Agreed. My collection includes a Guantlett 2, Tempest, Ms PacMan, Xevious, Robotron 2048, and Smash TV (not in original cabinet). The rest of the modern stiff pretty much pales in comparison.

Hi gang,

        Thanks for the reports of stale gasoline - I'm convinced. Tonight I'll head out & recycle my old gas. The problem isn't getting things together; it's keeping it all up to date & ready. Your comments hit me in the right place: be prepared.

        I'm associated with a ham radio emergency group; the rule is that the station's equipment must be immediately ready for action. In an emergency, you don't have the luxury of stringing a cable, or figuring out which power supply can work with which rig. If the transceivers aren't wired up, tested, and set to go, they might as well be underwater. Same's true for on-the-air skills. You gotta check into the 2-meter net at least every month, or you'll get rusty and screw up when things get hot.

      And so it is with earthquake readiness. It's not enough to put away a survival stash and let it molder. Gotta keep things fresh - gotta keep my skills sharp.

Best wishes,
-Cliff
        ps to ksmithderm ... sure, I've got Klein bottle hats (and Mobius scarves). They're on m'website.

Background: I live on North Oakland, next to Berkeley, in the Rockridge section. Urban, detached 2 bedroom house about 100 years old.

We bolted down our house, fully reinforced the stemwalls, and installed shearwalls. For our little 2-bedroom bungalow in Oakland, this set us back around $20,000. Earthquake insurance seemed outrageous (around $2,500/year, with very limited benefits). Along with the earthquake retrofit, we set aside a few cases of food & twenty 5-gallon jugs of water. A 2Kw Honda generator. Radio, flashlights, FRS walkie-talkies, etc. Small amount of medical stuff.

Yes, I have onsite and offsite backups (that's easy); the real problem would be connectivity after a quake. There's probably a hundred telephone poles between my house and the central office.

Some challenges: Keeping food & water fresh is a problem - cans get rusty as water condenses on cold surfaces. Some camping food goes bad. MRI rations taste, well, horrible. We should replace water & food annually, and generally forget to. (We discovered diapers in our earthquake stash, left over from when our college kids were infants)

    Storing gasoline for the generator is a problem. I'm told that gasoline gets stale after a few months (is this true, or an urban legend?). It's a pain to lug a 3 gallon gas can around, and it's not something I want under my house. (I store it in a shed, where it's out of sight & out of mind - so I rarely refresh it. Is there a small, 5 or 10 gallon under-ground gasoline storage tank?). I should start and exercise the generator every month; it's more like every two years or so. Our experience in the 1989 quake was that gas stations can't pump after an earthquake (no power).

  Our neighborhood's quake group (the Oakland - Rockridge Shakers) meets every summer, and the earthquake drills have been quite useful - we've had several fun practice sessions, where we hunt for human dummies hidden around the neighborhood, search for downed wires, and practice using walkie-talkies. Afterwards, it's a block party, and we compare notes while sharing lunch.

    My home business, Acme Klein Bottles, lost two glass Klein bottles in last night's quake. Both fell off a shelf and shattered on the floor. Good lesson: keep my glassware stored down low, with holders to prevent boxes from shifting. Since most of my glass Klein bottles are stored under our house; a major local temblor that destroyed the house would also wipe out the business.

Perhaps the five most important words in TFA, omitted by TFS.

From the linked piece:

In hindsight, his remark was a clear sign that the marketing hype around "big data" had peaked.

This is true, and it provides the context missing from TFS: "Big Data" is over as a marketing term. But as technological term and as far as actual implementation, it is the status quo and forevermore will be.

From a technological perspective, "Big Data" has a simple definition: more data than can be stored on a single machine. And this need will only grow as hard drives and maybe even SSDs plateau while of course enterprise data only grows.

Indeed, TFA itself states (that TFS omitted):

A particularly hot sector has matured around Hadoop, an open-source analytics software platform. Many tech companies are writing software to make Hadoop industrial strength and integrate it with new and existing types of databases.

So, from TFA itself: Hadoop is hot, but the term "Big Data" is not.

Although there is some lip service to seeking "aneutronic" fusion the truth is that fusion is so hard to achieve that we don't have the luxury of being picky about the reactions we aim for, and all the practical ones generate a metric fuckton of neutrons, enough to be lethal even on the other side of thick shielding, enough to induce dangerous secondary radioactivity in many elements, and enough to knock enough atoms out of their place in metal crystalline lattices to seroiusly weaken structures made from elements that dont' become radioactive too. It's a serious enough problem that the first and most important clue that Pons and Fleischmann had not achieved cold fusion was that they were still alive.

That's because you are most likely an intelligent person working for a company that is unlikely to pull dumb stunts and so the mere concept of the depths of the stupidity that some companies harbor in the name of "RoI" and "Risk vs Profit" is completely foreign to you. Hopefully you will be able to continue to stay unknowing, as the reality is ruddy scary.

Here is a small example: "Let's give WORSE customer service. We will make them wait for one hour on hold for very basic tech support, then anything that can't be handled in under five minutes will wait another hour. During all this time, we'll push fixing for them if they pay us. That way we monetize support of our product!" "Won't that make us lose customers like blood from a femoral artery?" "Yep! We've already gone down from seven million customers to four million!" *Six months later* "We're at two million customers, we've made a killing off 'premium' support, and we've remained profitable by massaging the books to write off the losses, and now we completely reverse it, doing everything really well." *twelve more months* "We're at eight million customers now. But instead of that being a 14% increase in customer base from 1.5 years ago, that is a 400% increase in customer base from one year ago! And because the 75% loss was within a certain frame, we didn't have to report any loss in customers. Watch the funding roll in, guys! This is what I'm talking about!"

Sad. But true. Which makes it even more sad.

Sadly I do. I just simplified things for folks. Not going to bother to type out details for you though. Go to school if you want to learn those.

In many cases it is more "profitable" to do something dumb, take a loss, thus being able to write off that loss on taxes and make more net as a result. Having somebody handle the forums intelligently would cost money that couldn't be written off.

The management company where I work mandates Sophos. Scans once a week and I get weekly tickets during the scan about computers running so slow that nothing can be done. When it was Sophos only, Sophos caught about 20-30 items a week and I had to reimage or repair about two computers a week from infections or Sophos-caused issues.

Now for the past year the 250 systems still use Sophos because corporate says they have to, but the site also uses Webroot. ~800k full installer for Webroot, 2-minute scans that nobody ever notices running, and not a single need to reimage or repair. Webroot catches about 90-120 items a week above what Sophos catches. CryptoLocker (and crypt-alikes) have struck about seven times IIRC and Webroot's journalling simply restored the damaged data on the local system as part of the cleanup process. Mind you, Webroot didn't detect the crypto malware immediately. There was a decent amount of encryption performed prior to Webroot catching it due to the encryption process itself.

So obviously some companies can do it right. Non-intrusive scanning, only scanning what actually needs to be scanned to protect that computer, action journalling and rollbacks, and a {censored}ing tiny application. Symantec and the others just need to do it right and people need to stop believing that "rebuilding three PCs due to virus attack" is good while I think that rebuilding zero is the only acceptable solution.

So now, you've tried to back up your claim, and you've failed. You did not show any evidence, at all, of me expressing support for impeachment. You're a liar, you know you're a liar, you have no regard for truth of any kind, and therefore nothing you have to say henceforth matters.

So, here's how this goes: nothing in your next comments matters until you back up or retract your claim that I have ever said impeachment of President Obama needs to happen, or in any way supported impeachment of President Obama. Anything else you say will be ignored until that happens. You need to learn to tell the truth, at least sometimes.

The Constitution says we don't. Stop being stupid.

You're a liar.

You're a liar. I implied no such thing. You appear to be under the impression that a. the House is not currently Republican, or b. that if the incoming House wants to impeach, the outgoing House would not, or c. the Senate has anything to do with impeachment before the House actually votes for impeachment. a. and c. are obviously false, and b. is nonsense. Stop being stupid.

You're a liar. I said no such thing. I simply proved you were wrong. And you still won't admit you were wrong. In fact, you repeated your lie, even after I proved it was a lie, that removal is a separate process and takes a long time.

You're a liar. It's never happened.

So, here's how this goes: nothing in your next comments matters until you back up or retract your claim that I have ever said impeachment of President Obama needs to happen, or in any way supported impeachment of President Obama. Anything else you say will be ignored until that happens. You need to learn to tell the truth, at least sometimes.

Simply put: the Constitution doesn't require an investigation, therefore it isn't necessary. This is easy, even for you, to understand.

You're a liar, or you can't read. (I could go either way on that one.)

I never implied they would. What are you blabbering about? (Note: this is a rhetorical question. I don't really care what you are blabbering about, because I am quite sure it won't make any sense, won't reflect reality, won't be honest, etc. As usual.)

You're a liar. I presented evidence: evidence that Clinton was impeached and tried in 5 months, evidence that removal can happen as part of the trial process and take no additional time, evidence that the Constitution requires no lengthy time period, evidence that no investigation is required, and so on. And make no mistake: all of this evidence is incontrovertible.

You have provided zero evidence. You simply asserted it would take two years or more, literally without any evidence at all.

You claimed it but you did not prove it.

You're a liar. I gave you the example of the former judge, Alcee Hastings (D-FL), whose removal was not a separate process and took no additional time. That is proof. I didn't prove it wouldn't be a separate process and wouldn't take much more time, only that you were obviously wrong to say it necessarily would. And it makes sense that you were wrong, because you are completely ignorant.

You're a liar. I have never once supported impeachment of President Obama. You're simply making shit up, as usual.

I ... are [sic] really enjoying how you just discarded the demonstration of your list of claims as being pure fantasy by trying to pick apart just one of them to try to make yourself feel better.

You're a liar. That never happened.

Let's see. You don't admit you were wrong about removal being a separate process and taking a long time, despite incontrovertible proof being presented. You don't admit you were wrong about Obama refusing to enforce the employer mandate, despite it being truly uncontested. You don't admit you were wrong about me supporting impeachment of President Obama, despite the fact that you have no, and have never seen any, evidence I ever did.

And let's not forget that bizarrely stupid claim you made about a grand jury being required! That was a bona fide howler.

You just can't stop making shit up. It's pretty funny.

And I also already proved no investigation here is necessary. There's nothing in the Constitution requiring it, obviously; and if the House feels that we know what we need to, then no investigation needs to be done. It's that simple.

You're a liar. Even if an investigation were done, it could start immediately in January. Actually, it could start this November, after the results of the Senate election are known. But it would likely begin in January.

That is not a problem with anything I said, no.

You're a liar. No such thing is reasonable to expect. In fact, the only evidence we have is that removals are not complicated and do not take a long time. Granted, a President is not a Judge, but you've offered zero evidence backing up your assertion that it would take a long time. None at all.

And to compound your dishonesty, you did not admit you were wrong about removal taking much more time and being a separate process, when I proved it doesn't and isn't. You stopped asserting it, which is fine, but maybe you should at least admit you were lying when you said it?

assuming of course that your fantasy of a conviction

You're a liar. I never said I hoped for that, and, in fact, I do not.

I have evidence that it does not need to take that long, which is more than your nonexistent evidence for your claim that it does need to take that long.

You're a liar. I am not. I've said from the beginning of this thread that I oppose impeachment ("Impeachment is a stupid idea ...").

Not that I don't expect you to not lie, but still, that one was beneath even you. Which is saying something.

I am not going to cast pearls here and go over all the cases, but one of these in particular is very funny, because it just shows how completely ignorant you are. Not that we didn't already know, with your idiotic claims of impeachment taking years, of removal being a separate more lengthy process, and so on.

But you just said it is merely my opinion that Obama has refused to enforce the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

This fact is seriously not in dispute by anyone. It's a simple statement of fact. The law says it begins in 2014, and he signed an executive order pushing it to 2015. No one denies this.

Now, on this point I am actually on Obama's side, in that I think the President has the legitimate authority to not enforce punishments, as long as he does it without violating equal protection. So he cannot say, "I won't enforce the mandate against liberal companies," but he can say he won't enforce it against all companies. He can further take it on a case-by-case basis, if he chooses. It's basically prosecutorial discretion. The President can, and does, choose all the time which laws he will and will not enforce prosecution or punishment of. Suing the President for exercising his authority here, as Boehner is threatening, is legal nonsense.

Of course, you can impeach the President for anything you want to.

But, none of this takes away from the fact that Obama has refused to enforce the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Everyone knows it.

Similarly, it's in my view a proven fact that Obama has given subsidies to people in violation of the law, and Obama's own advisor said this is the case. The law does not allow subsidies for the federal exchange. The wording of the law is absolutely clear, the intent of the law is very well-established, and Obama knew all this and did it anyway. But Obama denies this; he does not, however, deny that he has refused to enforce the employer mandates, though he wouldn't use those exact words to characterize it.

You're just full of shit, as usual, at every turn.