Rich people.

I don't know why these observations are being thought of as a big deal. Why go to all the trouble of building some big underground Italian detector when we can see, right here, that passing neutrinos hit the /. servers and cause apostrophes to appear randomly (but due to a quirk of quantum behavior, almost always right in front of the letter 's').

You're right. If a cop sees you step outside the crosswalk at an intersection, he should have NO choice but to cite you for jaywalking, and generate all of the paperwork and costs involved, whether or not the reason you stepped out of the cross walk was to avoid walking through a big puddle of hydraulic fluid that was just spilled by a trash truck. It's situations like that where a cop's body cam might very well record such an infraction, and in the name of ridding society of any potentially abused judgement calls, we should use that technology to make sure that everyone involved toes the line, literally and figuratively. We can't have judgement calls! Your judgement call that we shouldn't is good enough for me.

No, the victims are the residents and business owners in a trashed place like Ferguson where a bunch of idiots decided that wrecking the place is the right reaction to events like that lovable big lug, Mike Brown, being shot for no reason whatsoever. We know it was for no reason because thoroughly reliable witnesses (like, the guy who was within him when Lovable Big Mike, the 6'-4" 300-pound Gentle Giant was intimidating a retail clerk) said so, and the witness who said he was "shot in the back, execution style" said so. Except both witnesses are full of crap, and they know it. The cop who got his face mashed by this giant guy would indeed have had an easier time of it if Lovable Giant Mike's altercation with the cop inside the cruiser had been recorded. But more importantly, there's a chance that a lot of people's businesses wouldn't have been wrecked by people who came in from out of town specifically to trash the place and steal stuff with the tacit blessings of guys like Al Sharpton.

I don't download that stuff, but as a netflix user who also has DVD rips and DVR recordings that I manage under XBMC, I can easily understand the appeal of having the content locally and in a form that can be integrated with media from other sources.

Netflix outages are frustrating. When it is up, sometimes I can't stream the best quality in real time. Sometimes the client has to be kicked in the head for no apparent reason to make it stream at all or stream the best reasonable quality. Any seeking takes a relatively long time, and won't seek with the same precision as xbmc will. It does an admirable job of a UI, but it's not my favorite. I wish the streaming service could be mated with third party applications better to allow more than just netflix's concepts of show organization and playback control to work with their content, as well as the ability to prebuffer the highest quality regardless of my current conditions. I also find it excessively wasteful if I feel like rewatching something and knowing it redownloads it every time, which is where I would like to jump to 'just buy the damn thing' were there a convenient legal option without DRM.

That all said, they still have a great deal better software experience than amazon prime...

I had pretty much given up all hopes of DRM-free video via legitimate channels, even as music is pretty much DRM-free exclusively.

I'm not getting my hopes too much, but like DRM-free music before it, I'll be very eager to give them my money instead of buying DVDs with it.

I'm however fully expecting like eBooks, the DRM-free selection will remain sad and pathetic.

1) If you're in business, likely you don't care about the privacy of searches anonymised under legal agreements because, well, there's just nothing quite that interesting and if your employees complain, you have to wonder what they are Googling in their spare time that they don't want you to know about.

2) Alternatives. I was an Opera user since before 3.something. It peaked a year or two ago, the developers were moved on, and it's now just junk and uses Chromium backend. IE isn't a sensible alternative either (trust no browser that wants you to go to Bing by default, has the Bing toolbar, etc. either). Quite what are we supposed to use and deploy? Firefox? The MSI and GPO integration is still all random-third-parties that we have to trust did it right and didn't add their own junk in.

Sorry, but on the face of it, the privacy "problem" isn't really a problem for most people. I agree that privacy is an issue and I get more than most people that privacy is just something you should have by default, not be made to justify or fight to get. But, honestly, there's little choice.

And when you're a techy working for a business, you'll deploy what's been agreed on, which will be the lesser of most evils. At least Chrome MSI-deploys and has proper GPO and respects Windows Internet Options, and is cross-platform in other respects.

At home, I still use Opera. But only until websites start crapping out on it, because there's no way I want to touch the newer versions anyway (whatever their underlying browser).

Back in the day, my enterprise storage vendor warned us that tape was not terribly reliable and to no reuse tapes. The more consumer oriented formats were especially failure prone. Something like LTO was much more reliable but still not something you want to reuse a lot of times.

Hard disks don't have that problem.

So... you should probably compute TCO based on how your software vendor tells you you should use your tapes and not just gloss certain considerations over.

> You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.

More often than not, they fail WITH warning. Or rather, they give you some indication that it's time to replace a drive and you aren't stuck scrambling at the last minute because it was a surprise.

If this stuff is sneaking up on you, you are probably not paying attention.

I haven't had TW for years, but when I did, it was newsworthy when it was actually working.

Well for one thing you are conflating two very different groups of activities commited by two very different groups of people. You are conflating the actions of soldiers with the abuses committed by spies.

As far as "destroying all the surrounding stuff", that's just basic warfare. Whatever propaganda you've been feeding yourself has got you convinced that there's such a thing as "surgical military action".

Combat is not surgery. Never was.

This is something that I addressed in my original post and something that you chose to ignore and remove.

> So, live your entire life as though you're going to get fired tomorrow. Sounds like real fun.

If you work in IT, the whole "disaster recovery" thing should not be new to you. It doesn't just apply to technology. If problems are readily forseeable then certainly you should try to plan for them and be as prepared for them as possible.

You don't necessarily have to go overboard. With many things, the most effective measures are the initial ones that are just past total apathy.

Being slightly more prepared than the next rat is a very useful thing.

Plus, if you are a slightly more prepared rat then the thought of being fired tomorrow won't weigh on you quite so heavily.

Slave is a pretty accurate term for that arrangement. It also works for midieval European peasants too.

...and the Easter Island heads "walked" into place.

They actually could have. A team of scientists actually worked out how this could be done and did a trial run with one of the heads.

The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.

As virtualization became 'cool', people said 'look how many instances you can cram on these gigantic boxes'. This quickly became 'how many instances am I going to lose if this goes down' or 'how many do I have to live migrate to service this thing?'. The cost advantages of scale with a larger box are quickly offset by practical issues. As such, if you need that much memory in a single system, those sort of boxes are still very valued (in-memory databases and some particular sorts of modeling for example). If the workload naturally fits into more nodes of smaller size, it frequently makes sense to opt for the higher node count. There is of course different break points depending on judgement calls, but most places seem to think of two sockets as about the sweet spot.