This. Absolutely, 100% this.

As I've alluded to in my other posts, as soon as I graduated from cowboy sysadmin to a "proper" sysadmin that files change requests and writes project documentation, I've come to love change managers for precisely the reasons above. Change managers are under continual bombardment from non-technical project managers and developers that might well have deep, deep insight into a certain area but can't see past the end of their nose. A good change manager will often trot up to us sysadmins and say "So-and-so has submitted this change but doesn't think it needs approvals from you guys, can you take a gander?" to be met with either a "yeah that's fine" or a "Holy crappingon what-the-fuck in a god-buggered handbasket NO!". Good sysadmins in a constructive environment see a bigger picture than the project managers and the developers and, as far as CAB is concerned, submit better change requests as a result - because risk analysis is such an innate part of our job that most of us don't even realise we're doing it. But change managers see a bigger picture still because they're exposed to the sysadmins, network admins, security admins, user admins, mail admins, storage admins, admin admins, admin users, sysadmin networks, bread, eggs and breaded eggs.

Change managers exist to protect the business. Sysadmins exist to run the business' IT. Change managers realise that sysadmins are often asked to do dangerous or even outright impossible things by powerful people with only an inkling of what consequences such an action might have; it's a change manager's job to communicate with and understand the sysadmin (and everyone else) in such repsects, just as it's the sysadmins' responsibility to communicate to the business why change X is crucial or dangerous. In a properly functioning IT dept, sysadmins and change managers protect both each other and the business from stupidity, mis-co-ordination and lack of oversight. As a sysadmin, change managers are almost always on your side - either pushing for that change that's so essential, or holding you back where there's a risk. They're a highly valuable ally. When something goes to shit, they're the first people to step in and say "no, the sysadmins had nothing to do with this incident".

I'm MrNemesis and in the last three years I've learned to love my change managers.

Well, if more people like you stopped saying "it's impossible" maybe some of your countrymen would stop thinking it was. Some might even start thinking about how to change it.

I've noticed many Americans seem to have a strange habit of dismissing or often completely ignoring (as you just did) anything that happens outside of the US. Clearly representative democracy must invariably result in two parties with an unshakeable grip on power! Except that most of the time it doesn't. Just in the USA.

Do what people in other places in the world have done. Get off your ass, stop saying it's impossible, and work for change. Go find a third party you can support and volunteer for them. Or run yourself. Sure you'll lose, today. Maybe not tomorrow.

No.

There have been several studies of tidally-locked planets around M-dwarfs which refute this.
Simulations of the Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Conditions for Atmospheric Collapse and the Implications for Habitability, M. M. Joshi, R. M. Haberle, and R. T. Reynolds , Icarus (1997)
A Reappraisal of The Habitability of Planets around M Dwarf Stars, Tarter et al. (2007), Astrobiology,

Basically atmosphere and ocean circulation transfer the heat, and you get a relatively habitable earthlike environment.

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/04/16/0221210/study-finds-us-is-an-oligarchy-not-a-democracy

No report of a Macdonalds franchise yet.

Your brain washing has been complete. You are now free to follow orders, citizen.

You have the same government that you started this century with.

They just changed spokesmodels - while you felt like you had a say in the matter... Your coup happened in many stages, over many decades - but defining moments happened with the Truman/Eisenhower/Kennedy years - with a decisive event in Nov 1963...

Call us back, after you acquire a few more orbits on this rock... ;-)

The "people" who own Obama, own the media.

One of the most important pieces of career advice I've received is to make sure that people who cause pain feel the pain. It is not my job to be a whipping boy who suffers for every bad decision I tried to warn someone about. If management insists that I do something really goofy, then they should not be spared from the consequences of their plans. Insulating them only enables them to keep making bad choices and inflicting them on codependent organizations.

You say "rubbing their nose in it". I say "making sure decision makers understand the results of those decisions".

And having succeeded, they continue to use those same computers to this day.

Interferes with someone in the lawful use of data would seem to cover it.

You are engaging in learned helplessness.

It depends how you measure "speed". If you measure speed by things like sequential read or write speed like so many people do, it's possible to match SSD speed with as few as two platter-based hard drives.

But in the real word (of servers at least) there's not really any such thing as sequential reads/writes any more, and when you throw a VM-backended-on-a-SAN into the mix it's safe to say that there is no such thing as a sequential transfer - all I/O, by the time it hits the SAN controller, will look random simply because it's the aggregated reads and writes of dozens or hundreds or thousands of different servers.

So going back to the original premise - if you in fact measure speed in IOPS rather than throughput, you'll need something approaching at least twenty spindles (probably with a bunch of expensive battery-backed RAM as cache sitting in front of it) in order to even get close - platter-based drives basically just suck at random IO and it's not unusual for them to be an order of magntitude slower in throughput when doing 4kB random as opposed to 4kB sequential; I've seen drives that can do >150MB/s sequential drop to doing less than 1MB/s random (something you can easily try out yourself with iometer if you so wish). It's why so many SAN technologies now use tiering, where incoming writes first get written to RAM, then the SAN controller does some IO coalescing, and then sends it down to the fifty or so spindles directly - or increasingly these days to an intermediate NAND layer. This way you can serialise requests so that whilst the data hitting the SAN is inherently random, your SAN controller has the smarts to get it to write to the spindles in as sequential a manner as it can.

If it's IOPS you're after and you don't have a fancypants SAN, it's now frequently cheaper to shell out for a limited amount of NAND than it is to buy enough spindles to support a peak IO load, even if you shell out on the big bucks of FusionIO or those ludicrously pricey SAS SSDs. If you need speed and capacity, you can now buy "application accelerators" or suchlike that will automatically promote hot blocks into a local NAND cache rather than going straight to the platters (although I don't know how well these work in practive). If you do have a fancypants SAN you can make it an even more fancypants SAN by plugging a layer of NAND in between the controller cache and the spindles themselves and still have oodles of relatively cheap platter capacity.

Of course at home I still use an SSD for the OS and programs and I keep my static media on platters, because that's one environment where I do know accesses will be mostly sequential and I need the capacity-per-quid that only platters can give at present. But I've just added an SSD writeback cache to my NAS and it's noticeably faster already.

TLDR: Throughput and capacity aren't the only measures of storage, and an SSD can improve performance massively whilst costing less than the equivalent platters as long as you're aware of your IO workload.