I participate in SKYWARN as a licensed HAM operator and we are careful to not call ourselves chasers. We are trained spotters. We have gone through training to SPOT super cells and the classic warning signs of tornadoes. And yes, we are what trigger tornado watches and warnings through a direct line of communication with the NWS.

Make is to DIY what iPod is to MP3 players.

Are you serious? Make is crap! Once a month, you'll get an article about actually MAKING something. Other then that, it's 50 articles about knitting bicycle seats or turning a nerf gun "steampunk". Make has become nothing more then hipster fashion.

Don't forget:

Carcasonne
Agricola
Last Night on Earth
Pandemic
Ticket to Ride
Steam
and many more

There are TONS of great board games out there that are fun to play and don't follow the "roll the dice and race to a finish line" concept.

I was a Sys Admin for a day trading company in Chicago.

We had a 100mb serial line direct to all of the major markets that we traded in. We also traded the European markets. Trades were taking upwards of 300ms to complete. So, we spent $25mil USD to build a data center in Germany. We could then use Citrix to remote into this data center and trade, We still had traders that would scream for us when a trade took >100ms on the local markets. And we came running and scoured network logs trying to find the bottleneck.

We replicated all traffic to certain ports on the Cisco and had Wireshark running constantly, even after hours. Every millisecond counted. And seeing that the owner of the company personally made $3mil profit every quarter, it seemed to be working.

TPB is just linking to material. They don't host it. Yes, they 'make it easier to infringe', but the line between what TPB is doing and what e.g. the roads are doing (helping bank robbers get away, the horror!) is one of degree

I've never agreed with this. This is a horrible argument, and I'm appalled at the people that fool themselves into believing it.

I support drug reform, so I setup a service. All of the local drug dealers have GPS trackers on them so I know where they are and how to contact them. Someone comes to me and asks me where to get weed. I look up the GPS location of the weed dealer, hand the customer the phone number and location. Next guy asks for cocaine. I lookup the coke location, hand the customer the number and location.

This is EXACTLY what TPB are doing. In the above scenario, do you honestly think I wouldn't get any jail time for my service? I mean, I'm not making any money. Some of my clients are medicinal users, so they can legal have the drugs. I'm not offering any drugs myself.

Depends. The Mayans did this centuries ago. We seem to think that when their clock runs out in 2012, the universe ends. Some of the more sane among us doubt the apocalypse, but still theorize some cosmically significant event that can change the world. What will the civilization after us think about OUR clock? I can only hope they are sane enough to take it as it is, a random and arbitrary cutoff number.

For storage server, I don't think I'd agree with 6x drives in RAID1+0. That many drives on a nice controller, I'd strongly advise RAID5. The only downfall of RAID5 is that you need a minimum of 3 disks. We already have 6 disks here.