As other people have mentioned, a lot of these errors can occur while you are actually copying the files. I have copied files and immediately executed md5sums on the source and dest files only to find differences. Unfortunately, I didn't start this practice until after I had to restore from backup only to find that some of the backup files were corrupted.

And given that this seems to be a common problem, why in the holiest of hells does the cp command not have a verify option? Yeah, it's easy enough to wrap the copy command with md5sums, but a verify option would be even easier. Throw in an auto-retry function on top of that and you'd be really cooking.

By the way, the submitter did not mention the current method of backup, but if they are using Linux with the cp command, they would be better served by moving over to something like rsync.

Interestingly, iOS users accounted for 18.1% of online sales

That is interesting - how could they see what they were ordering on their tiny screens?

And for the fanbois: relax! It was a light-hearted joke.

From what I can tell, essentially a bubble burst occurs when prices have become so inflated that people are priced out of buying in

Bubbles burst when people finally realize that the constant and dramatic increases in the price of the commodity can't last forever and may be already past their peak. If no one can afford to buy a commodity, then the demand has to fall and the price follows the demand which is an extreme form of correction. However, in some cases all it takes for a crash are a few influential people to realize that the commodity is overpriced, sell their inventory, and the rest of the market starts to follow which keeps driving the price down. Since many actions in the market are overreactions, commodities can likely go from way overvalued to way undervalued before stabilizing somewhere in the center. But the situation you describe is definitely not the sole cause of crashes, just one extreme form of crashes.

Most market crashes are triggered by large sell-offs

And many run-ups are triggered by large buy orders from influential investors - that's how the market works. It's a zero sum game driven by a herd mentality in which everyone tries to guess when the herd will stop moving or start moving in the other direction. The market commonly fulfills it's own prophecies because the few influential people making the prophecies are always one step ahead of the herd.

China is nearly as large as the US, and so it has vast resources - but don't forget that it also has several times the US population, so those resources won't go as far.

Until you realize that labor is one of the biggest and most sustainable resources in a service-oriented economy. And then you realize that, in the long-term, they have a huge advantage.

A single good idea can go through many more minds than a bullet.

I need to go back and show this to the guy on a bike that I just almost took out!

How could they have possibly known that people would prefer to stream videos directly from their couch rather than leave the house into whatever nasty weather was waiting for them outside and drive all the way out to a store full of loud and misbehaving children only to find that every movie worth watching had already been rented?

Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of fond memories of renting movies and video games from Blockbuster. But they had nearly two decades to prepare for the transition to digital and they dragged their heels every step of the way. Anyone who understood technology knew that the transition to digital was inevitable, so it's not like there was a lot of risk in investing in that direction. Even if you argued that the transition did not seem inevitable at the time, smart executives would have prepared for it anyway just to hedge their bets. Since Blockbuster fumbled on every count, it's hard to feel that bad for them.

.I am a devout fan of capitalism....turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.

Capitalism is all about maximizing profit, so using the world's IQ toward devising solutions for people who cannot afford to buy products is a horrible capitalist strategy. It's taking resources that could be spent on maximizing profits by developing products for more profitable demographics and shifting them towards something systemically unprofitable. I'm not trying to take anything away from the hard work that Bill is doing - he seems determined to use his money to make the world a better place, but I can't help but see some cognitive dissonance going on in his defense of capitalism.

It's all a part of the growing "I've Got Mine, Fuck You!" attitude that is spreading like wildfire in this country. I wonder if they would still feel that way if they got too sick to work or if their precious insurance company dropped their coverage because they were costing the company too much money.

While I realize that you're not a Verizon spokesperson, your attitude seems to mirror theirs. Either way, they spent thousands of dollars to hook up my FIOS for a couple of years of service only for me to switch to another ISP and leave their equipment to rot. As a customer, I don't care why YouTube has such poor service over FIOS - I just know that people on Comcast don't have this issue and I can resolve it by switching ISPs.

That's good to hear since my FIOS connection has been sucking shit for YouTube videos lately. According to independent investigations done by FIOS customers who happen to be network engineers, the problem is on Verizon's end. Some people are claiming similar issues with Netflix on FIOS. I just bought an HD TV antenna and I'm going to switch to Comcast for internet since YouTube has a chance of working on their network. Seriously Verizon, what's the point of 75 Mbps down when your network is slowing down the traffic of the most popular web site to the point of making it unusable?

The denominator is the bottom number in the fraction

I started using Chrome back in its beta version because of its process separation that prevented one bad tab from taking down the whole browser. The funny thing is, the browser was so stable that I rarely ever had a rogue tab fail on me in the first place. And while Firefox stepped up their game on speed, Chrome just seems to render faster (it could just be psychological). Also, Chrome's interface uses less real-estate and leaves more room for page content. While I also use Firefox on some machines, it's performance seems to suffer if I leave it open for too long. Yet I have left Chrome open for months and it feels just as snappy as when I first started it. And since I don't use many, if any, extensions, Chrome is a better fit for my needs.

I see this argument all the time and I find it hard to believe that the people making these claims don't have a Facebook account.