iPhone's are for hipsters. OSX is certified UNIX running on rock solid, high performance hardware. Don't confuse the two.

I used Linux exclusively for fifteen years. I've contributed to many open source projects, including the Linux kernel, and I'm the maintainer of Linux::LVM and other projects. In other words, I'm a fan of Linux. From one fan of Linux to another, don't dismiss OSX just because the same company makes overpriced toys as well. It's a solid UNIX which will run all of your favorite FOSS software, and do it well.

You're saying locks are useless because they are used? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Locks and polygraphs can both be beaten. I say that doesn't make them useless.

> Iove how you are [were] a locksmith *and* a magician

As a kid, I got into magic. I studied the most famous magician of all, Houdini. Houdini was famous as an escape artist, he'd get out of handcuffs, locked boxes and jail cells. I studied to be like Houdini. That's how my weekend magician gigs lead directly to a short stint working as a locksmith. Fyi, almost all magicians are *and* a day job. A magic show is a 30 minute event on a Friday or Saturday. Magician's don't work 9-5 except the ONE guy with the CBS contract (Henning, Copperfield) and three in Vegas.

From locksmithing and "tricking people" (magic) I got into security, which is my long-term career.

Snapshots can certainly be part of a backup system, and the btrfs variety can be a convenient local "undo" step, similar to the undo in your editor. The way they function is not appropriate for offsite backups, though, not without a solid validation regime anyway.

The problem with btrfs snapshots is that if data is corrupted at any point, that data silently remains corrupted in future snapshots because they are copy-on-write. Suppose, for example, that your backup of your httpd.conf file gets corrupted at any point. If you take a snapshot, the "new" version is actually the old version - still corrupted. You then rsync from the source. Rsync looks at the mtime and because the file isn't marked as changed on the source, it doesn't get synced. All backups are still corrupted. For a litle while, you might have a copy from before the corruption, but eventually that ages out and you're left with nothing but corrupted data. I'm not theorizing on this point. I learned this lesson the hard way.

You've brought up some interesting topics. I bet you could ask some really good questions regarding the topics you mentioned. Instead, you chose to make ludicrous assumptions, assuming answers to the questions you could have asked.

Do you have any reason to make any of those assumptions? What makes you think some companies, such as a certain insurance company, don't run Clonebox on-site, mirroring between their facilities? Are you familiar with the datacenter choices available with Clonebox, including the underground nuclear bunker?

Do you think it's even POSSIBLE to offer that service at that price WITHOUT deduplication?

Do you somehow think you know anything at all about the media used?

That's a higher quality response than often found here on /. when someone refutes a post, thank you.

> if it is possible to fool the polygraph it leaves no doubt that the polygraph is not scientific or useful

Your eyes can be fooled. Therefore they are not useful? Locks can be picked. Therefore they are not useful?

I used to work as a magician and a locksmith, so I can fool your eyes, and your locks. Now that you know your eyes can be fooled and are therefore useless, you're getting rid of them I guess?

If your eyes tell you that I just put your watch in my pocket, that's PROBABLY true. If a polygraph tells you that a stole your watch, it's probably right. Witnesses and polygraphs are about equally reliable.

"rsync at midnight". At 8:00 AM, discover that your filesystem got hosed at 10:00 PM, so you now have two copies of garbage.

Do not just sync periodically. Approximately everyone I've seen try that method got screwed in the end. They'd discover that they got rooted two weeks before, they'd overwritten an important file two days before, etc. You must ROTATE and then sync to be doing anything more than pretending that you have a backup.
me.

The attributes of a good backup system:

Backups must be fully automatic, otherwise you'll stop doing them regularly.

Backups should be rotated. A midnight backup is useless if you are hacked at 11:55 PM, or discover a problem 2 days later. You must have access to older backups.

Backups must be offsite. Fires and burglars will take your backup if it is on site.

Backups must be accessible. As OP said, spending two weeks downloading your data isn't acceptable.

Backups must be tested. Our experience with web servers indicates that approximately 60% of backups provided by hosting providers don't actually work when you try to restore them

To meet all of the above requirements, we use an enterprise grade system called Clonebox. Other systems may be more applicable for home use.

I have three options I'll present for you. One matches your headline, one is cheap, and one is really, really solid.

The option that most matches your headline would be to use a WIFI NAS at the next door neighbor's house. Use any of the many good backup software packages. More on what a "good" backup system is in a moment.

Something I used to do was have two external drives. On Mondays, I'd switch out the drive in the house for the one in the car, which would go to work with me. The drawback to that is it's not fully automatic, so sometimes I'd forget or be in a rush. That leads us to the attributes of a good backup system:

Backups must be fully automatic, otherwise you'll stop doing them regularly.

Backups should be rotated. A midnight backup is useless if you are hacked at 11:55 PM, or discover a problem 2 days later. You must have access to older backups.

Backups must be offsite. Fires and burglars will take your backup if it is on site.

Backups must be accessible. As you said, spending two weeks downloading your data isn't acceptable.

Backups must be tested. Our experience with web servers indicates that approximately 60% of backups provided by hosting providers don't actually work when you try to restore them

To meet all of the above requirements, we use an enterprise grade system. It may be overkill for your needs, but then again the $8 / month version may be just what you want. It provides several offsite backups from different points in time and they are BOOTABLE. You can pull down a file or two, run a program or service remotely, or restore a full system.

3-4 Mbps to transfer 1TB is no good, as you said, but you actually have 200 Mbps available if you use the system we use. If you need the entire 1 TB, not just a small part of it, the whole 1TB bootable drive will be delivered to your front door within 12 hours. You may know the old saying "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full if tapes.". With a 1TB drive, the bandwidth of FedEX is over 200 Mbps.

What we use is called Clonebox. It's designed more for business, but it may either work for you, or give you some ideas.

Those are both problems. SOLVED problems.

> with wealthier students would try paying their teachers more(and so being able to get the best ones), while the schools that had poorer students

Instead of handing $10,000 of tax money to whichever school is nearest the student, the money goes to the school that the parents choose. It's thesame money being spent today. The only difference is that in order to get the money and students, schools need to not suck. We have a limited form of this where Ilive and it works well.

In fact, where I live not only do we have GOOD schools that students and parents can choose, they can choose the one that's best FOR THEIR CHILD. We have a high school for the arts, a collegiate high school where students graduate with an associate's degree, etc. All are tuition free - as public schools, they are financed by taxes

> raising the class size to 100

Schools here haven't tried that because if they did, students wouldn't choose that school. What they have done is ask students who are leaving "why are you choosing the other school?" They look at what works in the next school to see if it would work for them. Sometimes they decide to emulate the other school, sometimes it's different strokes for different folks. The science academy, for example, doesn't try to be just like the school for the arts.

>

I could post examples of questions created by instructional designers at the government agency I work for that are also horrible. Neither government nor private companies have a monopoly on stupid.

The big difference is that if a private company sells crap, purchasers can switch to a better vendor. If the government mandates garbage, you're screwed.

Perhaps Pearson is full of blithering idiots. A course I took with Pearson content suggests they don't train people in writing quiz questions.

MY point is that Pearson didn't write common core, so Pearson's bad qquestions in no way reflect on common core. Common core may be bad because most things dictated from on high aren't great, but TFA's examples of Pearson questions tell us nothing about common core.

As for idiot mistakes, maybe Pearson is a bunch of idiots, but maybe not. I consistently score in the top 0.1% on any test, and I make idiot mistakes more often than I care to admit. I took a programming certification exam recently. When I gave the certification agency some feedback, they hired me to go through the entire test bank and improve it. When I was done, they paid me a bonus for doing a good job. So I'm a good programmer, right? Yesterday I completely screwed up the fire school by making a dumb programming mistake after my boss had already warned me about the problem. So even the best of us produce crap occasionally.

I believe the point is that the people near the top of the NSA, those managing major projects, do their work with a (sometimes misguided) sense that they are protecting their country.

Someone outsourced to cobble together a hundred archaic government systems for some other country is more likely to be simply punching the clock. They COULD do better work, and probably would if they believed their job was essential to protect their nation's freedom.

You know we're in trouble when the best that can be said about the sitting president is to compare
him to a top 5 worst president and still Obama comes out worse. "He has less experience than Bush" isn't a compliment, my friend.

The top five worst presidents would include Filmore, Harrison, Bush, Obama, and another of your choosing. In many ways, including executive experience, Obama is the worst of the "worst five". Compare him to a good president like Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Eisenhower ...

"Billion+ dollar data center"
Well it's certainly not suprising that government spent a lot of money. They may well have spent a billion and ended up with a DC worth $10 million. As far as we know, their DC capacity may be the same as what Amazon and Google build for 94% less money

Most likely, though, people with experience in similar signals intelligence speced out a project that would actually meet their expansion needs, probably part of a ten year plan to reach X capacity. That's a different beast than politicians saying "my next election depends on building a giant federal bureaucracy in no more than three years".

> "within 20 to solve word" ..
> DOE should have more say

The people who wrote that should have MORE control over elementary curriculum? No thanks.

Over the last 60 years, DOE has had more and more involvement. As their involvement has increased, US scores have fallen further and further compared to other countries.

On the other hand, if students and parents could choose between two or three nearby schools, the schools that suck wouldn't get any students. There would be an incentive for each school to improve.

For optimal results, those two or three schools would be able to try slightly different methods to find ways that work better. For teachers compensation, one might focus on seniority, another on subjective evaluation of teachers, and another on results of standardized testing. Parents could send their kid to the school that works the best. To have the flexibility that optimal results require, DOE's role would be limited to providing parents with guidance on choosing the best school, such as by reporting graduation rates, test averages, etc.