I don't doubt the performance would be stellar, but even with the encouraging news from the write endurance tests and stuff like Samsung's 10 year warranty on their Pro series drives I still am just nervous enough about long-term durability and some rubber-hits-the-road compatibility with systems like FreeNAS/Nas4Free that it makes me just a smidgen nervous about dumping $2500 into a new NAS setup.

My own personal usage patterns are probably low enough that durability really wouldn't be a major issue, although I wonder what the "write multiplier" effect is with even single parity RAID. Is every byte written to a filesystem multiplied by 2, 3, 5, or more? That could play into the durability angle faster than you might think. Just moving my 2.5 TB of VMs to a new NAS could end up being 5, 10 or more TBs of writes to the drives.

A spokesperson for [Big Telco] said that even though they broke the law law pertaining to maintaining government security by putting the keys into network connected system, that no phones could actually be compromised because every piece of data [Big Telco] stores is useless without the corresponding PKI private keys secured by the [Three Letter Government Agency]. The spokesperson went on to say that replacement keys had already been automatically pushed to every online phone anyway as an extra security precaution. We spoke with the lawyers of the defendants accused of breaching national security and two of them confirmed their clients were considering plea deals to avoid longer jail sentences.

I wouldn't disagree that dual key systems make security weaker, but how much weaker the security is depends an awful lot on how you do it.

I don't know if you missed the PKI component in my previous post or just aren't familiar with it, but for the sake of other readers here's the essentials of Public Key Infrastructure:
A) Anyone can encrypt a message using a public key
B) Nobody can decrypt that message except the holder of the corresponding private key
C) No, not even you, the person who encrypted the message, not even you can decrypt it
D) Because math

The thing about the process I described is that it would be impossible for the [Big Telco] to cause the actual passwords to be breached, because they would never have them. It would be impossible for the government agency to cause the actual passwords to be breached because they wouldn't have them either. Both would have to fail dramatically, and at the same time, in order to prevent corrective measures from being effective.

No, that's just it: that was never the question. A partnership isn't "an entity on its own" when it comes to civil rights, it's a few people who run a business. Just as a few people can individually buy political ads, the same people can pool their money to buy a single, bigger political ad. You need some kind of joint accounting for that, some way to have a checking account where the money is pooled, so a partnership or (tightly held) corporation is appropriate: that was exactly the Citizens United case.

You have the right not to be compelled to act against your religious beliefs (the right to do nothing) by the government, unless the government can show both a compelling state interest is being server, and that the law that compels you is the narrowest possible law that serves that interest. In other words, if the government is going to force you to do something that you think is Evil, the state needs to prove it has no other option.

You don't lose the above-stated right when you form a partnership or (tightly held) corporation, and in that case forcing the business to do something is the same as forcing you to do it, as you are the business. That's what the Hobby Lobby case was about. That doesn't apply to "normal" corporations, where you're just buying some ticker symbol - even if you're on the board, it's still not "your company" in the same way that it is with a partnership, and so you do lose that right against compulsion.

In none of these cases has any right been assigned to a corporation, instead it's the rights of small groups of people who directly own and manage a business are still protected.

...using these con/pro-sumer drives and not high-dollar SLC enterprise drives?

I've been long tempted to and more so with the generally positive results from the SSD write-them-to-death-athon that wrote to SSDs until they expired.

I know it's "not advised", risky, etc, but I'm thinking that maybe the drives are more reliable than we think and between backups and maybe a double parity RAID scheme or hot spare the risk is dialed down, or at least worth taking on a what-if basis.

For my own home/lab VMware cluster I'd sure like more disk performance than spinning rust gives me.

What, read TFS? You must be new here. Heh, I just assume all misbehavior is Comcast - it usually works!

This is such bullshit, and I wish people would stop repeating this urban legend. The only way in which "corporations are people" is in that laws restrict "person or persons" restrict corporations as well (which had nothing to do with the SCOTUS, and is good thing).

What the SCOTUS has repeatedly upheld is that people don't lose their first amendment rights when they form partnerships or tightly-held corporations (as the latter are effectively partnerships). You don't lose the right to free speech, or the right to freedom of religion, or the right to peacefully assemble, just because you start a business.

None of that applies to public corporations like Comcast in any case: not that it stops them from abusing the system to bribe congresscritters in other ways, but that's a very different problem than Citizens United, and conflating the two issues doesn't help fix anything!

The plenty to be pissed about the SCOTUS shredding the constitution, especially this past couple of years, without making up false distractions.

Maybe so, but it's enough to make the point. The lady who got harassed gets nicely compensated, and it's enough that Comcast will probably fire someone over it -- a scapegoat, of course, but that's enough to scare the guy who's really at fault and maybe fix something.

This kind of money won't result in any corporate culture change, to be sure, but it might be enough to motivate one manager to give a shit, which it likely all the problem will take to get fixed.

I know it's wrong and I will go to hell for it, but when I get a spyware plant Microsoft support call I usually try to play dumb for as long as possible to keep the guy tied up (I'm kind of paying it forward to someone down the list who may not get called because I kept the guy going).

Once i get bored with that or they get irritated with me and it's obvious the caller is from South Asia, I start to get insulting. Some guys won't just hang up on you, they try to bully you and that's when I get really cruel and drag out truly offensive insults -- "So I hear you upgraded your residence recently, you moved from a cardboard box to a tin shanty. How's that working out? Are you still eating insects or have you moved to a fresh rat diet? Your wife, has she freshened her dot lately, or is it the same old faded one she's had for a while?"

If I get that far, the guy is usually really wound up and spewing profanity as fast as he can mentally translate it. One guy threatened to kill me and I told him that the CIA would be interested to know that he's probably a terrorist and might want to watch those drone stike videos on YouTube for a preview.

I know, it's awful, the worst kind of Americanism possible, but I figure these people are the scum of the Earth and deserve no quarter.

I wonder if it comes under:

1) a sub-entry of the legal department budget
2) a main heading entitled something like "Regulatory fees, legal compliance and civil litigation unrelated to human resources"
3) a sub-entry under "Political contributions, lobbying and outright bribes"

#3 would be nice because they could force the "governmental relations" arm to eat it and reduce lobbying payments, political contributions and bribes. This would probably be the right feedback mechanism because if their political payees want to maxmize their income they need to make sure they are minimizing their fines and penalties.

I'm not a big fan of punitive damages payable to the victim. (In my country there's no such thing; there are fines payable to the state, and actual damages payable to the victim, with very small amounts being paid for unquantifiable stuff like "mental anguish"). I'm also not a big fan of people landing a huge payday because of a small "jackpot" mishap or being slighted in some small way by a large, rich company.

However, I am in favour of strict anti spam laws and rules against robocalls. $1500 per unlawful unsolicited call does not sound excessive to me, either as a fine paid by the company or as a sum received by the victim. I wish we had a similar law. But yes... if you are going to call someone 150 times, even after the person points out that you have the wrong person, then you are going to pay the fine 150x. Simple math.

That's the part that bothers you? Really?

Yes. Give the kids an Arduino and shield, or come up with their own design but make it compatible with the Arduino.

What I'm proposing is a little more honesty in PR.

I think the basic technical fact is that this data center won't be "exclusively renewable" except on paper. The reality is that it will rely on non-renewable baseline power.

So it seems kind of dishonest to say it's a "renewable only" datacenter.

Is this one of those things where they site near a wind farm and tick a box on a form that says they want to buy green power but in reality the actual electrons that enter the data center are "from the grid" and not actually exclusively produced from renewable sources?

It would be more impressive if the data center was completely powered by renewables ONLY and unable to tap into the non-renewable sources of the grid. Basically, make it an off grid only data center. But I imagine that this would be much harder and more expensive than simply checking a box and producing a spreadsheet that says you use renewable sources when in fact you're probably using baseline power from non-renewable sources.

I can't help but think that the medical system feels something like a mix between an aristocracy and a cartel.

On one hand, it seems very much a class-based system. Doctors aren't involved in a lot of hands on medical practice, they get nurses to do a lot of it. Is this a specialty based division of labor, or is it a remnant of a class system from a couple of centuries ago where doctors were likely to be members of the social elite from birth?

On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of cartel like structure that's designed to limit competition. Filtering structures in training and education serve to limit who gets into medical school and who is able to finish residency. And by limiting the number of people who can be doctors, you are able to justify a class based labor system, high wages, etc.

Then there's the actual practice of medicine, where only doctors are allowed to do a fairly wide number of medical tasks or have to be involved in supervising non-doctors whose training would seem to make them reasonably qualified to do on their own.

Another poster in the comments suggested we need more, less well trained doctors. That's probably reasonable. Other than an emergency surgery I had a couple of years ago, I can't think of much of my exposure to the medical practice that couldn't have been met just fine by a nurse practioner or physician's assistant. Sure, we probably need the specialists and people with advanced education for diagnoses and speciality care -- your level 2-3+ ticket escalation -- but it seems like for the majority of ailments and regular care, a doctor is simply overtrained and underavailable.

And what about pharmacists? They have doctor-like training yet for the most part don't seem to do very much but count pills. Sure, they serve as a safety net in some regards to make sure that people who take a constellation of medications don't end up with complications from contraindications and side effects, but that's limited to a person getting all their prescriptions filled by one pharmacy, which is habit people have, not a requirement.

If you think about it, even with the class-based structure of medical practice, today's physician assistants and nurse practitioners are probably better trained and more informed than most general practioners were 50 years ago. It's not hard to see why it wouldn't make sense to have PAs and NPs make diagnoses and suggest drug therapies that could be vetted by pharmacists with a more detailed knowledge of drug efficacy and effects.