I live in the Canadian prairies. Our block heater is 400W. When it's -40, you need the heat.

If you didn't already know about this, and didn't have a network connection, how would you discover this?

(And yes, the same complaint holds true for linux as well....)

Anything performance-sensitive isn't going to use emulation but rather paravirtualization or passthrough of physical devices. Current x86 virtualization is getting pretty good, with minimal hit to CPU-intensive code. As for I/O, you can pass through PCI devices in to the guest for pretty-much native networking performance.

Disk I/O still isn't as good as native, but it's good enough, and most enterprise systems are using ISCSI anyway to allow for efficient live migration.

There are plenty of places where you can't just add more memory...embedded devices in particular. Your phone is limited to 2GB of RAM, and you really don't want any one app chewing it all up. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, BeagleBone, etc. are all relatively limited in terms of resources and to use them efficiently you need to be careful.

Even on really beefy virtualization hosts with a couple hundred GB of RAM, you want to be able to dedicate as much of the resources as possible to the guests, not the host management software--so you need to be able to put strict limits on how much memory the host itself will use under any circumstances.

Apparently there are a number of vaccines being developed. None of them have reached the human trials phase, but several of them have been given to people under in emergency circumstances. The problem is that it requires an official request from the person's government as well as informed consent from the patient. According to the researcher it's hard to get either of these in the area of the current outbreak.

My main compute is a laptop with a docking station. It has external keyboard, mouse, dual monitors (can connect via hdmi, displayport, vga, or dvi), audio, networking, etc.

The only downside to my laptop is that it maxes out at 16GB of RAM and the CPU is more limited than what you could put in a power-hungry desktop. But the peripherals are all supported.

CPython (the most common python interpreter) has the "global interpreter lock" which means that even if you have multiple threads only one of them can be executing python bytecode at a time.

I'm fairly sure that my current house could *not* be rented for cheaper than my mortgage payments, and I'm making bigger payments than strictly necessary because I want to pay it down fast and minimize interest costs.

Also, around here (Canadian prairies) housing prices were pretty stable for decades. Recently they took a jump due to more demand in the market, but that's because people want to move here.

Connection tracking can be expensive. If you need that, it's going to cut into the performance of your server, so it can be beneficial to do that on a separate box.

I did mostly linux kernel stuff for over a decade. The vast majority of developers are quite helpful to people with little history in the community. As others have pointed out, generally this sort of stuff is aimed at people/projects that have a history of good work and then fall short of expectations.

If you submit a patch (formatted as per instructions) to the list, generally it will either get ignored (in which case you might want to contact the maintainer for that area) or else you will get some comments. Note that not eveyone's comments count equally--ultimately the subsystem maintainer is the one that will apply the change.

240V would be used for kitchen stove/range, clothes drier, electrical heat (air and water). Some commercial cappucino machines use 240V.

A home shop could very well use 240V for a welder and any number of power tools...lathe, jointer, planer, tablesaw, mortiser, wide belt sander, dust collector, shaper, etc.

In the USA/Canada typical residential setups use two conductors at 120V to ground, but the conductors are out-of-phase so there is 240V between them.

There really isn't any such thing as 110V or 230V in the USA/Canada, both of which you'll sometimes see referenced. 208V does exist, it's the difference between two legs of a 3-phase setup where each leg is at 120V to ground.

If it were all about "even" traffic flows, then netflix could have their clients send garbage data back to balance out the flows. This would result in *more* traffic on the network overall, but hey it'd at least be balanced!

No...the traffic is there because it was *requested by verizon's subscribers*. There is no logical reason why cogent/level3 should pay extra for traffic requested by verizon. I know this is how it was done in the past, but that was under the assumption that the types of flow is more or less similar. In the case of verizon, it's mostly consuming data rather than sending it, so it shouldn't be treated as a regular peer.

caveat: I live in Canada, your mileage may vary.

When I see a person panhandling on the street, I know full well that there are social assistance programs, welfare, employment insurance, homeless shelters, retraining programs, health care programs, etc. In many cases, they have trained professionals who will probably do a much better job than me of helping people that need help. In a sense that means that *I have already helped them* by supporting a society and government that includes these programs, and by funding them with my tax dollars. In many cases the problem is just getting people into programs that will work for them.

That said, I still help people out sometimes if I think it makes sense. Most of the time though my charitable giving goes outside the country to places with less of a social safety net.

It seems to me that we want to simultaneously be able to prove to the voter that their vote was counted properly, while also wanting to ensure that the voter cannot prove to someone else that they voted a certain way (to prevent buying/coercing votes).

Adding to this...how do you ensure that the person voting is who they say they are, and not another family member, care provider, guest, etc.?