--As long as it has Goodyear on it and resembles the old ship, it will always be the Goodyear Blimp. Just like we always refer to the Sears Tower, Marshall Fields, and Wrigley Field. Nostalgia has intertia.

/ ask a Chicagoan

> OTOH, the US is very sensitive to the loss of their manpower. If too many US soldiers die in a war half a globe away, the general sentiment towards the war can very quickly change. This ain't WW2 anymore where something like that could work. Vietnam already showed that it's easy to lose support at home if too many of our boys die in what is then deemed a "pointless war". Drones work beautifully here because nobody gets hurt.

--And at that point, war becomes a video game. $Side1 sends our robots against $Side2, few to no human beings are in danger, and the war never stops.

--I remember that I had to register for the draft when I came of age. Using Human fighters and human-controlled battle engines keeps the proper perspective - war is hell, and there really needs to be a damn good reason for it. There's no good reason to let robot armies demolish each other just to keep being replenished, or have one side's robot army deploy against (fairly) defenseless/underarmed humans.

--Science fiction has gone over this extensively - looks like some people need to read up and learn from it.

/ I ain't no fortunate son, etc

--Now THAT is an interesting idea. +2, would advocate more research into this.

--Personally, the rare times when I have an awesome dream, I want to go back to sleep and resume right where I left off...

--Thanks for that. I remembered something along that line when I saw this article but couldn't recall it exactly.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...

" Never build a prison that you wouldn't like to live in yourself "
/ Havelock (Lord) Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork

> When I was jumping between stations every few days, I was irritated that the Ubuntu FIrefox felt Ubuntu-y (Edit > Preferences?) and not like the Firefox I used on Windows (Tools > Options).

--That is a huge pet peeve for me, too. I wish they would make the Linux/etc versions just use Tools\Options, because it makes more sense. Edit menu is for copypasta text, and Find.

--Running behind a proxy can help. Try the Squid VM to start with:

https://communities.vmware.com...

--A fairly accurate summation. I would only amend it thusly:

EXT4 = most current open journaling filesystem in widespread use on Linux systems; Successor to ext3 and generally faster

btrfs = journaling filesystem with more bells and whistles than ext4; Functionally designed to compete with (and mostly equivalent to) ZFS, and may have more features for home/average non-Enterprise users

frontend to YaST = graphical utility to command line versions of various Linux setup/configuration tools

--Say, thanks for that - I hadn't heard of Elio and didn't know they had a dealership in my town. Might be my next trike, and WAY cheaper than what I had been saving up for!

--You obviously have no idea. I subscribe to both Netflix and Amazon Prime, and Netflix consistently has *way* more title availability. I have something like 470 titles in my DVD queue - Amazon has no such thing. Streaming is NOT all that and a bag of chips; however, it is nice to have while I'm waiting for the next set of DVDs to arrive in the mail.

--Amazon also charged me extra $ to watch "The Raven" with Vincent Price, even tho I have Prime. Honestly, if it weren't for the discounted shipping, I wouldn't bother with Prime. However, since I'm already paying for it I've been ordering a lot more from Amazon (instead of newegg and tigerdirect.)

--Dude, he's the 1st black POTUS. You have NO IDEA what kind of stress he's under. Think you can do a better job? Then feel free, go ahead and run for office. I would rather have him be able to de-stress and be able to think with a clear(er) head.

/ not a fanboi, just being realistic - POTUS is a job I would never want. Turns your hair gray.

> RAIDZ can be dynamically expanded

--To the best of my knowledge, not so much. You can create a pool of mirrors and expand that, but expanding a RAIDZ (ideally) should be done with the same number (and capacity) of drives that was in the original RAIDZ - for balancing purposes. Otherwise you get weird errors and possible performance impact. Building asymmetrical pools is fine in a VM, but on bare-metal you kinda have to start to question what to do if there's data loss.

http://serverfault.com/questio...

--You can expand the underlying disks in a pool, but it's a PITA and requires repetitive resilvers.

http://jsosic.wordpress.com/20...

http://www.itsacon.net/compute...

--Honestly, adding a 4-port SATA card to an existing system and using all-new drives is probably the best bet for expanding existing storage. You can buy 2-4TB drives depending on budget, copy the data over, and repurpose the existing pool of old/smaller drives until the HW starts failing.

PROTIP: With newer drives (4k sectors) you're better off setting the ASHIFT to 12 on your ZFS pool right off the bat. Will save you trouble later -- I speak from experience.

https://www.icts.uiowa.edu/con...

/ Btrfs has some promising features, but practically I would give it another ~2 years to get to production-ready as of this writing. Just my $2.02

--I agree with you that clay or stone tablets stand the test of time. The problem becomes: how much data can you reliably store on such a thing, how thick should the stone be, how small should the bits be, where do you store it, and how conveniently can it be restored?

--M-discs are promising. They are basically stone-based Blu-ray DVD discs. Last I heard, they will have a 25GB version shipping as of March 20, 2014. I plan to get a set of 3 and burn the stuff that I've filed under NEVERLOSE - which really isn't all that much, it fits under 25GB. (I have multiple TB of JBODs at home but it's mostly VMs and a few movies.)

--The thing to do that most people don't think about, is PARE THE DATA DOWN. Does one average human being REALLY need 20TB of music, or pictures, or anything? Doubtless there are quite a bit of things in that pile that aren't in the top 25% of what you really enjoy the most.

--How do you even keep track of all that in your head? If you put all that music on random play, it would most likely go for more than a week or two. And I guarantee there would be songs in there that you wouldn't enjoy listening to that much - most albums are not 100% great.

--Separate out the stuff you enjoy less than ~65-75% of the time. Put it on secondary storage. Now you have less to back up.

--The only thing with current Blu-ray drives is that they're slow reading the data back. Linux is actually faster than Win7 when it comes to reading UDF discs on the same equipment, in my experience. Play around a bit, and get the data separated out so you can restore what you need the MOST in a certain period of time. YMMV.

--Squid proxy server is your friend; you can specify DNS servers in the config file, and change them at will with a simple ' squid -kreconfigure '. Try setting one up on a cloud VM and access it over SSH with compression enabled and using the arcfour cipher - it's well worth the time to setup and provides secure, filtered and logged comms.

--Last time I checked, you can get a Digitalocean VM for $5-10/month with a static IP. No affiliation, just (mostly) satisfied customer.

--You may have something there. If politicians can show "attack ads" during elections, Tesla should be able to air commercials detailing EXACTLY what is going on - and encourage people to buy their cars in !Jersey. More than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.