Most drivers in SV do 10-15 _over_ the speed limit when traffic is open. Elderly generally stay off the freeways except on Sunday... Sunday drivers tend to be slow road boulders.

Silicon Valley weathered the 2008 bubble better than most of the country and bounced back very quickly. Unemployment is quite low and there are a lot of new tech companies going in. Currently things are far more diverse than they were when the dot com bubble burst.

Part of it is the whole environment of Silicon Valley which is not easy to duplicate. Silicon Valley rewards failure. If your last two startup ventures failed, you're more likely to get support for a new one. People also hop from company to company if they're not happy, and the California making non-compete clauses irrelevant has helped a lot. The weather is quite nice though rain would be quite welcome after two years of severe drought. We may get a few hot days in the summer but it's usually a dry heat and it cools off after a few days. The winter rarely gets below freezing. And as a software engineer, it's an engineer's market. If I'm not happy I can just go across the street and work someplace else and the employers know it. Also, the social services here have not been cut nearly as much as in many red states. That isn't to say that there aren't problems, like bad traffic and high housing costs, much of which is due to the demand greatly exceeding supply. There's not much room to build more housing either since Silicon Valley is surrounded by hills.

The state's financial situation recovered much faster than many other states and has had a balanced budget the last few years. Once we got rid of all the gerrymandering the state has been balancing its budget with minimal fuss since the current voting laws promote moderate candidates.

I have had things fail and XFS performed like a champ and all data was recovered. I also love the xfsdump/xfsrestore tools and xfs_fsr which will defragment a mounted filesystem (though XFS is excellent at not fragmenting in the first place).

If you want to do a very large filesystem then XFS is the obvious choice since EXT4 can't scale beyond about 16TB. My only complaint, and this is not with XFS itself, is that the tools like gparted do not play nice with growing XFS partitions. They balk that the partition is mounted then complain because they don't know how to deal with XFS. The thing is that XFS has its own tools for growing the filesystem.

One of my friends was actually one of the original authors of XFS at SGI and it was interesting talking to him. A lot of work went into the real-time part for handling live video streams when hardware was much slower.

With my 2006 Prius I was told that if I lost both keys that the only way to recover was to replace the computer. If I had at least one key fob I could add more key fobs but it required having at least one fob.

My current car does not have a physical lock, making it all the more difficult to break in to. It can't be programmed over ODB either.

Peanut allergies are also higher in people whos mothers did not eat peanuts for fear of it affecting their babies.

On top of that, glyphosphate is one of the least toxic herbacides out there that generally breaks down relatively quickly in the environment.

A compatible chip does not use the FTDI USB ID. FTDI paid for their USB ID. It is not available to other chips, whether they are "compatible" or not. The chips, BTW, are fake chips with FTDI's logo and part number printed on them, not compatible chips if you read the article. USB to serial chips are not a general class like USB storage devices where there are many compatible chips so in other words one cannot make a compatible chip. In the USB storage case, each chip or device has its own vendor and device ID which is not needed to be compatible. For USB serial this is not the case since there is no standard.

You must not drive much. I drive 40-50 miles every day. I have a tremendous amount of storage and it's certainly fun to drive. I also never have to set foot in a gas station. I spend 5 seconds plugging in at night and 5 seconds unplugging in the morning to a full battery (or whatever level of charge I choose). I don't have to stand out in the weather and wait in line for fuel nor has the range been much of an issue. It's also a somewhat different driving experience with how smooth and quiet and responsive the car is. There is no lag.

The problem is that you now have the big players writing the laws to stifle competition. In this case, it's not the auto manufacturers, but the dealerships. The dealerships are not the mom and pop dealerships but the huge conglomerates. For example, the 5th largest which Warren Buffet just bought, the Van Tuyl Group does $8 billion in annual revenue. In my area there are a huge number of dealerships under the Del Grande Dealer Group. These are the guys who are paying off the politicians.

To get an idea of why car dealerships are generally so unpleasant to deal with This American Life has a good podcast showing why car salesmen are the lying scum they are. Some of the auto manufacturers would like to ditch the dealerships but they can't due to the laws. Most states have laws that prevent manufacturers from competing against dealerships but those don't apply if there are no dealerships as in Tesla's case.

The dealerships like to make the argument that they add protection to the consumer. This is pure BS. I know someone who bought a Fisker Karma. When Fisker went bankrupt, so did the warranty even for those who paid for it. Most dealerships dropped all support for the car like a hot potato leaving the owners in a lurch or get support from a couple of ex-Fisker employees who do the support on their own and paying for all service and repairs out of pocket.

I have a single car that's electric, now granted it is a Tesla model S. I don't have any issue if I have to drive from the Bay Area to LA. I was planning to drive up to Seattle though sadly I couldn't get the time off of work. The rate they're building superchargers makes it easier and easier for long distance travel. If I need to go on a long trip that isn't covered, renting a car for the few times I need to is still cheaper than all the gas I'd be burning otherwise. I kept my old car for about six months but I never drove it so I ended up selling it. The only trip I've taken where I couldn't take my Tesla is one where I wouldn't take my Tesla anyway since it involved a lot of bumpy dirt roads. In general long trips have not been a problem. While I do have to stop every few hours I find I'm more relaxed when I get to my destination.

I've had issues with many non-FTDI USB to serial adapters but the real FTDI ones have been rock solid. I pushed for integrating a quad FTDI USB to serial chip into one of our products since the FTDI chip can also do i2c and JTAG. I'm sure a knock-off chip would have a lot of problems. I've had the FTDI serial chip reliably running at 10Mbps.

In this case they are using the FTDI trademark and USB ID. This is not second sourcing but counterfeit FTDI chips.

Maybe there have been a lot of support calls on these fake devices not working properly. If that's the case, why not nip the problem in the bud and kill off the counterfeit chips. I pushed for FTDI USB to serial chips in some of my company's products because they work and have good OSS support. I've had too many other USB to serial adapters give me problems, but never FTDI based ones. FTDI also provides a lot of useful code for doing interesting things with their chips, like JTAG and I2C.

Deliberately creating fake chips is illegal. If an operation that works on a legitimate chip bricks a fake chip, whose fault is that? I've dealt with FTDI and designed their chips into products because they work. They also have great oss support for their USB to serial devices.

I wish they'd focus more on things like MRSA and KPC which kills far more people in this country and are far more deadly. These diseases are easily spread and there is no cure for them. While not trying to diminish the cause to fight Ebola, frankly there are a lot of things far deadlier in this country that people should be worried about.

The cases in Texas I think can be squarely blamed on incompetence from the Dallas hospital.

In the case of KPC, Congress has basically put their head in the sand and handtied the CDC and FDA from effectively studying and fighting it, thanks to the livestock lobbies Frontline has a good episode on this. It doesn't help that congress has cut the budget of the CDC significantly over the last decade and played politics to make it difficult to study and fight the causes.

As it is, the CDC had to cut back on their research on Ebola due to the budget cuts and the delays in the worldwide community for fighting and funding the fighting of Ebola aren't helping matters either. If the Dallas hospital wasn't so incompetent, there's a good chance Thomas might have survived and nobody else would have become infected.