People are in general, morons. Worried about Google Glass? People can be recording video from a cell phone in a pocket RIGHT NOW. I walked around with mine recording for 3.5 hours just to see what it was like. (Boring and bounced worse than the Blair Witch video.) People have dash cams in their cars. People have their houses and offices wired with security cameras that do motion detection and upload 1080p high-def video to the cloud.

Every store you walk into, every car you walk in front of, anybody holding a cell phone...

If you aren't alone inside a building that you control, you have no privacy and your face can end up on Youtube at any moment. Get over it.

Directly providing the power to vaporize a person is not the elegant way to do it. The correct, elegant mad scientist method is to use the power contained in the vaporized mass to power the vaporization.

Consider if you develop a means to "program" a plasma such that it generates a contracting magnetic field that causes fusion inside the vaporizing object and then absorbs some of the energy from this fusion reaction to power itself.

Now you're talking! Now you've got an effect that can vaporize any object provided you can provide the initial energy requirement.

There could be variants on this. Perhaps you've got an effect that flips matter into antimatter and absorbs some of the released energy to continue the effect.

If this is an expanding effect instead of a collapsing effect you've got a world killer like the weapons in Ender's Game.

Except that on a LAN FTP is almost the only protocol I can rely on to get high speed data transfers. SFTP blocks at about 30 MB/s when FTP can easily get 90.

If the Linux distros would be reasonable and enable the "none" crypto on SSH it would be a good thing. If I explicitly ask for no crypto then why are they making it hard for me to get what I want?

Yes, I know I can recompile OpenSSH for "none" crypto but it is easier to set up FTP, or even use tar and netcat.

You will sometimes see motherboard driver files for Windows which are simply ugly hacks to fix things without doing a BIOS update by hot-patching the board's ACPI, or overriding some Windows default so it works properly with the buggy board.

The right thing to do would be to issue a BIOS update or recall the board. But no, as long as they can hack in a software fix for Windows they go ahead and ship it.

I assume you would like security bugs specially marked so that you can prioritize fixing them and releasing the changes.

Look at the number of bugs found and fixed which have much later been discovered to be security bugs.

So now you didn't push "non-security" bug fixes to your production servers and they get owned by bad guys.

The lesson is that you should treat all bugs as security bugs.

Microsoft got so sick of those calculator jokes that in Windows 95 it was rewritten to use arbitrary precision math.

The main reason is so that your company is equally vulnerable to the ridiculous patent system.

Just being in business using computers and the Internet and writing software opens up your company to hundreds of potential patents. Most of which are OBVIOUS! Really.

Another reason to be a producer is something that every inventor knows. Coming up with an idea is 10% of the effort. Actually making it work is much more difficult and 90% of the work. Sitting around and coming up with wild ideas that might be possible and writing patents on them and then waiting for someone else to do the 90% work before suing them is a very bad taste for the people who really did the work.

"Rocket science is easy. Rocket engineering is hard."

And if you try one you'll see that it doesn't matter if you touch it.

The software is smart enough to know somehow that after you've been typing a touch is not likely to be intentional. It really works. I imagine that the software knows where your thumbs and palms are likely to be touching while typing so it can ignore those areas and also waits for deliberate motion on the pad before accepting it as real input.

Track pads are another thing that Apple took and did right. Samsung has some good ones on their more expensive laptops, too.

Try using a Macbook and its trackpad for a bit and you'll see a huge difference between that and the normal junk you get on a $500 PC laptop.

Try reaching out and touching a thing and then putting your arm down. Do it every 15 seconds.

Is your arm tired after five minutes? No. Or well, mine isn't.

What kind of touch screen are you thinking of using that requires holding your arm out in front of you constantly?

You know, to someone just reading the law your argument seems like the only reasonable result. And I agree with you.

But the Supreme Court doesn't. Oh no. A while back they decided that Interstate Commerce comes into effect if what you do in your state might somehow affect people in other states. Like by reducing the demand for the wheat in other states by growing too much wheat in your state and selling it, in your state.

Yup. Perfectly ludicrus. But that's the law for you.

I don't think it affects the unrecoverable read error rate. But patrol-scrub does find those unrecoverable read errors as it goes and rewrites the block. If you don't scrub then those read errors will just invisibly accumulate over time.

So during a RAID5 rebuild you'd be limited to any read errors that occurred during that last week. Hopefully.

I do think that RAID6 or other systems that allow 2 disks to fail are more reliable.

You should be scrubbing your RAID at least once a week. That will detect and fix most of the creeping errors that would have prevented a successful rebuild.

Yes you lose IOPS during the scrub but if you didn't care about data correctness you'd be using RAID0.

From what I've read in the last few months, the Linux kernel and glibc will both be adding transaction lock support. The performance benefits are pretty nice even when limited to backwards compatibility with existing lock methods.

Also, libraries like Intel's (of course) TBB will add support.

But all of that will be done with feature detection and fall back to using existing code.

It's like saying that nobody codes for MMX, SSE, Altivec or 3DNow. Or that nobody uses a particular Nvidia OpenGL extension only available on the newest cards. Yes, if it gains that extra 15% speed boost they will code for it.

In the states where it is legal (sorta) now, I predict this will happen, like beer kegs.

"Gimme a kilo man. It's for the party."