If there was something that made your life extremely well off, would you pay more for it if the other option was to go without?

Less pain now, or more pain later.

Email away!

Disregard the sort of part.

Sort of. To get the value plan I had before the no-contract push, I had to sign a two year contract even though I brought my own Galaxy Nexus devices to my family plan. I've "switched" to the no-contract plans to get the cheaper rate, but still have a year on my contract *even though I brought my own devices and incurred no expense device-wise with T-mobile*.

It's a loan, not a cell service contract.

You can cancel your service anytime, just pay up the rest of the principal on the 0% interest loan they're giving you.

We used ROCKS, and started running into the same problems you did. We were mid-process of moving to our own custom built solution when I left to work somewhere else.

Something to think about:

If you're seeing boot storms, get a network switch that is managed and support vlans. Either programatically switch VLAN access on the switch, or use trunking support in Linux, so you have a production VLAN and an installation VLAN. This should segment your network to the point where boot storms are no longer an issue.

That's exactly what we used for configuration management and distributed/unattended installations :)

You don't multicast images to Linux machines when you're using configuration management tools. PXEBoot->Bare Image Install->Puppet system configuration upon first boot based on machine grouping/criteria.

Disclaimer: I'm OP.

While working at Fermilab on the LHC CMS data taking team, I used bittorrent to speed up re-installs of thousands of worker nodes. I was able to saturate 10Gb Ethernet links this way, and could reinstall ~5500 Linux boxes within 10-15 minutes (with only two initial OS source servers).

Yes, Bittorrent is not just for piracy.

How long is it going to take to clean the atmosphere of all the pollutants pumped into it by thousands of coal plants around the world for the last 100+ years?

So what if it takes 40 years? Its contained to a small physical area.

And the rest of us roll their eyes when the greenies expect us to roll back ~100+ years of progress because nuclear accidents have happened.

Nuclear power has the lowest carbon output per megawatt of ANY base load power supply. Full stop.

This is a chart of deaths per TwH of power:
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976

Nuclear? 0.04. Coal? *161*

Wow, great, we've had Chernobyl and Fukushima as major incidents. You know how many people die every year because of coal-fired generation? Hundreds of thousands. Greenies can fuck off.

You have yet to outline how having an RFID chip in a school ID or a driver's license is a violation of someone's privacy.

My Platinum American Express was possibly skimmed when I flew from Chicago to Amsterdam a month ago; someone tried to use the information (not the card, the information) on Amazon, as well as at a hotel in Columbia. American Express immediately locked the card down, overnighted me a new card at no cost to myself, and told me I wasn't liable for any transactions I didn't make).

After your comment, I checked with my bank (PNC); they said I'm not liable *whatsoever* for any charges I did not make, whether the card was used or just the card information (card number, expiration).

Also, with a debit card, it's run as a Visa/Mastercard credit transaction when the RFID chip is not used, not as a PIN ACH/Debit transaction. Once again, zero liability for the cardholder.

Can you explain to me how an RFID tag is any more of a violation of your right to privacy than being constantly filmed/taped in public? Because courts have already ruled for quite a while that you have no expectation of privacy in public (as you shouldn't). You may not agree, but I fall on the side that "If you're in public, it's public". I say that now, and I say that under the assumption that in the future everything I do in public will be recorded by hundreds of different sensors, devices, and cameras.

What are you going to do? Hide in your house?