Linode is a standard VPS provider. I don't need "hosting" where the sites are on a machine with 1000 other web sites. I do high-end business-to-business sites that need to be available and very responsive. Because of using a variety of software pieces and having to run cron jobs and all that I also need access to the machine.

As for disk space there's no comparison between a service like Amazon S3 (or similar offerings from Google, Rack Space, et al) and a bunch of disk space. Disk space is actually pretty cheap, but Amazon's service level for S3 is something like 8 9s (literally). It's simply crazy. But it's what my customers expect. If someone hits a "play" link and the music doesn't play they'll move on to the next provider. I had a guy explain to me one day "if I have to wait 10 seconds I'm already on the next web site". He wasn't kidding. These folks work hard when they work and dead links are not acceptable.

Nothing's perfect, but with the right tools I can run a business offering a service level that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago, particularly for one or two guys.

Let me explain it from my point of view. I own and operate a one or two man software company that also hosts web sites. I work in the flim & tv music industry, meaning I have a shit load of music (literally terabytes) that has to be available for download.

8 years ago I owned a rack of servers downtown here that I managed myself. Honestly, it wasn't that bad. I bought reliable used 1U servers (mainly IBM and Dell) off ebay and stocked them with disks. I ran FreeBSD and Linux, used RAID, etc. But I always had two issues to deal with. The main one was "I have to always be available to handle hardware issues".

My company isn't big enough to hire someone to do it, but I managed for nearly 10 years with no disasters. In that time I had a motherboard crap (when I was starting out with one server - ouch) and a few disks fail. In all of those times I had to go in - sometimes in the middle of the night - and fix/replace whatever was wrong.

Then I found Amazon AWS. Here's the kicker - it was actually cheaper for me to simply "rent" storage from them than to rent rack space for my own servers. I moved my servers to linode.com - again it was cheaper although they're nowhere near as fast as my former dedicated servers were, but they're fast enough for my applications and I can always move to larger instances where needed. And that eliminated my maintenance issues for hardware while costing less per month and maintaining the same 3-4 nines level of availability that I've always had. Oh, one other thing - S3 makes it just as easy to secure my audio files but the delivery speed can easily saturate any pipe that the files are being delivered to.

So the cloud might not be "magical" and solve all the world's problems, but for small IT shops it's great. Everything I do is on the internet so the whole "what if your connection goes down?" issue doesn't exist for me. I do not recommend such a solution for everybody. I have clients in the industrial wholesale space and their inventory & sales system definitely should be on-site with off-site backups. But their web site can be hosted elsewhere.

Anyway, yes, the "cloud" is very useful for many businesses.

Hey, at least it wasn't Bennet Haselton telling us about it.

It would be dirt simple to write the software for his blog - all you need is a single page where he posts entries. No need for any kind of "display" functionality since it won't be read, anyway.

Agreed. This is the last Bennet Haselton (I don't care how you spell his name) that will be "viewed" by me. I came in here to say that I'm done reading his tripe, hopefully others will follow and it'll no longer be valuable to [what's left of] Slashdot to keep posting his ramblings.

Anther issue that you bring up is that people who perform mechanical turk tasks see the world differently. Energy shortages are a problem in places like India where a lot of the "turks" live. Having not grown up in America their view of race is completely different than ours and they're not going to bring the usual prejudices with them.

Simply stated, there's no good way to get useful results in this manner.

s/toys/entire fucking islands/

The only way to truly win the war on drugs is to quit fighting. There's no way to "win" and no reason to continue. Rates of drug usage are as high or higher than they were before the war. You can see in Colorado that marijuana usage didn't increase when it became legal.

But us not fighting would actually be a win. The free market would make many drugs really cheap (like marijuana) and drive the criminal drug gangs out of business. Remember, Al Capone was a liquor distributor who lived 80 years ago and you know his name. Think about that, and then try to name the head of any current liquor distribution company.

At some point - probably soon - they'll shut down the last one of these and then there won't be any more. That's how the war on drugs was won!

It's worse than that. When you talk about making big evil corporations pay more - well, it ends up being little corporations like mine paying out the nose. 4 or 5 years ago I paid off a debt one year, which of course meant that I had a huge profit since I couldn't expense out the debt payment as I could employee payroll or something. I ended up writing the IRS a check for $12,000 or so. That's a lot of dough for a one man company. I joked at the time that I paid more taxes than Apple.

The next year I had a loss. Knowing that the tax laws allow large corporations to get a refund of prior year taxes when they have a loss I asked my accountant about it. His response was that it would cost far more to file the paperwork than what the refund would be. The loss wasn't huge (and is normal) but would have resulted in a couple grand coming back.

People (especially on the left) need to realize that raising corporate tax rates will not screw Apple, Google, etc. They have enough money to write the tax laws and they *will* be exempted. It's not only or even mostly Republicans doing that, by the way. It's at best a bipartisan effort and at worst a Democrat effort. If you raise corporate tax rates companies like mine will pay. And it would help the country better if I could spend that money myself or use it to hire someone.

One thing to note is that the chip card shouldn't need to be replaced after one of these breaches since they're doing end-to-end encryption, so hopefully it's a one-time cost that they were going to incur anyway.

Bingo. I always assumed we had a billion years of creating a massive set of genes and proteins that would be used later on, and at some point (the Cambrian Explosion) that complexity had reached a tipping point. Your normal bacterium is awesomely complex, but doesn't leave a lot of fossils laying around.

There's more to it. Note the last line - banks want to make retailers pay for their expenses when these breaches occur. My bank just had to send me (and presumably thousands of other people) new debit cards due to the Home Depot breach, for instance. That cost them plenty in aggregate - sending me a letter and then a new card. It's not much, maybe $2 or $3 for me, but multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000 and suddenly some money's in play.

So if the retailers can hijack the "regulation" they can write it such that they don't have to reimburse banks.

I know this is hard for some people to understand, but big business *wants badly* to be "regulated". They have the money to buy legislation, so they won't personally be regulated or they will be regulated to the extent that the regulation simply defines their current business processes and won't harm them. The point of such legislation is to create barriers of entry into their markets and harm smaller competitors. And, in this case, other businesses that wish to extract money from them.

Actually, I well remember how stupid I was as well as all my friends. I'd crap if I caught my kids doing 1/10th the stuff my friends and I used to do.

That said - I knew plenty of people who would cheat on tests given the chance, but I don't remember a single one who tried to justify it when caught. They knew they were wrong, they just didn't care.

Claiming that cheating is okay is worse than simply cheating.

That's what it means to you and me. I just posted an example of an email that I got from CREDO about it. Here's the exact line:

That's what "net neutrality" means to them. It's meaningless anti-corporate drivel but it's what a lot of people believe. It also hooks into preconceived notions and prejudices to make it an easy sell to their customer base, but it doesn't help the bigger discussion of the issue.

If we can't define what we (and by "we" I mean technically literate people) by net neutrality then the other side will win simply by redefining the term.