Huh? Hubble is 11,110kg, 4.2m wide, and 13.2m long. Atlas V can do 29,400kg and has done 18,814kg. It regularly launches with a 5.4m fairing. For reference, the space shuttle could do 24,400kg to LEO.

I don't know exactly how MS's certs work, but doesn't this mean that they can tell exactly which cert did the signing of the malware? That might be an interesting piece of information, even if it just leads to a dead end.

Yeah, sorry I wasn't more clear. pkg_add still fits into the ports framework, though - so really you can use the two simultaneously and things generally work... most of the time. I've taken to just using ports unless I'm in a huge hurry. You can technically use apt-get to bulid from source as well (-b flag).

I meant in terms of healthcare. We are going in the opposite direction. We should offer non-smoking discounts, healthy lifestyle discounts, etc.

I use Solaris at work, but as a workstation and not as an admin so while I have a "feel" for it, I can't directly compare them. I would say they are very similar but do have semantic differences... de-facto file locations, behavior of temp directories, etc. I feel that they are more similar than Linux is to either FreeBSD or Solaris.

I looked into both (at the time) OpenSolaris and FreeBSD and decided that FreeBSD's better hardware support was worth the tradeoff in lagging ZFS versions. And not that I anticipated it, but it turns out that the FreeBSD Linux emulation environment was also useful (for running a CrashPlan server).

This article uses the kernel module, not the userland FUSE stuff.

I don't know about "heavy"... I have it running on a 6-year-old HP xw4400. Sure it's a nice old machine with a 64-bit processor (required for stability) and ECC RAM (required to get the real data integrity benefits of ZFS), but you can get a HP Microserver new for under $400 that has both of those things.

I have to second this... Debian was always my preference but I tried FreeBSD to get ZFS. For dependencies, ports does some things... differently than APT, but they are similar enough that it won't completely shock your system.

And just like Debian, it is easy to start with an extremely minimal system and only add what you need, so stability and boot speeds are excellent.

I think that Debian is still faster at certain things, though that is subjective.

For Medicaid folks, you could make their coverage contingent on enrollment in nutrition programs or some other anti-obesity initiative.

I think it is perfectly reasonable to require people on the dole to attend a training program as a requirement to get the free stuff.

Fair enough. So why isn't Bloomberg just requiring an ID to buy the giant drink?

I agree that something needs to be done about obesity - I just don't think that the Bloomberg approach will work. The nice thing about having it done in just one city is that this will give economists/epidemiologists/statisticians/sociologists a field day and we'll see how it works out. My personal preference would be to let the private sector make being fat expensive, which the new health care law specifically prohibits. Combine this with educating people who are on the dole (and continuing other public education efforts), and making nutritious food more available to those same people. Hell, consider limiting the types of groceries that food stamps will pay for (that is what Florida is doing). I think there are a lot of things we can try before we resort to treating sugar like a controlled substance.

Indeed. Religion would appear to be a part of a normal human psyche... and I say that as someone who has yet to be persuaded that there is a need to invoke a supernatural deity to explain the natural world.