Well I envy my cat in the same way: he's happily living his life hunting mice in the garden, eating his food, sleeping and getting petted by yours truly, blissfully unaware of how the food gets in his bowl, how the mice come to exist in the garden, how he gets to sleep warm and cozy even in the dead of winter, what his purpose is and how his life will end.

Comfy, care-free and appealing though a domestic cat's life may be, it doesn't mean I want to be a cat though. I much prefer having a brain big enough to look at the world in a more profound way, even if it can be unsettling.

The great thing about religion is, if you look at it with a critical mind and a little bit of reason, it's fairly quick and easy to dismiss as pure fantasy.

Religion is the opium of the people.

The fact is that technology may not have driven the purchase price of a car down that much, but it HAS driven the cost of transportation down significantly, while at the same time dramatically increasing reliability, comfort, and safety

I don't think this is supportable by evidence. Cars, including total cost of ownership and operation, are more expensive than ever. Mostly because people are willing (and able) to spend for it. Our entire culture and civilization is designed around subisidizing the hidden costs of transportation, to the point where it's buried into everything we buy or make or sell.

1909 cost of a Model T Touring edition = $850, inflation adjusted 2012 dollars, $23,394.41.

The problem with this comparison is there is rough equivalence in value between a 1908 car and a modern car. There was no such thing as commuting. There was were no highways. There were no paved roads. No auto shops, nothing. It was the wild west. There is no equivalence of value. People in the early days of television used TV much as it is today. There is arguably more value now because of many choices, but the uses and how it fits into a value tree decision are essentially the same. There are also a few new users (i.e. as a general purpose digital display) which add value that was not useful in 1950 since there we not other sources other than broadcast for content. But I think either way, the comparison is useful.

VW is notorious for selling its old models in foreign countries.
The original VW Beetle was manufactured in Mexico until 2003.
The VW Bus is finally getting canceled in Brazil (and that's being fought).
The 2nd gen VW Passat was sold in China for almost 30 years until it was updated.

Yes, this is exactly right. It cannot be done in the US because of increasing regulatory burden, and the availability of cheap credit (which I will get to in a minute). The examples you give support my position. In Mexico, increasing standards are what also finally killed it, and led to major revisions in three different model years. The Beetle in Mexico, despite rising standards and material costs, was reduced in price several times over it's production run, and it is likely that if new standards had not have been added, it would have continued to drop in price. See http://www.csmonitor.com/1990/... for example.

a. it's never cheaper to buy a new car.

This is absurdly wrong. You can argue that it's not a better value, but it can be frequently less money, especially short-term, to buy a new car. And it's often easier. If you are facing a large repair bill and have even mediocre credit, you can almost always buy an entirely new car for less money out of pocket than fixing your old car. And with special terms and whatnot, you can appear to save monthly as well (except that the term and therefore costs long-term are very expensive). Cheap credit, predicated on financing, makes it attractive to buy cars over unreasonably long terms, continuing the ability of car makers to hide the costs behind a seemingly low monthly payment.

b. One of those regulatory agencies crash tested a 1959 Chevy Bel Air with a 2009 Malibu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
This video speaks for itself.

You are arguing that increased costs somehow are good for people because it puts them in safer cars. There is no argument that a 1959 Bel Air is not as safe as a 2009 Malibu, however, that is not the only piece of the equation. Why shouldn't the government (not insurance companies by the way) force every company to make a car as safe as a top of the line German built car?

Now you're just arguing with a straw man.
We're talking about the cheapest car of 1970 and the two cheapest cars of 2014

Yes, but the 2014 cars have many, many, many upgrades that are just plain flashy. People lived before air conditioning. People lived before automatic transmissions, CD players, airbags, LATCH, TPMS, etc.

I think you are right, but it was not focused on like bundling. Bundling was the charge that the DOJ thought they had MS nailed on, and it was their best chance at victory.

which I question.... by the time the first matter which used to be the ball reaches the batter, the ball no longer conforms to the definition of a baseball by the rules of the game. I think the pitcher would be guilty of illegally modifying the ball.

As such, according to a quick review, looks like the pitcher should be given a warning, and the pitch called as a ball.

You weren't at the last PAX Prime, nor will you be at the upcoming PAX East. Any story behind that?

This is so true; in fact, it is my current pain.

Couple of days ago I got a simple request to install an agent on some hosts. No biggie....5 minute job. So I put it off for other priorities. Figured friday afternoon is a good day to catch up, so couple of hours ago I started. ...Except the install script was updated, and requires some prerequisite updates....ok fine. ...Oh and the install script doesn't work if there was a failed run unless you clean X up manually...ok ...Oh and this other one actually had the agent installed but not working, and that other cleanup? Well that was wrong for this case... now it needs more manual cleanup..

Now 6 emails, a couple of IM threads, and 4 quick hallway conversations later... almost done....totally a 5 minute job from here.

Then maybe I can go test the script I was writing today....you know, the one I just finished adding a whole bunch of test cases to be sure it can run in the current environment, and give an appropriate error if it can't. (oh the irony)

That is some pretty wide open conjecture. I have personally been reading and commenting on slashdot for more than a decade and I have skipped or missed entire articles full of comments. Slashdot has contained comments on everything from Natalie Portman to Hot Grits.

Conjecture: Most everything said on slashdot today has already been said by someone on Slashdot prior to it.

Yes, it is called "having fun with it". If he didn't, it would be pretty boring.

I was pretty hooked after reading the first one I ever saw, which was about what would happen if a pitcher could throw a baseball at a signficant fraction of the speed of light. I thought it was pretty hilarious to see see the breakdown.

A simple "a huge explosion destroying the ball park and leaving a crater" would have answered the question, but, it wouldn't be very much fun, and wouldn't have anyone looking to buy his book.

is if it burst into flames with the president in it..... then I might throw a party. Otherwise, this just associates Tesla with a mass murderer who condones torture and doesn't think it needs to be prosecuted aggressively.

I wouldn't say ever..... every time i hear of an abusive domain shutdown, I think gee, maybe its time to stop letting ICANN be the authority and move to an alternative DNS.

I expect it will happen one day. I would like to see something like namecoin where there is no central authority and no way to shut down a domain at all, other than for it to expire.

With some time, I would even be willing to start accepting that as .com and telling icann dns users to get off the legacy system.

Google *is* evil - and greedy. I use their search engine for one thing only: looking for commercial vendor sites to purchase something. They're good for that. For anything else - fun, interesting non-commercial things, there are better search engines out there. DDG, Blekko... heck even Bing come to mind.

That can be a risk yes, but is easily defeated.

If the files I upload are intended to be distributed and shared, say software I write or videos I publish or whatnot, then that profiling is only a good thing since I want to rise in the search results as the source and creator.

If the files are a backup of personal/company data, stuff not to be shared anyway, I'll be uploading an encrypted container.
Yes, my profile will have a single entry stating I use encryption (which I don't know how to avoid) but my actual data isn't profiled since they can't read it.

True, that is always a risk when you go 3rd party and don't do it "in house".

But that shouldn't be TOO much of a problem, especially for the backup situation. By definition backups are a copy, and by best practices you shouldn't ever have only one copy but many. Losing one may be an inconvenience in replacing it, but only a fool would delete their originals after uploading a backup.
(Not to say there aren't fools out there who do exactly that - only to say this is the fools fault, not the hosting provider)

For the distribution situation, it is adamantly a much larger inconvenience and to many more people.
Hopefully a person operating this way has their own domain name and website, and can be the authoritative source for where to download the files.
Then it's just time being spent to upload everything to a new host to distribute and updating the links that point to them.

Yes users wanting to download will be upset, but that's mainly a result of you not having redundancy in place.
I realize redundancy isn't always an option for many reasons, and am not attempting to place blame. (If you can't afford it, you can't afford it.)
But this is the case with most everything online, be it file hosting, web hosting, backup services, ISPs/uplinks using BGP vs a single DSL/cable provider, etc.
I don't see that as a fault with the 3rd party really, just an unfortunate truth to the nature of what we do.

Agreed! No one is perfect, and expecting otherwise can only bite you.
But for most, especially individuals and hobbyists but small companies too, Google or Amazons (or even Microsofts) admins are going to have more time and people on hand to take care of it.

It's always a cost/benefit to figure out.

Perhaps. I think this one is going to boil down to personal preference.
There is a certain extent I do trust Google, and a line I wouldn't trust them past. I suspect my line is a bit closer to "trust" than your line is ;}

But assuming we are both knowledgeable about what Google does, what their business modal is, and what specific thing we will be using them for - I don't think there is much either of us can say to move that line for the other much, and that doesn't make either of us wrong.

According to the statements made which my comment replied to, no actually you can't.

Parent specifically said the solution was one single 4 TB hard drive.
You can't do a RAID with one disk.
You can have multiple copies on that one disk, but that won't help against most failure modes.

Parent specifically argued against all the options that would let you protect a single consumer drive from failure, and didn't even account for other failures such as bitrot checksums, parity to fix said bitrot, or user error (ie deleting something on accident)

Strongly agreed there too.

Personally I do not backup any of my movies. I keep my original DVDs and whatnot, and yes it would suck to re-rip everything and sort it nicely again, but it can be done.
My music ended up backed up due to wanting it at multiple locations, but I didn't intend on that originally.
My vacation photo situation sounds identical to yours too. If 5 US states disappear over night including the one I live in, fallout has taught me photos will not be of help in fighting off the raiders and mutants ;P

But - I do have a ~250 MB encrypted volume I DO backup everywhere I can.
It contains my tax paper work, scans of important documents I need to keep for some time, my own unencrypted private certificate authority cert, etc.

I also have a smaller encrypted volume I store with family and friends that contains my password basis and schemes, plus some of the more important ones along with my rotation schedule and whatnot.
My will contains this volumes password and a list of which family members and friends have a copy, intended to be available to my heir once I pass on.
The more help for her in this case the better, since I won't be around to ask!

While these days I run a fleet of my own servers to host files I distribute, I too started out with free hosting online (zomg ftp.netcom.com and geocities!) then moved up to paid hosting (usually of the web hosting form) before finally moving to colo servers and now adding VPSes.

Professionally on the other hand, I do have a metric crapton of data that does need to be backed up. I have ~250 employees here I have to protect against themselves (Be it a boot drive image to be restored after an infection, or files on the storage server to be placed back after being overwritten incorrectly)

But I will fully admit at work I keep everything in-house. They provide much more funds for that than I am willing to spend for myself at home, so thankfully this isn't an issue ;}

In the end it all boils down to the specific case at hand, what concerns one has, and which options are easiest to address those concerns.

But none of that was mentioned in my previous reply, since that was on a pure technical level between a single consumer drive on one PC, and enterprise grade hardware setup by best practices, administrated by competent people.
Hopefully it is clear however that even the political side of the argument isn't as black and white either.