It kind of is, but they put in so much information that I can't hold it against them. Look how many code fragments with common errors there are in there. This is a quality article.

And then one of the stupid old PLCs craps out and you discover that they have not been made for 20 years and all of the old stock is exhausted... Now you have a crisis where you have to rebuild a major part of your system at great expense.

IIRC they did remove some of the more obscure APIs, but honestly most of those were research projects that were never used in real life, so they shouldn't break anything. The OpenBSD guys compile their own ports tree against LibreSSL and have only had a small handful of applications break I think.

Mine has a 2GB eMMC slot, which is too small for a standard Debian install, and you can't put the standard Debian on the eMMC you have to hack it to make it work.

The Pi hardware isn't the best, nor is it cheapest, but the community has a lot of support built around it. There are pre-built images for all sorts of tasks and people have gone and done a lot of the hard work on it. I have a Pi and a BeagleBone and the BeagleBone, although slightly faster, has some braindamage that is hard to ignore. It has a built-in version of Linux, but it's hard to update and the eMMC space is a little too small to be really useful. So you boot off of SD instead, but that requires you to hold down a button while it is booting to bypass the eMMC. But then you notice that it doesn't have as many packages available as the Pi. No Chromium for instance, so you're stuck with the really stripped down and mostly broken browsers. The worst part is that by industry standards, the Beaglebone is above average. You can pick up one of the many much more powerful and featureful AllWinner boards, but find yourself utterly stymied by the horrendous state of the documentation and lack of community. It's really hard to get real work done if you have to do all of the groundwork yourself.

Isn't that how game companies work? They hire fresh faced grads, work them like dogs for a few years and then let them go once they get the skills to demand good pay and reasonable working conditions. Or they just burn out entirely and change professions. That's one reason why there is so little institutional knowledge in game companies and they end up making the same mistakes over and over again.

It's not hard to see why this happens. The industries they are trying to regulate (or deregulate) are hideously complex and don't discuss the details of their work with the government if they don't have to. So a regulator has little chance of writing workable legislation without outside assistance, and the only outside people with knowledge of the industry work in it. This is the fundamental reason communism doesn't work beyond small agrarian communities--it puts people in charge who are not working in the field daily and don't have the mass of knowledge necessary to properly manage the resources. That said, the answer is clearly not "let the industry self regulate", because that guarantees destruction of the commons and oppression of the working class. Sadly I don't have a good solution to this problem, all I know is the current solutions don't work.

Didn't the US officially go metric back in the 80s? Not that it means anything obviously, but there was a push to make sure Metric was taught in schools and used where convenient.

Bah, you're right. I typoed in 1.5TB instead of 15TB. So you go from half a rack to 5 racks. Still not an unmanageable amount of hardware.

They're crappy speakers in a tube. $325 was a ripoff.

That's around 250 HDDs a year at current densities, or 600 tapes. That's not a trivial number, but for a large organization like the LHC it shouldn't be much of a problem. You could fit all of those hard drives in about 20 RU with room for redundancy if you really wanted to. That's half a rack a year.

Oh yes, all of those Particle Physicists definitely got in it for the money... Check out that 15 year old Volvo lifestyle!

Many diseases have animal reservoirs they can keep a population in if there are no available human hosts around. Sometimes the animal is the preferred host and the human infections/deaths are a side effect. In cases like those, immunization alone won't eradicate the disease, not unless we figure out a way to start immunizing wild animals/insects. For diseases that are human specific like smallpox, there is a chance to eradicate the disease entirely with a global immunization campaign.

That said, mass vaccinations for diseases with animal hosts can still make a huge difference. It's a lot easier to fight a disease when it only shows up in sporadic cases where people live near wild animals. It does mean that we won't be free of Malaria or West Nile for a long time sadly.

The Diphtheria vaccine doesn't prevent infection, it only immunizes against the effects of the toxin the bacteria produce.

That's not how vaccines work.

I don't think those came with boxes. You had to personally know the Steves to get one of those, and they were hand built in Job's garage.