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Comment Re:That Analogy Falls Apart (Score 1) 917

Yeah, last time I tried to fabricate a steak, it got a little out of hand and I had to flush the whole project down the sink with lots of sulfuric acid. They really are easier to grow but ya got to get them there first. Sending lots of food as seeds might be a good bootstrap. finding water and other necessary organic substances to keep them growing might be tricky but I believe we already established that there is viable soil there.

Comment Re:Disk replacement? (Score 1) 487

They don't do business the same way you do. If the monitoring tool shows a pod with 2 drives down, they just ignore it. Two RAID arrays out and they might replace it. When all three go, they pull the pod and replace with a new one. Then they scavenge the carcass for parts. The magic is in the software. They don't simply save files on servers, they have software that manages where things are stored and stores everything in multiple places.

To give some perspective, at your stated one or two percent failure rate per month, a 45 drive pod would last over a year before all three RAID 6 arrays were likely to have failed. Just "refresh" the dead drives in each pod every three months and the likelihood of actually losing a whole pod is miniscule.

In their world, a drive failure is a non-event. An array failure is an "indicator of possible proplems". A pod failure is a reason to schedule it for maintenance tomorrow. The only thing that might get them to sweat is if they lost 10% of their boxes simultaneously.

There are two ways to run a reliable business. Either buy expensive reliable stuff and watch it like a hawk, or buy cheap stuff and make it redundant and self-healing.

Comment Re:Well, we all know what to do... (Score 1) 359

Who gets to decide what our laws are in general? Are you against the law if you do X? Y? Z? Building foundations of law is a difficult task, but in the end we managed - "who is to say" is not really much of an argument. The danger that it would banish speech that is politically unpopular is a better point - it is a dangerous tool to have, and it does make me a bit nervous to suggest we weaken our existing strong tradition against its broad use, although the cost of not doing so could be quite harmful. Like the basic costs of having laws and courts (what if we make a mistake?), it is a muddy water into which we must tread gingerly.

And yes, to a certain extent we do need to be protected from them, not like a bunch of children, but rather like a bunch of humans. We have seen times in history when people have been captivated by the ideas of these groups. Would you deny history?

No, I'm not proposing a magic number system :) Apart from Scientologists, I would not muzzle any of those groups.

Comment Re:Power to collect Taxes for general Welfare (Score 1) 10

That isn't adding "general welfare" as a end-run around enumerated powers so that anything the government wants to do is fine. It is adding the power to collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises to those two things with a restriction on how they can be used.

So a tax on gasoline with the aim of reducing gasoline usage as opposed to with the aim of raising revenue to fund the government would be unconstitutional (not that anyone cares) at the Federal level.

If you really think that's adding "general welfare" as a new power then you must also think that the government can't spend money it gains from selling assets on "general welfare", right? That's not listed in those revenue items after all.

It would be in the "general welfare" for the government to kill all disabled people and elderly people whop are no longer productiviely contributing to society. Is that OK?

Or is it only things you think are in the "general welfare".

And yes the government has been in that camp since moments after the ink dried on the document.

Communications

EA Forum Ban Will Now Mean EA Game Ban 549

An anonymous reader writes "A post on the EA Support Forums from APOC, online community manager for Electronic Arts, outlines a new policy for their new forums, saying users who earn a ban based on their behavior in the forums will be locked out of all of the EA games tied to that account: 'Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned. Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it's all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature. All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but it's what we have to do.'" Update: 10/31 12:36 GMT by T : Not so! Pandanapper writes "After a flood of complaints the EA community moderator APOC corrects his statement about how banning you from the forums bans you from your game access as well:"That said, the previous statement I made recently (that's being quoted on the blogs) was inaccurate and a mistake on my part. I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad."
Security

Alarm Raised On Teenage Hackers 213

Arno Igne writes to tell us that the number of underage participants in "high-tech" crimes has risen steeply in recent history. Reporting children as young as 11 swapping credit card details and asking for hacks, many are largely unskilled and thus more likely to get caught and arrested. "Communities and forums spring up where people start to swap malicious programs, knowledge and sometimes stolen data. Some also look for exploits and virus code that can be run against the social networking sites popular with many young people. Some then try to peddle or use the details or accounts they net in this way. Mr Boyd said he spent a lot of time tracking down the creators of many of the nuisance programs written to exploit users of social networking sites and the culprit was often a teenager."

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