Stan is not a girl: "né".

Happy birthday, Stan!

Minor correction: the O in NOAA is Oceanic, not Oceanographic.

Not to be confused with the Unitard Nations, which sets international standards for superhero costumes.

The Earth has enough fossil fuel to last hundreds more years.

At current rates of consumption, perhaps. With a 3 percent growth rate, consumption doubles every 24 years or so. Guess what that does to your prediction.

I'm amazed that no one seems to have mentioned the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday", from the album Foxtrot (1972). It tells a story of real estate speculators' collusion with corrupt genetic engineers:

This is an announcement from Genetic Control:
It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot
Restriction on humanoid height

[Extract from conversation of Joe Ordinary in local puborama]:
I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold
It's said now that people will be shorter in height
They can fit twice as many in the same building site
(They say it's alright)

... if we're really losing all the COs, is in emergency telephone service during extended power outages.

My Verizon FiOS land-line only works for a few hours after a power outage starts, because they provide only a small UPS to operate the network interface at my site. No more full-time talk battery, folks.

Good point--i was overlooking the parent RAID.

They should have shut it down in the first place. It's wildly irresponsible and stupid for the FBI to have set up a replacement infrastructure.

Presumably the hosts that are compromised had a vulnerability. Leaving a working infrastructure in place has masked the signal not only that DNSChanger was installed, but that there might be an unpatched vulnerability. If they'd shut it down, staff would have looked at the boxes and identified that there was malware installed, then cleaned up the boxes in the process and fixed their patching process. Who knows what additional malware may have been installed in the interim using the same or other unpatched vulnerabilities, because the FBI meddled?

In addition, by taking the responsibility for maintaining a DNS infrastructure, they run the risk of contributing to another mass compromise if the replacement infrastructure is itself compromised or becomes the victim of a cache poisoning attack.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

1. Why did they put a label on the RAID devices? They should have just used /dev/sd[b-x] directly, and not confused the situation with a partition table.

2. Did they align the partitions they used to the RAID block size? They don't indicate this. If they used the default DOS disk label strategy of starting /dev/sdb1 at block 63, then their filesystem blocks were misaligned with their 128 kiB RAID block size, and one in every 32 filesystem blocks will span two disks (assuming 4 kiB filesystem blocks).

3. Why did they use md and not LVM? md can sometimes introduce bandwidth limits, and LVM lets you alternate between striped and linear volumes for your testing.

4. Why don't they report the raw bandwidth of the disk, and maybe some IOPS numbers?

5. Why don't they report total operations and bandwidth consumed as measured by iostat or sar?

6. Why didn't they give geometry hints to mkfs? The ext4 mkfs invocation, for example, should have included "-E stride=$[128 / 4],stripe-width=$[(10 - 2) * (128 / 4)]".

7. What about using an external journal?

8. They report that "during the file system check the server did not swap, and no additional use of virtual memory was observed." Wouldn't it have been better to just do "swapoff -a" and report that no swap was available?

9. Why didn't they (as someone else also suggested above) test an actually damaged filesystem?

10. Is there any indication other than their credentials that these people know what they're doing?

I think it's on the last item that you go wrong. I'm curious which of the definitions you cited you have in mind for those two examples.

First, "alien meteorite": if we accept that "alien" meant "not from Earth" (which it doesn't), what would the distinction be between a "foreign meteorite", an "alien meteorite", or just a "meteorite"? I would say all would be objects disintegrating while deorbiting--meteorites--but a "foreign meteorite" would be an object not from Earth, an "alien meteorite" would be an artifact of extraterrestrial life, and a "meteorite" would be any object, including one that originated on Earth, e.g. a fragment of an artificial satellite.

Second, "alien planet": usage (in which the attribute of being alien is always conferred to a living thing, or an instrument or artifact of a living thing) aside, the essential concept of alienness is that something is colocated within a domain in which it did not originate. It is similar to the concept of xenos in Greek, and is why the title of the film "Alien" is a pun--it refers both to the life form and to its way of inhabiting another during gestation. A planet could only be "alien" in that sense if it were colocated outside its native range. This loose sense could work if applied to a planet that orbits a star around which it was not formed, or orbits another planet from which it was once independent. One could then distinguish between a "native planet" and an "alien planet".

But in the usage here, attempting to mean "extrasolar", it's just plain wrong, and it implies something that the author does not intend.

By what precise definition of "alien" do you think it would be correct? Yes, people from other countries are called "aliens"--that's exactly my point--it's because they are living beings that they are "aliens". Nonliving things from other countries are not "alien", but "foreign".

I would argue that calling them "alien worlds" actually implies that they are inhabited by alien life forms, if you consider what "alien" actually means, and the other ways it may be used. For example, if you pick up a radio signal from a pulsar, would you be comfortable calling it an "alien signal"?

"Estadounidense" fails to distinguish U.S. citizens from Mexicans. And it's ugly, verbose, and badly formulated.

Actually you are in North America. There is no continent called simply "America". You are a North American, as am I. There is no ambiguity when U.S. citizens identify themselves as "Americans", especially since that sort of identification is almost always unambiguously an identification of citizenship rather than continent of origin.

That said, I usually refrain from using the term "American" in this context, and prefer "U.S. citizen". This is, however, equally ambiguous, since Mexico also is the "United States", i.e. the "Estados Unidos Mexicanos". And I suppose Botswanans might resent South Africans for calling themselves that...?

As far as geographic knowledge goes, as a U.S. citizen, I can name all of the Canadian provinces from memory. I wonder if you can do the same for the states of the U.S. How about Mexico? :^)