if you tell a lie often enough....

... then some nutjob, who thinks he's the last sane person on the earth, will fill in the details of how the lie is true, and then believe it absolutely and unconditionally?

The slashdot crowd is supposed to be very US centric though...we would never "whinge" about anything.

IMO there are 3 significant facts:

1) We cannot prove/disprove Global Warming in a satisfactory way, if we wait for proof then the time to react in either direction will have passed.

2) CO2 either DOES or DOES NOT affect the environment as a whole, ultimately it has become a political football.

3) We ARE treating the earth like a whore.

There is nothing we can do about the first 2 facts.

I don't know if you ever applied for a scholarship or a school that wanted an essay, but let me tell you how it works:

Every one who's writing KNOWS exactly what the person reading it is looking for, and embellishes their life experience to fit that, thus making themselves look as good as possible. So you end up with the best bullshitters winning.

I would definitely love to live longer then 100 years, but consider what would happen if a person could live indefinitely. they'd have to have some pile of savings to support themselves, they'd have to have a pile of people in the supporting generation to support them or they'd have to continue to work as long as you were alive.

#3 sounds fine to me. Work for 30 years, take a mini-retirement for 3 years, then start a different career, repeat as often as you like. If your body and mind stay healthy there's no reason for permanent retirement.

Kind of. It has to boost altitude, on average, more than 200 meters per day, just to keep up. Over and above that, yes anything will do.

There is also a scheduling issue. Currently they burn chemical thrusters every month for a couple hours. That means no "microgravity environment" for less than 1% of the time. That is OK, 99% of the time is good enough for experiments, etc. Now, if the fancy new vasmir can only boost 400 meters per 24 hours of continuous operation, then just to keep up with atmospheric drag, it absolutely must run 1/2 of the time, meaning you only get that fancy microgravity environment for 1/2 of the time. Also with respect to maintenance and reliability, that means it has to be operational about half the time or better. And finally, a 1% of the time activity means direct astronaut operation/intervention is possible, but there is not the staffing to baby sit a low thrust engine literally half the time, so it has to be highly automated.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080213164432/http://pdlprod3.hosc.msfc.nasa.gov/D-aboutiss/D6.html

"Reboost mode is necessary because the Station's large cross-section and low altitude causes its orbit to decay due to atmospheric drag at an average rate of 0.2 km/day (0.1 n mi/day)."

Let me spell it out for you:

Right now, my LAN is a switch, with two things plugged into it: My server and my laptop. If either of those are compromised, I'm hosed anyway.

If I were to plug a vulnerable machine in, it's still a switched network, which means sniffing is impossible -- they'd have to actively MITM me, somehow without my server noticing. (DNS tricks are right out, as I refer to the server by IP.)

Phoronix loves doing this. Last time, they compared a beta version of FreeBSD to a release of Ubuntu. The debugging definitely hurts performance.
I complained about this once, but a bunch of teenage kids started saying, "Ubuntu R0X0RS!"
I'm not sure where people got the idea that benchmarks are the one and only metric for comparing OSes. When Ubuntu doesn't win a benchmark in one of their OS shootouts, they'll have some explanation why that doesn't mean a lot.
I think they're still reeling from that time around 1999 or 2000 when NT4 trounced a redhat tuned linux in web server performance. It seems to me that OS X is the real desktop competition for Linux, and that OS X is winning "the hearts and minds" of the users. I'm sure Ubuntu can beat OS X (wasn't there a phoronix shootout about this?) in most benchmarks, but that doesn't matter if desktop users generally prefer OS X.
I suspect it would be useful to have more articles about what is needed to improve in Linux on the desktop... but to be fair, phoronix is just a benchmark, so that would be out of their scope.

You didn't answer my question.

I'm not asking how you would subvert the system.

I'm asking how you would profit from subverting the system.

Yes, Twitter is insecure. And?

Hehe. Actually, her old car died months ago and she put off getting a new one as long as she could. She's been bike-commuting and using public transportation, but there comes a time (namely Minnesotan Winter) and a place (namely the Twin Cities public-transport-weak suburbs) where that becomes impractical.

So she's getting a small and efficient car and will use it as little as possible.

That makes much more sense. With about 4TB of disk space between the two computers, it'd be difficult to store a trillion numbers (considering that they'd need to be more than 32 bit integers).

They might be stored as a bitmap. That would take only 10^12/8 = less than a terabyte of space. Or they might store them as successive differences, which would require only 3x10^9*8 = around 30 gigabytes. Of course, the latter would be a lot harder to work with. Depends on how you wanted to use the results, I guess.

I don't even have a problem paying by the story if the charge is 1 or 2 cents. But as clueless as most newspapers and old media are, I suspect they'll do something monumentally stupid like trying to charge big subscription fees ("All you can eat for $100 a year!")or trying to charge $1 or more per story. They won't get the lesson that iTunes taught to the old media in music (that the old $15-a-CD model is dead but that people will still pay a REASONABLE amount to buy a song). They need a shift in thinking.

I always thought that building drivers into the kernel was going to be Linux's downfall. There is an un-ending supply of equipment that requires drivers and they can't all go into the kernel without some repercussions. Let alone being a black hole that continually sucks up stuff and never deletes it. This design may work well for a small system with limited hardware but is doomed to fail at some point when trying to scale it up for the real world.

I haven't seen anyone in this thread mention SymForm http://www.symform.com/, which may well be an ideal solution for your situation. This is a fairly new startup operation founded by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers that manages a cooperative cloud backup platform. You'll need to do some reading of the whitepapers on their website to wrap your brain around the concept, but the gist of the idea is that you configure your spare storage device (like your Drobo box) to form a node that connects to the cooperative cloud, which is comprised of free disk space on the spare storage devices (SAN, NAS, external SATA drives, etc.) of the other members of the cloud. With 5,000-10,000 other nodes sharing exabytes of free disk space, there is plenty of capacity for all the members of the cooperative, and as the cloud is distributed worldwide, there is no single point of failure to worry about. The data is fragmented in such a way that it is distributed randomly across multiple nodes (in a system they call RAID-96) so that no single node in the network contains a complete copy of your data. You pay a flat monthly fee to join the cloud, and your data is encrypted by your node and backed up incrementally over your network connection. It may take a while to get your first full backup transmitted, but after that, the bandwidth is used only for deltas. It's kind of a brilliant idea that blew me away the first time I heard about it.

The truth of the matter is simply that the perps know you (as a police officer) can not shoot them unless they are offering deadly force against you or another. It is however legal to taze them if they offer resistance. If you pull your pistol on a perp and he knows you have no right to shoot, he will laugh and keep doing what he is doing, pull a tazer and he will change his mind. It is legal for a police officer to taze some one anytime they have a reason to place their hands on them, this IMHO is inappropriate and should be judged according to the situation.

(IAaPO) not that it matters.