty relaxed about replacing that particular drive sometime in the next few days.

When a second drive subsequently fails inside a pod, pagers start going off and a Backblaze employee starts driving towards the datacenter.

With that said, it is worth noting that multiple simultaneous drive failures in one pod are WAAAY more common than pure statistics would indicate. If a SATA card fails, it has three SATA cables plugged into it leading to three separate port multipliers and ultimately is talking with 15 hard drives. So we'll see 15 drives simultaneously drop out of the RAID arrays in one pod and it's pretty obvious what just happened. No big deal, it doesn't (necessarily) corrupt any data. I'm just mentioning you can't take the random drive failure rates of one single drive and do straight multiplication to get to pod failure rates.

(Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze) - If you really care about data, you *MUST* have end-to-end application level data integrity checks (it isn't just the hard drives that lose data!).

Let's make this perfectly clear: Backblaze checksums EVERYTHING on an end-to-end basis (mostly we use SHA-1). This is so important I cannot stress this highly enough, each and every file and portion of file we store has our own checksum on the end, and we use this all over the place. For example, we pass over the data every week or so reading it, recalculating the checksums, and if a single bit has been thrown we heal it up either from our own copies of the data or ask the client to re-transmit that file or part of that file.

At the large amount of data we store, our checksums catch errors at EVERY level - RAM, hard drive, network transmission, everywhere. My guess is that consumers just do not notice when a single bit in one of their JPEG photos has been flipped -> one pixel gets every so slightly more red or something. Only one photo changes out of their collection of thousands. But at our crazy numbers of files stored we see it (and fix it) daily.

Well they did drop the price by $100 and you can get the external superdrive for $79 so it is still cheaper than the model it replaces for a much more powerful machine.

The removal of the optical drive also provides room for a discreet graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 6630M).

Bravo. There are public health implications to sharing medical data that so clearly outweigh privacy concerns. The difference is a factor of possibly a million lives saved by collecting, sharing, and analyzing medical data versus embarrassing moments and unfair prejudice when data is mishandled (unfair prejudice sucks but it can be and is dealt with by methods other than privacy).

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine an opt-in system that eventually allows a huge meta-analysis of data that discovers the cause (and cure) of autism. Then, a parent's child is newly diagnosed with autism, but the parent (and child) have not opted-in to share THEIR medical data. They are given the option: we will cure your child, but since you are benefiting from the shared data of others, you would be required to also opt-in and share your medical information.

I can't image a significant number of people would say "No thanks. My child being cured of a disabling illness is not as important as keeping our medical information private. We will keep our privacy, and you can keep your cure for this illness."

I will also say "Me, too" on your other point: I do not spend time wishing I knew about other people's foot fungus, back pain, or whatever other medical conditions. No matter how embarrassing or stigmatizing your medical info, unless I know you personally and you come to me for help with your illness, it's just not on my radar.

The distinction is between consciousness (or awareness) versus "conscious awareness", which is the awareness that one IS conscious.

My garage door opener has an electric eye that makes it "aware" whether anything is blocking the path of the closing door. It is not aware that it is aware of this. I, on the other hand, am both aware if the path is blocked, and I am AWARE that I am aware of it.

A toaster with a microprocessor could be called "aware" of specific info, but it's now aware that it's aware of it.

Conscious awareness is akin to being "sentient", in that it's immoral/illegal to brutalize a sentient being. You can brutalize your toaster, but not a person or animal. We take it on faith that others have conscious awareness...for all I know, I'm the only person who is AWARE of his consciousness, and everyone else is a biological robot that's not actually sentient.

I don't think biology can explain conscious awareness. We can't even prove it exists, despite everyone having the direct, personal experience of it.

Walmart has carried CR123A batteries for well over 10 years. You should also easily be able to find them at Target, Radio Shack, Best Buy, etc. Heck all the grocery stores around here (Houston) carry them as well.

From what I've seen the CR123a actually seems to be a pretty standard battery for use in flashlights. I think all of the Surefire flashlights use them: http://www.surefire.com/ Tactical gun lights by Streamlight use them as well: http://www.streamlight.com/product/class.aspx?cid=10

In 2003, Arlene Corpuz did a Google search for "microsoft word class handout". She found my website where I had teaching handouts I wrote. Arlene was in the Philippines, emailed me, and I provided the documents she wanted.

She had a Geocities homepage in her signature. I read it, and we corresponded.

In September of 2004, I landed in Manila. In June of 2005, Arlene and I were married in the USA. In March of 2008, our daughter, Athena Corpuz Gregerson was born.

This was the advantage, for us, of sharing information about ourselves online. We have not experienced any disadvantages yet.

Well, malignant lymph nodes grow. Having naturally large lymph nodes are not "growing". My brother's lymph nodes tripled in size in a few weeks.

That's supposed to be why we have doctors -- to figure out complicated things (decision trees), not dismiss a change in your condition with a cursory evaluation.

I agree.

My late brother's doctor told him his swollen lymph nodes were nothing -- he had no symptoms, and a routine white count showed no infection.

That's how lymphoma presents. The next year he was in the ER due to wheezing, and was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin's lymphoma, which eventually killed him (photos of his last years). He had a bone marrow and stem cell transplant...not looking for lymphoma in someone asymptomatic turned out to be pretty expensive as well as fatal for the patient.

This story is not rare, either. After speaking to a handful of other Hodgkin's patients, they all had similar experiences. And those were the survivors.