Agreed. For more than one reason, and from personal experience. I've had both, a crew of code monkeys and a small but incredibly efficient team of well paid but also very good programmers. To say that the latter were vastly outperforming the former (for less money in total, too) is an understatement.

Two people doing each 50% of work will not compensate for one person who could do 100%. Simply due to a lack of information. One person has, by design, all the information that person has. This is not true for two people who should do this one person's work instead. They have to synchronize and exchange information, and that invariably fails at some level as we all know, where you either lose efficiency by having to design an interface between these people or, lacking this, lose even more efficiency when their interface just doesn't work out.

In the end, you're better off with FEWER, but BETTER people than you could ever be with a truckload of code monkeys. Yes, even if they cost a multiple of the monkeys. A billion code monkeys with keyboards will never write the better OS.

And that's what's wrong with the USA today. Working simply doesn't pay anymore. Not working and having others work for you does.

In earlier days, we called them spongers and leeches, but in today's world where everyone needs a title, it's CEO.

High energy densities and high currents are emitted when shorted and you end up with maybe a spark. Quite a safe spark though given the pathetically small voltages they can store.

Voltage is irrelevant. If a short releases the stored energy, all of it is converted into heat, since it has nowhere else to go. If stored energy is significant, and is released in a short enough time, this results in an explosion.

So, the safety-relevant questions are: how much energy can a capacitor store, and how much currency can it supply?

Where I work, 3 pieces of personally identifiable information together are considered to make the whole thing trackable directly to you. This is any three of a list that includes things like...

forename
surname
email address
a previous IP address
account number
username
zip or postcode
the fact that you have already done business with them or "sister company"
and so on...

It's not that they are secret but the combination of them can reveal information about you to someone else without your consent.

In the UK we have http://ico.org.uk/ and the rest of Europe has something comparable. The problem is that corporations from your side of the pond don't like it. I think it has even been reported to the WTO as an illegal restraint upon trade.

Many companies make mistakes. Some large, US based, "international" corporations see it as their duty to break civilised laws.

He seems to be mainly saying tht he does not like his address getting into the hands of other parties.The fact that these other paties don't give a toss about his privacy does not really seem surprising.

If you build a datacenter with its own solar, wind and hydroelectric power supplies, why would the price raise?

Because hydroelectric sites are taken, and your customers might take issues with their clouds disappearing when eclipsed by real ones.

In those places, a $100 bill would work as well or better than a passport for getting through checkpoint guards. The idea that someone would bother with your passport number in trying to forge a passport to get through there is rather laughable, since they didn't even bother to check said number to see if it was legit.

At a border with better security? Not going to work. Passports have a lot more security to them than that, particularly now.

Basically if places have weak security, the have weak security. Someone isn't going to bother to try to get a legit name and number to forge a passport. If they have tight security, then it wouldn't do any good as they check the other features, which wouldn't match.

See if the point of someone having your information is to, well, be able to access your information then it needs to be stored in that format. A password can be hashed, but something like name and address needs to be stored in text. Encrypting it is the kind of thing that does a limited amount of good. They may well encrypt it on disk, but the software that accesses it still needs to be able to decrypt it, wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't. So if someone busts in through a problem in the software, they can get your data.

It is easy to get mad and say companies should "do something" but ask yourself what that something is, I mean really analyze the problem, and then try and come up with a solution that works. It is harder.

We deal with that kind of thing at work. Securing data isn't just a magic switch you can flick. Like our new storage array has self-encrypting drives. Great, we can, with no performance loss, encrypt everything on it... However that only really helps against it getting stolen, or if we forgot to wipe the disks when we decommission it. Being that all data is encrypted, the unit has the password (it is a power-on kind of thing) so if you bust in over the network, well then you can get at the data unencrypted.

For more sensitive stuff you can take it a step further, use Sophos (ya that is what they bought, no not my choice) full disk or file container encryption. That means that if a system with it is lost, nobody can get the data. However, when that system is online and the FS mounted, again a break in can get at the data.

The only way to stop network breakins from being a possible compromise is to take the systems entirely off the Internet. Not only is that unfeasible in normal cases, but it is impossible if you are talking the system that is to handle talking to the users online.

I can't come up with a way that you can have a system where the data is secure, even if the system gets compromised. Of course you try and stop systems from getting compromised, but the idea that data should be stored somehow that even if a system gets broken in to you can't get at it is rather silly.

So basically this slashvertisement is for a childrens toy of absolutely no interest to geeks. I'm still waiting for an affordable, programmable, personal robot to replace the Sony AIBO.

First off, "well regulated" when referring to the military means "well trained / disciplined" not "highly controlled by the government". You can look up the definition in older dictionaries and see for yourself. Secondly, even the Supreme Court has explained that the first half of the amendment was explaining why we need the right to bear arms, not placing restrictions upon who can bare arms. Lastly, while each State has their own definitions for a state militia, the US Constitution specifies all able-bodied men up to 45 years old (older if they have previous military experience) are the militia.

This is exactly why rights should never be up for a vote, because most people can't be bothered to learn what they are talking about.

First off, about 30,000 of those are suicides. Studies have repeatedly shown that gun ownership has no impact on suicide rates. Secondly, the US has roughly 315 MILLION people in it. About 3.5 times as many people die in car accidents in the US each year as are killed with a gun (that even includes self-defense shootings in that number).

You have to be really immature to think your emotions invalidate peoples right to self-defense. Even the most anti-gun groups have admitted that there are (low end) 10 times as many cases of guns being used for self-defense each year as there are murders involving guns. The facts simply do not support your purely emotion based argument.

If someone kills my friend with a gun, how is it the responsibility of millions of people who didn't commit the murder? Why should almost half the adults in the US be punished for a crime that they didn't commit?

Exactly. I was going to make the same argument, so I'm glad someone else did to save me having to do the math (I really should just save a template for situations like this). We have decades of data showing that the number of people who legally own a gun and use it to commit a crime is (statistically speaking) zero. We also have plenty of data showing that gun owners are actually less likely to commit a crime and are less likely to shoot the wrong person than police in a defensive situation. It always amazes me that Slashdot is supposed to be filled with intelligent people who use facts to derive conclusions, yet so many want to use nothing but emotion when the issue of guns comes up.

FYI, you can already go to any FFL (gun shop) and ask them to do a background check when performing a private sale. Anyone selling to a person that they don't know would be wise to do this. The problem people have with your idea of banning private sales is that the only way to enforce it is for the government to track every gun and every gun owner. Quite using scare tactics when you don't even know the existing laws.