Get off my lawn, blah blah...

Meanwhile, flash has revolutionized storage. We saw at least a 95% reduction in query times on our DB servers when we switched from RAID5 15K SAS drives to RAID1 flash SSDs. Floppies are history, and 32 GB thumb drives cost $5. SSDs have been catching up to their HDD brethren, now just 2-4 years behind the cost/capacity curve, and spinning rust has just about reached EOL, with Shingled Hard drives that make you choose between write speeds and write capacity being a necessary compromise for increased capacity.

I have no idea why you'd be so dismissive.

FWIW: RAIDZ can offer 1, 2, or 3 levels of redundancy.

I don't see why these are mutually exclusive. The trick is to set aside the math for the ballots themselves with the math for verifying the ballots.

Let's say you take 100 ballots, and randomize their order. You make hashes of the ballots and hash the sum of hashes. Keep the hash of hashes and you can easily verify that the numbers add up, while simultaneously anonymizing the ballots on a per-voter basis, making it instead 1% likely that any vote can be attributed to one person.

Ah, Slashdot. Where the grits are hot, Natalie Portman is petrified, and price gouging is considered Win-Win.

A "fair price" and "the highest possible price the majority of people are willing to pay" are not synonyms.

When consumers don't feel like every corporation they do business with is a leech trying to gorge itself on as much of their blood as possible, they'll probably be willing to do more business in general. When it comes to cable TV, people are cutting the cord not just because they feel it's overpriced, but because they're sick and tired of feeling like they're being fleeced with a dull razor every month when they get their bill.

The DNC does not make any governing policy and does not do any surveillance and is not associated with any police force. You are factually incorrect.

I think someone should shoot this Allah guy and put a stop to this crap.

Oh, god, you have no idea how much this pisses me off. I've had a few family members get bitten by this when I've suggested they get VLC or Firefox. The bastards at Google allow people to purchase ads for these high-profile FOSS software project names and then they serve up malware.

I thought they'd stopped doing it, but checking now I see searching for both Firefox and VLC still show these links. And some morons still don't understand why people block ads.

Not quite that bad, but I have an older Chevy Lumina and in order to replace the battery you have to

- remove a front-end crossbar, the bolts of which have about a 50% chance of being welded to the chassis with rust
- remove the windshield washer reservoir, which involves removing the pump that's attached at the bottom of the container (without spilling too much fluid on the battery)
- remove a bracket from overtop the batter which is connected to the chassis under the air filter housing, requiring at least a 10-inch wrench extender (12" is better)
- remove another bracket that holds the battery in place, also fixed with a bolt located 10 inches down a tiny hole.
- wrestle the battery out past the main fuse/distribution box, which it barely fits past without breaking it
- repeat the process in reverse with new battery

Here's a picture. It's a nightmare.

It's so bad I found several sites online describing the process and mocking the designers of the vehicle. I understand that space is at a premium under the hood, but FFS, this is just bad.

That was true 4-6 years ago, but not today. Now we're seeing most of this stuff getting installed via zero-day exploits in browsers and plugins like Java and Flash, and distributed via third-party advertising networks. It's a lot harder to blame someone for getting compromised via a browser plugin they didn't even know they had.

The best protection these days is still to block all advertising, run with limited permissions, and have automated external backups with versioning. If the user is capable, blocking all third-party scripting is also incredibly effective.

You just listed some of the best features of email.

Now this is true. Antivirus software has been a joke for a decade.

... or you could set up ZFS with a mirrored vdev and keep snapshots. All the benefits of RAID1, combined with all the benefits of keeping any number of sync'ed disks laying around. If you have many disks, go with RAIDZ and get the reliability of RAID5 too.

If you store lots of data, once you ZFS you'll never want to go back.

Actually, those $0.02 make all the difference in the world.

1) Sold for $0.01 means that the new owner can do whatever they want with it, including sell it to North Korea for $5, hoping that the NKs have enough to make the check clear.

2) Paid $0.01 means that it's a demolitions contract, and the recipient has obligations to perform a service under specific terms. While many commercial contracts limit liability to the size of the contract, (in this case, $0.01 damages) my guess is that this wouldn't be the case for a DOD contract.

My kingdom for mod points to rank this comment insightful +1!

Well, I can see part of your point, but there can be many kinds of pioneers. If anything, he was a pioneer in the consumer and business software and computing industry. Lots of people take tax write-offs. Not taking advantage of an opportunity like that is certainly laudable, but are we all supposed to become Harrison Bergerons to meet your arbitrary requirements for shared burden?

My kingdom for insightful mod points to hurl at you!