The metrics don't include failures so infrequent that they aren't expected to happen in our lifetimes. That sort of infrequent failure was precisely what I was speaking of.

I think the thing that bugs me here, as usual with this topic is the adversarial and somewhat ignorant nature of the debate. The original research that mdsolar spoke of, may well be accurate. But I don't see his condemnation of that research (as undermining the credibility of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) based on the actual content. That's more a problem with mdsolar's point of view than with the NRC.

As to your current arguments, I find them a lot better quality.

To elaborate, my view on this is that moving bytes just doesn't take that much energy. A heavily loaded network doesn't consume much more energy than a lightly loaded network.

In hindsight there are other issues. For example, you have to set up what you have on that SD. If you're downloading music on demand from the network, you can just change your demands in order to change what you hear. For an SD, you have to manage it, adding and removing stuff. Sure, you get more control over what you hear, but similarly, you get more work.

Finally, there's the matter of what happens when the SD gets destroyed. A server farm with backup and redundancy takes a lot less work to set up per person it serves than individual people managing SDs with redundancy.

Recode.net quipped that for an extra million, Alexander would show them the back door (state-installed spyware mechanisms) that the NSA put in consumer routers.

Only ONE of them?

What does this story have to do with Linux?

I assume you were going for "funny".

But on the off chance you (or some reader) is asking this seriously...

Slashdot is about things that are of interest to nerds. The approval process for new drugs (which might save, enhance, damage, or end their lives) is one of those subjects.

None of which will matter unless you have an unwanted local service listening on those ports. On the other hand, if there is a malicious service inside your network which wants to allow incoming connections, there are any number of ways to implement NAT traversal. It's even fairly common for common services to incorporate NAT traversal these days due to the prevalence of NAT and the ways it breaks network routing. If you want to reliably filter traffic—even incoming traffic—you need a proper firewall customized to your traffic requirements, NAT or no NAT.

The electrons are being run through the experiment one at a time, so they can't be interfering with each other. There is no "electron build up"; even if you tore the apparatus down and rebuilt it from scratch each time, guaranteeing that there was no leftover state from previous experiments, you'd still get the same results.

You only get one discrete "hit" per electron, but the location varies according to some statistical distribution—and that distribution, measured over a series of single-electron experiments, matches what one would expect for interfering wave patterns.

Don't forget that analog is lossy too; there is no such thing as a signal with infinite bandwidth in the real world. Per the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, a discrete (digital) signal with sampling rate f is equivalent to a continuous (analog) signal with bandwidth f/2. In other words, you're not losing anything by sampling a low-pass-filtered signal at 44.1 kHz unless you care about frequencies above 22 kHz. The range of human hearing is generally considered to max out at around 20 kHz; if you want to go higher, you'll probably need to invest in specialized amplifiers and speakers (not to mention a scope to detect the difference).

I tend to buy boxes with fairly high end parts (not expensive, just high quality), and when I built them I did the same. High end enough that I really didn't have to upgrade until everything was no longer "state of the art", so no parts to recycle in.

My ooold computer has a Q9550 and 8 gigs of ram, just as I ordered it. It is still pretty usable as a daily backup video player, and not bad for midline gaming like Portal 2, Goat Simulator, etc. Upgraded the video 3 years ago, $150-175 for what was then a steal.

5 years old, and the CPU is still on the front page of Passmark, at >4000 pmarks. Not bad. Paid around 1800 without monitor. Upgraded to 7 Pro over Vista, but even the original install is intact. Hard to beat that kind of stability, and not convinced you can build it by hand anymore.

You may not have used the word "absolute", but you did speak of "Palestinians in Gaza" as if they were a homogeneous group of Hamas supporters:

If I understand correctly, this is the "loophole" that MP3 player were able to take advantage of. Since they only receive and store audio data, and don't transmit it for storage anywhere else, they effectively implement a system which is strictly more limited than what the SCMS would permit: they can't make copies regardless of copyright or generation status. The same argument should apply to car entertainment systems, which only store and play back audio from CDs without providing any way to move the audio data off the device.

Which does NOT address how the TOR network will magically become somehow better because of being attacked not one bit at all.

[citation seriously needed]

The fact remains that while support for Hamas in Gaza may be higher than for Palestine as a whole, it's still well short of absolute. There are plenty of Palestinian citizens in Gaza who do not deserve any blame for the actions of Hamas.

I wasn't trying to imply that the election was illegitimate; at least, no more so than any other plurality-based democratic election[1]. Possible duress aside, Hamas did end up with the most votes. I only meant that with less than half of the population actually voting in favor of Hamas, the majority are not to blame for putting Hamas in power. The unfair blame and possible duress issues were my only points, so we would appear to be in complete agreement.

[1] I'd personally prefer a system where the winner was the least objectionable candidate, which favors centrist positions with broad support, rather than a mere plurality out of voters' first picks, which favors the extremes.

Hamas won the election with only 44.45% of the popular vote, with about 25% of the eligible population abstaining (Palestinian legislative election, 2006). You're blaming all Palestinians for a choice made by less than half of the voters, which is hardly fair. Those who voted against Hamas aren't to blame for the actions of Hamas just because they were unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of the election. On top of that, the way Hamas has dealt with Fatah supporters means that even some of the 44.45% who voted for Hamas could reasonably be considered to be under duress.