I *wish* there was a tinnitus shot.

Nope, DC and VA both prohibit them, but they're OK in MD.

Why was this modded troll? AC may or may not be demonstrably wrong, but was he trolling?

And I argue just fine, by the way. I seldom actually lose. I have been wrong time to time, but not all that often.

In any case, just so you won't have to look it up, here is part of what Thomas wrote:

"The fact that the federal government has the authority to imprison a person for the purpose of punishing him for a federal crime -- sex-related or otherwise -- does not provide the government with the additional power to exercise indefinite civil control over that person."

Pretty much what I was saying, all along. As I stated before, I was fully expecting people to claim I was full of BS. The reason is because much of the history that many of us were taught in school was either a distortion or a gross oversimplification. Sure, slavery was an issue in the civil war. But it wasn't THE issue. The war was not mainly about slavery (even though politicians claimed it was). The main reason was simple economics.

Why is any gov't willing to settle for an arrangement where a vendor agrees to provide specifics regarding the nature of a product's flaws rather than questioning why to use the product at all? And mind you, this is after two decades of a lot of knowledgable people saying said product is flawed by design, by implementation & both to such a degree that it can never be safe.

In regards to point 3, one can still be responsible while staying up with the latest hardware. When I decide it's time to build a new PC my current one either goes to server or media duty, whatever gets replaced goes to my parents as it's still a decent upgrade for them and will last awhile for what they're going to use it for. Whichever PC they replace either goes to some of their friends or they donate it to a local charity that will make use of it.

Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.

The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.

If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!

This is mostly a joke, but not 100% a joke. I sincerely hope it's not true. However, the thought occurs to me that maybe this "key" is nothing more than, say, a copy of Windows 98 on floppy discs. Seriously, without more information about this supposed "key" we have no way to know if those involved actually did include something that might really be useful to future generations who want to get at the data or if they did something as stupid as what I suggested.

If we assume that your fingerprint is assembled wholly at your side, then I would say you are RELATIVELY safe from it being disassembled into components that could compromise your realworld identity. One way to make the fingerprint irreversible like that is to encrypt it with a throw-away random key, also at client side. The unique but absolutely meaningless string arriving at the other end will uniquely identify YOUR END, NOT YOU. You can continue shopping and surfing porn, and all they got is a random string. If the porn site wants a fingerprint, they will get another value which will also identify you ACROSS THEIR DOMAIN. The two parties will not be able to cross-correlate their "databases" for any result. They will each contain a database of non-colliding pieces of data, one per each unique user, but they will not make any sense of comparing these.

Good points... I am not sure, though, that the issues you mentioned necessarily reflect the cultural ideas. They represent issues that ended up changing the culture, but did that represent the culture at the time?

I would argue that because TV has to make a profit based on their viewing audience, they have to cater to said viewing audience, which means they typically have to provide shows that the viewing audience likes and/or identifies with. It's interesting to note when the shows you mentioned went off the air, presumably due to profitability. I don't remember seeing many of the happily-married-couple-with-2.5-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence TV shows after the 60s.

Of course, I'm not any sort of expert on this in the least. It's mostly just from watching and listening to (e.g., music or radio shows) media from those decades and observing how they changed throughout the decades. There WAS a big shift, as you say, in the 60s with regards to sexuality. And that, I think, was pretty clearly portrayed in er, consumer media (TV, music, movies). (Example: not being allowed to show a husband and wife in the same bed in TV shows, hence having separate twin/double beds ... e.g., in the Dick Van Dyke show, Laura and Rob had separate beds).

Just like unpopular speech is still free, Slashdot posts aren't modded up for correctness or popularity. They're modded up for being interesting and well-communicated. Just because someone's wrong doesn't mean they should be modded down. I want to see the comments with which I disagree, so I can argue with them. Which is what happened here. I was actually meta-moderating, and your comment came up. I just had to jump in.

Does using RAID controllers actually provide superior price:performance to using software RAID? Last I checked, the processors on most cheap RAID controllers were slower than dogshit and using md under Linux would give you better performance than basically any of them, at the cost of some CPU. But since CPU is cheaper than RAID, it probably makes sense. For example, going from a Phenom II X3 720 to a Phenom II X6 chip of the same clock rate takes the CPU from $100 to $200. How much would it cost to go from four crappy RAID controllers to four good ones? It would probably cost you at least $400.

The answer is probably to just go ahead and install Debian on a machine with as many CPU cores as you want to blow money on, and to use software raid. Put lots of system RAM in it, which the OS will automatically use for disk buffers. Current versions of grub work fine with USB keys, because they can use UUID for the groot, and the UUID never changes. If you want it to boot quickly, find a motherboard with coreboot support. If you want external disks you can use firewire cheaper than eSATA, if you get the external disks or just some enclosures at a good price. It makes maintenance a lot easier, but involves substantial power waste due to all those inefficient wall warts.

P.S. OpenSolaris is circling the drain, please don't suggest it to anyone for anything.

Actually NTFS is pretty good at keeping files unfragmented.

If a program opens a new file and them immediately seeks to the end of it to fix it's size then NTFS will look for a continuous block of free space to save it in. NTFS caches all writes so it can wait to see what the program actually does with a file before committing it to disk.

It also has a system designed to reduce the fragmenting effects of small files by being able to store their data in the same block as their metadata.

The only major fragmentation problem Windows XP has is when a machine has very little RAM and it allocates a rather small page file. It then ends up needing to expand the page file repeatedly and it gets highly fragmented causing severe slow down. I think they fixed it in Vista/7 by simply specifying a sensible minimum size and expanding it in larger chunks.

What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.