Hmm. The plutonium-based design was tested, but not the U-235 design. Should have read the entire entry. Fascinating, scary stuff.

Eh?

What was the Trinity Test then?

Oh, you... With your "logic" and "facts". Way to ruin a rant, Pointdexter.

I grabbed a Samsung BD-P2500 around a year ago. Kinda wishing I'd waited another 6 months or so, but I wanted to stop watching Netflix on the xbox360 (all that electricity was mostly being wasted as heat and shortening the MTBRROD).

Anyhow, we canceled cable altogether last month. I built an attic antenna for OTA HDTV but haven't bothered to put together a recorder for that content. Mostly we use OTA for football and PBS stuff like NOVA. The rest of our content comes from Netflix, MS (via Live), and iTunes (via a macbook that is connected with an HDMI adapter). The main obstacle we had to overcome was the irrational resistance to purchasing content which had previously been "free".

I'm convinced that a la carte programming will the the norm in less than 10 years... Either by per-episode payments or via a subscription model. Content providers will have to work harder to find money to fund new programs, but I'm sure they'll figure it out. Broadcast TV (and radio) are going to have a harder and harder time competing as technology for accessing the long tail becomes easier and easier for average consumers to use. Hell, my wife's parents have been streaming content from Netflix since I bought them a Roku box last xmas... They're into their 70s and took to it very quickly.

ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.

Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.

Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH. ;P

To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:

root@host:~# zfs list tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K /tank

What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:

root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www

I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:

root@host:~# zfs create -s -V16G -o shareiscsi=on tank/vol/build_centos5.4-x86_64

Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot ...
drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/ ...my homedir contents from 11:00...

There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.

That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and ... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.

Ah, one of the great philosophical quandaries: Where Am I?

I read this in Philosophy 101 (15-odd years ago) and it blew my mind then. I like to re-read it every few years.

The movie is "Office Space", you retard.

(yeah, Powertalk!)

Care to provide any supporting information for your assertion that organic farmers use "older and much more toxic" pesticides? Talk about pure bullshit...

Here's what the EPA has to say about it.

As for the issue of pesticide residue, I'm sure that the amount of pesticide residue for a given piece of produce usually falls below some FDA threshold, and I'm sure that washing produce helps even more. The point I was trying to make, though, was not that pesticides are eeeeevil. They have their place in agriculture, but there is growing evidence that they are being overused. In short, heavy use of pesticides (and fertilizers) is not sustainable agriculture.

When you need to dose the shit out of your plants (killing pollenating insects and doing other harm to the biosphere) to keep them from being eaten alive, you're doing it wrong. Your crops are too dense. When you need to pour on the fertilizer to make up for the fact that you've pulled all the nutrients out of the soil, you're doing it wrong. It's not sustainable. You're reliant on Monsanto for your engineered seed + RoundUp and Saudi Arabia for your petro-based fertilizers.

My concern is not based in some wooly-headed "o noes chemicals" fear. I would sign up to have a neighborhood-sized pebble-bed nuke plant next to my backyard if I could. I just believe that we can choose better ways to do things.

As I thought I made clear in my original post, my motivation for buying Organic food is not specifically for a perceived superiority in taste. High-quality produce is high-quality produce regardless of whether or not it's Organic. Meat, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax.

As an example, the "free range" chicken breasts I buy are far and away superior in taste and texture to the premium conventional breasts I buy every once in a while (depending on which grocery I get to). I usually make a chicken vindaloo several times a month (sometimes twice a week if we're fixated), and my wife can always tell when I've bought the Perdue chicken. I'd be willing to believe that it's simply a matter of freshness, but given the consistent discrepancy I'm not so sure. I know that often the factory chicken producers inject their meat with saline to plump it up, so maybe that's it... Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that one set of chickens is crammed into a pen so small they can't turn around and fed growth hormones their whole (short) lives, and the others are allowed to develop somewhat normally. I dunno. I don't really care -- I'm willing to pay more for chicken that tastes good.

As for steak... Have you ever had real grass-fed steak? The marbling is totally different. There's tons more flavor without needing to dress up the meat. If you haven't tried it, try to find some (e.g. at Whole Foods or a real butcher). Anyhow, I'm happy to pay more for the hunks of red meat we get once a month or whatever, knowing that I'm supporting sustainably-produced and local beef (Wolfe's Neck Farm).

My point, again, is not that I think progress is evil or that we should all return to hunter/gatherer society or something. I just think that if more people choose to support sustainable agriculture, it will be better for all of us in the long run. But I know that for some people "sustainable" or "organic" are watchwords for hippy libruls smokin' dope and trying to take away guns or whatever.

This is a really REALLY important point for just about anyone, really. I suppose it's a rehash of the old aphorism: "Know your audience." It took me a while, but eventually I learned that most people (even technical people) really don't care that much about the gory details and supporting data. Boil it all down into factoids and front-load your presentation, email, whatever with the simple stuff. If people want more, they'll ask for it.

Really, it works. And it often leads to quicker meetings. You have to be able to back up your factoids with real data, of course, but over time people will learn to trust your high-level analysis and not ask for more (unless you're awful at it, in which case you've got other problems).

Speaking as someone who never cooked anything more complicated than an omelette until I got married, I have to point out that it can be overwhelming to start. I married a half-italian woman who also works full-time. After we started a family, those two factors contributed toward me taking over for dinner duties and really putting effort into it. Over the past six years, I've found that I really enjoy the whole process, from selecting ingredients through savoring a meal that I made myself. Sure, it eats an hour or two of my day, but I can listen to NPR and drink wine while I'm doing it. If you don't have family responsibilities forcing you to take charge of your food, find some other motivation...

If nothing else, going through the process of selecting fresh ingredients, preparing them, and assembling them into a meal really makes it very difficult to ever rationalize eating crap "food" that comes out of containers. Unfortunately, it also resets one's standards for what makes an excellent restaurant meal. I know that I can cook tasty thai, indian, italian, french whatever stuff at home and therefore I'm not impressed when restaurants throw a bunch of stuff on a plate and charge $30 for an entree.

It usually does taste much better, and it is common sense that eating foods which haven't been doused with pesticides is better for you. Irrespective of those arguments, the weight of which vary wildly from person to person, I think that eating certified Organic foods is morally superior. I know, that sounds awfully hippy-dippy, but what cemented it for me was an article which pointed out that organic foods cost more because they're more expensive to produce. Duh, but why? Well, it's because they're produced in a sustainable fashion. The farmers can't use pesticides, so crop density has to be lower. The farmers can't use certain classes of fertilizers, so the yields are smaller. The animals are free-range and not crammed full of growth hormones and antibiotics, so it takes longer to grow fewer of them.

The result of choosing organic produce and meats is that we eat less meat. In my mind, this is a good thing. As a society, we've allowed the agribusiness industry to externalize costs, which results in artificially reduced prices for their products. They don't account for the increased societal health costs of a corn- and meat-heavy diet. They don't account for the pollution that results from factory farming (Fertilizer Runoff, Pigshit Lagoons, etc.), and they're doing it all with nice juicy federal subsidies. What is wrong with us?? We're paying them (via taxes and at the grocery store) to make us less healthy!!

I know that many people don't have the luxury of spending more for their calories. My family is fortunate enough that we can. I look at it as an investment in our own health and as an investment in sustainable agriculture. I'm under no illusions that we'll ever make factory farming go away, but if enough informed consumers choose to pay more for better product, then we'll at least put pressure on Big Ag to clean themselves up.

I believe you might be referring to the Channeled Scablands in Washington State? I remember seeing a documentary about that. Interesting stuff. The research happened a bit later than the 1800s, unless you're referring to something else. More pictures and information.

Yes. I never claimed that government regulation was perfect, and in fact I am often frustrated by the incredible amount of waste and buffoonery that goes on in the sausage factory that is government.

As you admit, though, government has had a more positive role on policing the commons than any other single entity. As someone who lives in the extreme Northeastern US, I benefit greatly from the clean air laws that "shackle" hard-working coal factory owners across the midwest who are upwind from us. We still deal with increased levels of mercury in our water which has been shown to be a direct result of coal-based power generation, but it's not nearly as bad as it could be (and used to be!).

Have you ever visited a national park? You can thank the government for them. Think private industry would provide that kind of resource, even if it could? You're naive if you do.

Finally, I'll grant that congress-critters are often corrupt and in the pocket of various industries. The beauty (ok, that's the wrong word for it) of the system is that they're mostly in DIFFERENT pockets. There Is No Cabal. Unions vs. owners, Big Pharma vs. Big Insurance vs. AMA, etc. True, the little guy often gets short shrift, but it's the best system we've managed to come up with so far, human nature being what it is.

The environment is not king of everything, people.

Trying to understand your point, here, but all I'm taking away from the rest of your rant is that you hate the gub'mint sticking its big-city nose in your hard-working rural business.

Since you're seemingly intelligent enough to work a computer, I'll assume you can figure out how to research something called the tragedy of the commons, if you're not already familiar with the concept.

I'll grant that there are some "hollywood moonbats" who "worship the environment" or something... But in reality what's happening is that government is the only thing that can force people to avoid short-sighted total exploitation of non- or slowly-renewing resources. It doesn't always work out perfectly, but I have greater faith in science-based policy implemented by government organizations than I do in individual wisdom when it comes to shared resources.

You seem extremely hostile to the idea that government might make better long-term choices than individuals. What's your solution to the problems of overfishing, pollution, hill-cutting mining, clear-cut logging, etc? Let the market sort it out somehow? Trust that Jebus will come back soon so our children's children won't have to deal with a polluted world barren of species diversity? What?

<dr. nick>Inflammable means flammable?!? What a country!</dr. nick>

Bingo!

If you want to be valued by management as anything other than a necessary evil, then you absolutely MUST be directly connected to revenue generation. I realized this about 6 years ago and exited IT near the top (my own department with several minions, budget, etc.)... It was kinda fun, but I could see that doing it for another 20 years was going to be a drag. Clawing my way into middle management didn't really appeal, either.

As a (good?) sysadmin, I wrote lots of tools and libraries to automate stuff to make my life easier. So, I used connections and have reinvented myself as a developer (C and Ruby mostly). I'm back to where I was at the top in IT, salary-wise (large metro area, not west bumblefuck), and these days I suffer from too many options, rather than not enough. It's a good problem to have. Not having to wear an electronic leash anymore is pretty nice, too.