Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.
The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.
If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!
If we assume that your fingerprint is assembled wholly at your side, then I would say you are RELATIVELY safe from it being disassembled into components that could compromise your realworld identity. One way to make the fingerprint irreversible like that is to encrypt it with a throw-away random key, also at client side. The unique but absolutely meaningless string arriving at the other end will uniquely identify YOUR END, NOT YOU. You can continue shopping and surfing porn, and all they got is a random string. If the porn site wants a fingerprint, they will get another value which will also identify you ACROSS THEIR DOMAIN. The two parties will not be able to cross-correlate their "databases" for any result. They will each contain a database of non-colliding pieces of data, one per each unique user, but they will not make any sense of comparing these.
Good points... I am not sure, though, that the issues you mentioned necessarily reflect the cultural ideas. They represent issues that ended up changing the culture, but did that represent the culture at the time?
I would argue that because TV has to make a profit based on their viewing audience, they have to cater to said viewing audience, which means they typically have to provide shows that the viewing audience likes and/or identifies with. It's interesting to note when the shows you mentioned went off the air, presumably due to profitability. I don't remember seeing many of the happily-married-couple-with-2.5-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence TV shows after the 60s.
Of course, I'm not any sort of expert on this in the least. It's mostly just from watching and listening to (e.g., music or radio shows) media from those decades and observing how they changed throughout the decades. There WAS a big shift, as you say, in the 60s with regards to sexuality. And that, I think, was pretty clearly portrayed in er, consumer media (TV, music, movies). (Example: not being allowed to show a husband and wife in the same bed in TV shows, hence having separate twin/double beds
Does using RAID controllers actually provide superior price:performance to using software RAID? Last I checked, the processors on most cheap RAID controllers were slower than dogshit and using md under Linux would give you better performance than basically any of them, at the cost of some CPU. But since CPU is cheaper than RAID, it probably makes sense. For example, going from a Phenom II X3 720 to a Phenom II X6 chip of the same clock rate takes the CPU from $100 to $200. How much would it cost to go from four crappy RAID controllers to four good ones? It would probably cost you at least $400.
The answer is probably to just go ahead and install Debian on a machine with as many CPU cores as you want to blow money on, and to use software raid. Put lots of system RAM in it, which the OS will automatically use for disk buffers. Current versions of grub work fine with USB keys, because they can use UUID for the groot, and the UUID never changes. If you want it to boot quickly, find a motherboard with coreboot support. If you want external disks you can use firewire cheaper than eSATA, if you get the external disks or just some enclosures at a good price. It makes maintenance a lot easier, but involves substantial power waste due to all those inefficient wall warts.
P.S. OpenSolaris is circling the drain, please don't suggest it to anyone for anything.
Actually NTFS is pretty good at keeping files unfragmented.
If a program opens a new file and them immediately seeks to the end of it to fix it's size then NTFS will look for a continuous block of free space to save it in. NTFS caches all writes so it can wait to see what the program actually does with a file before committing it to disk.
It also has a system designed to reduce the fragmenting effects of small files by being able to store their data in the same block as their metadata.
The only major fragmentation problem Windows XP has is when a machine has very little RAM and it allocates a rather small page file. It then ends up needing to expand the page file repeatedly and it gets highly fragmented causing severe slow down. I think they fixed it in Vista/7 by simply specifying a sensible minimum size and expanding it in larger chunks.
Along with research done by Mark Roth with H2S, this could save lots of people.
What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.
There's a difference between using an open Wi-Fi hotspot and doing a man-in-the-middle attack to collect data about what sites other people using the hotspot are visiting.
Your strawman is that there was some regulation, so that proves that regulation doesn't work. Perhaps BP should argue that they had some mechanical safeguards at the well head that were supposed to keep this leak from happening and those safeguards didn't stop this disaster, so obviously the lesson here is that safeguards are not the answer.
If you're arguing that government is inherently so corrupt and incompetent that it's impossible for it ever to regulate effectively and so we should stop trying, that's a slightly more valid argument, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. It's not an easy problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them. The fact that it's imperfect and requires serious work to function properly is a shame, but I fail to see how doing nothing would be any better.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.