Actually they sort of do. All major airports have industrial grinders to destroy confiscated items, though it's primarily for foodstuffs. For wood they probably hauled it away to a bigger (and proper) chipper.

CNN (Unfortunately they don't have a picture of the grinder).

Ginep. Mangosteen. Guava. Eggplant. Nance fruit. Ginger. Jocote. Grapefruit. Watermelon.

These aren't the offerings of some international supermarket. They're seized produce, destined for Customs and Border Protection's grinding machine.

Some items that need more inspection get sidelined to a nearby U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory. Bigger items - beef, sugar cane or bags of food banned from coming into the United States - are hauled away. Everything else goes through an industrial kitchen grinder in a back room in the International Terminal.

Tonight, agriculture specialist Lauren Lewis does the honors. It's 6:40 p.m., just past suppertime.

Slipping on black gloves, she takes each piece - garlic, onions, rambutans, carrots and more - and feeds it into the whirring machine.

With that, what might have been someone's post-flight snack is reduced to mush.

All in the name of safety.

But Latinum is silver-colored...

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Latinum

All the more reason to pay for it. Your local paper isn't going to improve in quality by having its budget cut further.

Though considering papers try to be all-encompassing, I never understood the AP complaint. It doesn't make any sense to rewrite a national story for a local paper, and would you rather the paper not include national news? These are still papers of record for their local communities, after all, so there's still a historical interest in making sure both local and national news is covered.

Correction for TFS: Readers are cheap, the media is understaffed.

All of this just goes to show that you get the news that you pay for. If you're not paying for your news, not only are you not the real customer, but you're not offering any kind of signal to the writer and publisher that rewards them for quality.

Instead you're probably drawing your news from the 24 hour news cycle, which is the epitome of low quality TFA discusses. The 24 hour cycle offers no time for quality, and being entirely advertising based means that it trends towards sensationalism in order to keep viewers watching (and the ad dollars flowing in). Blogs for that matter aren't any better for largely the same reason, as they have the same instant-publishing goals and are equally prone to sensationalism.

Real news takes time and money. Time to do research, and money to pay for staff and travel to go do that research. If the public won't pay for that, then the public won't get real news. It's as simple as that.

Which is why it's all the more important to support newspapers, which are by and large the last bastion of quality reporting and research. They aren't perfect, but they're all that's left. If you care about the news then the single best thing you can do to help quality journalism thrive is to go buy your local paper (yes, buy; not read for free on their website). Only by giving the journalists in your community a paycheck, some time, and a bit of trust, will you get quality journalism. Otherwise if you aren't paying for your news, you're getting the news that you pay for.

Leaves less of a paper trail and makes it somewhat easier to avoid paying capital gains tax on the proceeds.

Of behalf of all of the people who legitimately pay taxes on their capital gains, fuck you.

The Intellimouse Optical really is a tank. As Microsoft's "budget" 5 button mouse they went with a design that was both mechanically and electrically simple, and as such it just doesn't have too many ways to fail. The cable and the teflon pads are both strongly bound to the body, so the only real physical points of failure are the micro-switches. With enough time (and abuse) the switches under the left and right buttons can be worn out, but even that can take several years.

Without parity checking, you simply aren't addressing bit rot. Period. It could be Raid 9 Million(tm) and if all it's doing is copying the data, and not comparing it, bit rot will still proceed apace, silently eating your data. But let's say you're a good administrator that has enabled parity. Great! But there's still a problem: parity cannot restore data that has become corrupted due to bit rot -- it is a detection-only mechanism. So if you have two drives in a RAID-1 with parity configuration, as you also suggest... it will detect the file corruption, but as it cannot correct it, it will then promptly seize up and fall over dead. This is because for every N clusters written, a parity cluster is also written; This allows the array to detect if that data chunk was correctly committed; But if the data on any of the clusters within the chunk are altered later, the RAID array will only know that this chunk of data (known as a stripe in RAID), is invalid. It cannot correct it.

One quick note: a mirrored space running ReFS will do automatic checksumming and scrubbing. This isn't done for parity spaces, though I'm not sure why this is.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

This is just my $0.02, but if the trolls are anything like some of the rest of us, I have to assume it's because we're tired of the constant promotion of second-rate codecs that put ideology ahead of technical concerns.

Patent-free video codecs are the ultimate case of NIH syndrome. The major patent free video codecs (Theora, VP8, etc) are largely attempts to recreate/modify existing MPEG video codecs to get around the patents of the aforementioned original MPEG codec.The end results are codecs that aren't appreciably novel compared to the MPEG codec they're going up against, and at the same time it's not even clear (from a legal perspective) whether these codecs really are patent-free, or if they're infringing on the MPEG-LA's patents anyhow. Which is not an attempt to inject FUD into any of this, it's just that there haven't been sufficient legal challenges, and in the meantime it's questionable that these codecs can be so very similar to the MPEG codecs and somehow not fall under the associated patents.

At the same time the fact that these codecs are being pushed opposite the existing MPEG codecs only fractures the market and slows the adoption of new video technologies. We end up with Mozilla and Google flailing around with alternative codecs rather than buckling down and doing what's necessary to secure the rights to use the MPEG codecs in the first place, only finally doing the right thing after they've exhausted every other option. Web browsers should have fully supported H.264 years ago.

It's the codec equivalent of generic colas. Yeah, they're similar, but they're not the same and they're not what most of us are after. And in the meantime it quickly gets tiring of being told how we're doing it wrong by buying the more expensive product. There are certain things in life that are worth paying for, and a good/novel video codec is one of those things.

Which isn't to slag the patent free codec guys entirely. The video codecs have struggled, but the audio codecs have been outstanding. Opus is a roaring success, which I credit both to the development structure for the codec - involving many parties like the IETF early on while clearly shooting for novel/new audio codec - and the technical capabilities of the engineers who designed the codec.

That may be 4 years old, but still, that's damn impressive.

What you're looking for is called the eDrive standard. It lets the OS interface with the SSD in such a way as to allow Bitlocker and other whole drive encryption methods while using the SSD controller to do the encryption.

But that's not the case though. The extremely long design cycles for CPUs (and their associated chipsets) means that Intel has been working on power consumption for years. Haswell and Silvermont made x86 extremely power competitive, and the basic designs for those families were created before Windows 7 was even released, never mind Windows 8.

While it's true that handhelds cycle more slowly than full sized consoles, in the case of the 3DS it was clear after the first year that it was going to do okay. Nintendo's price cut lit a fire that has kept burning since, and the console was well on its way to a long and prosperous life by the summer of 2012.

The Vita on the other hand is coming up on 2 years old now - it launched in the US in February of 2012 - and its position keeps getting weaker, especially in the West. The number of new games that are known to be in development from major western publishers is tiny. It's like 3 or some such absurd number; The Lego Movie Game, MLB 14: The Show, and maybe a new Assassin's Creed game. Everything else is either a port, be it titles like Borderlands 2, God of War, or Final Fantasy X, or a translated game out of Japan. The Vita will likely continue to do well enough in Japan, but in the West there's a distinct lack of investment in the platform by the major publishers.

Consequently there's no real sign of an upswing here; western publishers tried, failed, and have seemingly moved on. They're finishing out their schedules for 2013 and haven't announced anything new for 2014 and beyond. If it continues to survive in the West, it will be as an odd agglomeration of a PS4 remote control, an indie (but not open) handheld console, and a Japanese import handheld console. Which is going to be okay for some people, but for those of us that bought it expecting a more traditional range of games it'll pretty much be the end of the console.

Indeed. And being an overpriced remote control for a PS4 is hardly a fitting existence for the handheld.

The sales aren't there to keep AAA developers interested, and without AAA games there's little to keep buyers interested.

It was a BUG in Safari. It was not a hack in any sense.

So if I take advantage of a BUG in Slashcode in order to download the user and password tables for Slashdot, then I'm not really hacking Slashdot, right?

If you're reading it incorrectly, then both of us are. That's how I read it too.