Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.

It's the *job* of the people who work in call centers to deal with these people. That's what they are paid for. Do you think that plumbers like dealing with pipes full of human waste? No, but it's their job to do so occasionally.

Yes, I goofed. However, believing that 11.4 years is what you'll get in practice is also naive,

Not, it's not your basic conversion error that's the problem.

A MTBF of 11.4 years does not mean that a typical array will have a lifetime of 11.4 years. From Wikipedia:

Once the MTBF of a system is known, the probability that any one particular system will be operational at time equal to the MTBF can be calculated. This calculation requires that the system is working within its "useful life period", which is characterized by a relatively constant failure rate (the middle part of the "bathtub curve") when only random failures are occurring.

You are conflating "useful life period" with MTBF. They measure different things.

mean time to failure (MTTF) of 100,000 hours.

100,000 hours = 273 years. Does anyone believe that?

You don't understand the meaning of MTBF.

So I tried to view the PDF, and it says "can't use the plugin, it causes problems on our server".

Maybe they have problems with their disk array?

But seriously, I had no problems downloading the document from the orginal site.

Yeah, it was Texas where that happened, not California, right?

Yeah, it was California where employees were able to sue employers for such collusion. Good luck with that in some other states, where what Apple, Google, etc. did is just business as usual.

They have the stupidest, most intrusive laws that negatively impact every other state.

You are welcome to your state where a lack of laws allows employers to restrict your opportunities to change jobs. Yeah, welcome to your overlords who use the lack employee protection to push your income down.

NOTHING is going to happen in California. Their budget is a joke. They have a double digit sales tax rate and the biggest deficit out of every state

Perhaps you should come up to date on California's budget situation. Even if California had the biggest deficit in the past, California has the largest economy of any state, by a wide margin, making everything relating to finances bigger in California than any other state.

California doesn't even have the highest sales tax rate.

I assume that the plane was rerouted on a pretty much direct route from where they were to Atlanta. They'd want to make sure that the airplane stayed over relatively unpopulated areas in the event of an explosion.

And if it strays off its assigned route? Do you really think they are going to shoot it down?

This "danger" keeps violent crime at less than 1/7 the level of UK, comparing New York to London (similar population, similar percentage of "bad" minorities, etc).

Where did you get that BS from? Fox News?

Hint, I think that you have the ratio the wrong way round.

It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.

The last time that I was in China (a couple of years ago), OpenVPN using non-standard ports to my private server was blocked. In the end, I ran OpenVPN over tcp/22 (yes, ugly and slow, but it worked). I don't understand why VPN's were blocked but not SSH. OpenVPN uses UDP (by default), so no obvious protocol numbers to block.

Competition is great. For the customer. For awhile. Not so good for the businesses that are competing. Perhaps you've heard of the term "dumping"? That's when a "competitor" can afford to sell below cost just to drive his competition out of business. Great for the customer, until the competition goes away and prices go back up.

We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and ... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?

It wasn't competition from a direct competitor that drove Borders out of town, it was a technological revolution. Ask youself if you would be better off riding round in a horse-pulled buggy, or in a car. Your argument above applies directly.

But yeah, there are natural monopolies. That's why we have regulated utilities, such as PG&E.

The cable and phone companies benefitted from sweatheart deals to install their connections in cities, yet they would scream in outrage at the prospect of a new competitor getting a similar sweatheart deal to bring in service.

My 70 year old mother and all of her friends use Facebook instead of the phone now.

Exactly, your kids are probably reconsidering their use of Facebook and are transitioning to other venues.

This.

I used to use Kino, but this doesn't work on 64-bit. I believe the developer has transferred his efforts to Kdenlive. Kino worked well, but required format conversion in most cases.

All I want is an effective non-linear editor.

I have never managed to do anything with Cinelerra. Usually, it crashes within seconds of starting, but I haven't even figured out how to open a file containing video. The "documentation" (I use the word loosely) seems to assume that you have already opened the video.

Kdenlive seems to have possibility. Let's hope that it really progresses.