I'm not a kernel hacker, just yet, but it is a personal goal that I've been working towards for a while now. I don't get a chance to work on anything deeply linux at work, but I've seen some shortcomings in the kernel that I'd like to rectify. One example is the lack of a "Ready Boost" like cache, but a bit beefier, utilizing SSD's to alow large databses to run at SSD speed for writes and cached reads while gaining the benefit of cheap spinning disk storage. This is a LOT of theory work and deep kernel driver stuff that I'm glad to learn on my own time.
I might be unique, or perhaps the fact that I'm not actively DOING it makes me another statistic, but i think the kernel is a worthwhile cause.

Perhaps she's waiting to see who offers the better deal. All the prosecutor can offer is staying out of jail. If there are enough bigshots behind this, it could mean a very comfortable retirement.

I know one guy who got caught as the patsy for some company wrongdoing. He spent a few months in jail, paid a few hundred K$ in fines. But for admitting to being the sole actor in the crime, he's now better off than he would have ever been working as a corporate officer until retirement.

I saw this news item as well, albeit at PhysOrg, which has linked a few interesting related articles. From the comments, it struck me that a concern is indeed the possibility that stray particles from applying this stuff might get into your lungs or on your eyes, causing all sorts of problems since it apparently binds well to organic substances. Also, one wonders what happens if the coating is degraded on food-handling surfaces. Do fragmented microparticles rip up your insides after being carried into your body within contaminated food?

Even with these concerns, of course, I'd love to test this stuff on various less risky surfaces, such as bathroom tiles and shop tools, with appropriate respiratory and eye protection. Being able to use it on a kitchen countertop would just be a welcome bonus if it turns out to be safe for that use after all. (As an aside, I think that use wouldn't breed resistant bacteria since it simply discourages any bacteria at all from growing on the protected surfaces).

Well, perhaps not as often. I'm married and I regularly masturbate to keep the pipes clear and get rid of idle sperm, much like you'd urinate or defecate. They're produced all the time and just sit in the gland waiting to be sent on their way. They are busy little guys though so the prostate needs to be emptied regularly. No point in having all those little guys causing trouble in the prostate.

Since the wife is not interested in sex any more (for various reasons), I have to do something with the sperm so out they go :)

[John]

starting at certain bitrates, there's simply not enough processing power to apply compression.
modern general purpose CPU can gzip at just tens of megabytes per second, simpler and less effective algorithms may give you couple hundred MBytes/sec, which is still just a couple Gb/s.

now imagine you have couple dozen 10 gig ports, in and out. and that's just the beginning, some high-end gear has 100+ 10G ports, all lit.
specialized ASICs can help, but they're not free either and ultimately don't take you very far, especially after throwing in all that memory required for processing.
all in all, none of the high-end routing or switching gear does compression nowadays, it's simply not worth it, in dollars and milliseconds of added latency.

Put another way, that would be gobbling up an Earth-shattering 2.83% of the RAM in the desktop I'm typing this on. They should drop everything and get that down to no more than 1.4% of my installed RAM.

Yeah, I know: best practices, bloat, netbooks, old computers, etc. Those are all perfectly valid reasons why all software should be well-crafted and should limit wasted resources. I just can't get excited about the raw numbers involved in this case.

It's the culture, stupid. Spend a few hours in front of TV in America and it will be clear that something's seriously wrong if that's what passes for entertainment.

I like the way you think.

It's very different from the support centers that I call with hardware problems - like when an update bricked my router - that suggested I:

a) re-install Linux to fix the problem,
alternately, b) don't use a Mac, because they don't do REAL networking,
c) if I were only using Windows, I wouldn't be having this problem,

and my favorite -

d) I must be lying because no one has three operating systems in their house - and if I do, then maybe that's what bricked my router.

But - as I said, I like the way you think, and I wish them many good lucks with this endeavor.

It's fascinating to me that so many people readily make excuses for companies/corporations as if they weren't made up of people who individually would not get the same benefit of the doubt. That's some pretty strong Kool aid the marketers have managed to foist upon the world.

Hard drives don't really get a lot of air circulation through them. They generally have a single hole in the case to allow for pressure equalization, and many have a spongy filter over them so the air exchange with the drive is very minor.

Fans are somewhat designed for it. Fans deal with everything in the air anyway, and have to keep dust out by design since they'll see the highest amount of it, so their design naturally reduces the amount of air that reaches the critical parts. With that said, fans around pets and smokers DO fail sooner on average in my experience.