Yes. But silent data corruption is obviously a problem of the filesystem, ext4 in this case. Too bad btrfs is still years from stable.

Oh I wouldn't worry about that. We've only had radio for less than 150 years. How many stars are there within a 150 ly radius? By the time the very first signal from Earth reaches the center of the galaxy, the human kind may have long destroyed itself.

The belief in extraterrestrial life is at least based on the observation that life exists on Earth, and the number of stars and planets like our Sun and Earth in the universe is .. astronomical.

The belief in God has no such basis.

Yes, I did, it does not work, they are able to distinguish VPN from HTTPS traffic. Their detection scheme doesn't seem to care about the port number.

I find SSH tunneling to be much less efficient than OpenVPN. With OpenVPN I can have a more-or-less usable remote VNC desktop from Beijing to New York, which is not possible using SSH tunneling.

Anyway, that is not a real solution, as there is nothing to prevent them from cutting off SSH connections when they feel like it. There is no technical solution to a political problem.

I was just in Beijing for two weeks. I have access to two OpenVPN servers, one in New York another in California. These are personal servers so they aren't on the IP based blacklist. However, my connection from Beijing to either of the two would crap out after a day or two, and the only remedy was to change the OpenVPN server port.

It seems right now they update their blacklist every 24~48 hours. I did not test whether the amount of traffic (idle vs. busy) would affect the time it takes them to block you. Blacklists last longer than two weeks, as the original ports I used was still blocked by the time I left. SSH connections does not seem to be affected at this time.

Not only that, even with the Xeon line which are supposed to have ECC support, they still flip the middle finger at you by crippling the "lower-end" E3 line to only support unbuffered ECC, not registered ECC.

If you're doing virtualization then the number of cores do matter a lot.

Yes, because the 1.3 billion Chinese are a borg-like entity, collectively known as "China", sharing a single hive mind and bent on a single purpose -- to destroy the US and the "West"!

Your fantasies aside, what you refer to as "China" is really the Chinese Communist Government, the current ruling entity in the country known as China. It has been in power for a little over 60 years, and unless helped by, ironically, people like you, it is extremely unlikely to see another 60 in power. (Coincidentally, the communists would never even have risen to power in the first place without the help of the Japanese invasion at a crucial point in the Chinese civil war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March )

If China really does view the West as threat, it is only because the history of the past one hundred and fifty years taught it to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Summer_Palace#Destruction_of_the_Summer_Palace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong_Problem

Oh please....

The reality of the situation in China is that the government is under _huge_ pressure to drop the draconian population control policy, aka one-child policy. However, there is no sign from the regime that it would even consider budging on this issue. So if anything, they have an incentive to _overstate_ the population, rather than understate it.

The other reality is that hundreds of elementary schools rural areas were closed down over the past few years due to not having enough school kids. Class rooms that once hold 40 children were down to 5, so the local gov simply closed the under attended schools and moved the children into bigger schools in towns, forcing some kids to travel great distances just to get to school everyday. The Hong Kong based Phoenix media ran a documentary on this a couple of years ago, which for some reason, was not aired in mainland China.

Yes, they will be blocked, just like how all the websites who do not paint the Chinese government positively are blocked in China, which are often hosted offshore where Chinese law enforcement agencies cannot touch them.

And if they don't even bother prosecuting those selling counterfeit goods in Chinatown in broad day light, what sense does it make to give them such broad power to censor the Internet in the name of curbing IP theft?

Won't be so easy if "what you believe in" happens to have rounded rectangles, or god knows what else might be considered "violating Apple patents".

Indeed. But nobody is making a fuss about Apple making people happy, the fuss is about Apple actively trying to make life miserable for those that aren't "one of them".

Perhaps by being more productive per labor?

...badly.

[quote]This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world. Doomed to failure, but that won't stop the "visionaries." They should instead of focusing on having much better driving schools, much more stringent driving exams and recurring examinations. I find it ridiculous that having passed two laughable exams, I can now drive my car and ride my bike FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE (or at least for the next 50 years) without any retest.[/quote]

It doesn't matter if you take one driving test during your lifetime or a thousand, the Google robot driver will still be at least a hundred times safer than you.

Driving is a mundane task, one which requires constant attention, and thus by nature humans suck at it. Driving requires zero creativity and imagination, so human minds should really be put to better use elsewhere.