Certain based on what? The zero scientific evidence which shows any risk of harm greater than existing drilling methods?

How can you be certain that someone whom you've never met or spoken to actually knows something which cannot even be shown to be true? This would be like me saying "I'm certain that Obama knows that an alien spaceship was recovered in Roswell, but he's covering it up because there's money to be made". Hilarious, maybe, but completely nonsensical.

Um no, not exactly. It basically says ChrisMaple was right, and drinkypoo has once again lived up to his name. The article admits that small quakes DO take some of the energy away from larger ones, and do delay them by "temporarily easing stress on the fault line". It merely points out that the massive disparity in energy levels means that a single small quake (or even a hundred small quakes) cannot permanently avert a much larger one. If, however, you keep repeating this "temporary" fix, you end up with a long-term solution.

The rest of your comment is bang-on though. Small quakes are of no concern.

It's amazing to me that this single statement can get modded "troll" on a website dedicated to people who supposedly are tech fans / experts.

[quote]I'll believe that the moment an oil multi's board moves into the area where they're doing some fracking.[/quote]

That's just silly. Not only is it an absurd thing to ask of them, it would prove absolutely nothing. You know full well that if such a thing DID happen you'd call it a publicity stunt and remain opposed to fracking anway ... so why make such a dishonest claim? Hyperbole?

Yeah, that was also my take on it, just from the bit of reading I did on it. Kept seeing that "thousands" claim but absolutely no evidence for anything even close to that number. Thanks for the confirmation.

Damn. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Target the perps properly, you're racist. Put on the kidd gloves and you don't care about the poor children. No-win situation.

This sentence is completely meaningless. Do you even cite, bro?

Hrm ... let's see ... do we spend the money on a one-time cost which reduces workload by 90% ... OR do we spend the money on the start of a recurring cost to investigate and prosecute a small subset who have little meaningful impact on the end result.

Yeah, no, totally, your idea rocks.

You forgot:

- Had the "study" somehow concluded that boys were better it would have never seen the light of day, rendering all such studies meaningless due to selection bias.

Systemd is headed towards a horrible slide-show inexplicably created as a PDF?

And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.

This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better. Overwriting / deletion might have been a concern prior to modern filesystems which incorporate easy and cheap snapshotting, but nowdays that part of the argument just doesn't fly. Corruption is still a concern but, again, that's a risk you take with any backup solution too.

There's no such thing as a guaranteed backup. If you're very rich and very paranoid, you could certainly rig up a "backup solution" that involves copying your data every 5 minutes to 50 different offsite locations in 50 different countries, plus having some cheap third-world-labour transcribe all the zeros and ones to a paper copy for storage in an underground vault. And even that's not 100% because a really big asteroid will result in unrecoverable corruption. In the end it all comes down to how much you're willing to spend and what level of risk you're willing to accept. For most of us who aren't running IT departments that equation comes down to something like "ZFS RAIDZ2".

Try this on for size then. My current laptop has 3 x 1tb drives internal, but they only spin up when I need them to. My many OSs (several flavors of linux, 2 versions of windows, plus BSD) all run off of a single 480gb mSATA Crucial M500 SSD, attached to a cheap M-SATA-to-USB-3 adapter.

All the features you're looking for, plus the portability of being able to use your personal setup on any other computer just by plugging in to a USB port.

Ah, yes. Confucius say, the path to mastering pedanticism is paved with low UIDs.

Not exactly. While there is some truth to that analysis, it completely ignores the much larger effects of marketing and fashion. A Rolex doesn't cost 3 orders of magnitude more than a Chinese knockoff because it delivers 3 orders of magniute as much "quality"; the price is a reflection of fashion rather than functionality. Similarly, a basic Starbucks coffee costs 2-3 times as much as a coffee at the local diner, but certainly doesn't deliver 2-3 times the "quality". And don't get me started on the absurd amounts of money people are willing to pay to scam artists and frauds (eg. Sylvia Brown, "psychic", ~$700 per hour) who deliver absolutely nothing other than vague promises.

tl;dr: people will buy expensive shit for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.

It must be wonderful to always have racism as an excuse. When shitty things like that happen to me, I have to wonder if maybe I screwed up somehow. You never have to question yourself; just blame whitey!

Maybe you should stop carrying a mop and bucket around with you? Just an idea ...