"Are book sales going to be affected ?"

Yes. I would imagine that a measurable increase in sales will be seen, correlating to this media noise.

If I were cynical, I would say that the estate probably has no actual intention of suing, they are just milking the PR for all it's worth.

The estate probably has no actual intention of suing, they are just milking the PR for all it's worth.

"Using innocent and unsuspecting members of the public to do it though seems like a pretty fucked up thing to be doing and I hope whoevers idea this was gets punished appropriately."

What!? Why? It's the ultimate double blind!

I regularly have my neighbors' PCs' download child porn, just to make sure that the FBI+carnivore is stepping lively. And the subsequent arrests test the police, courts and local gossip distribution system -- the 'news' I think it's called.

What could be wrong with that? Innocent until proven guilty, after all. Just a minor inconvenience; a small price to pay to *KNOW* that the system is working!

(if you miss the irony please sign off the internet. And delete your account)

"Faster, but there are far more bottlenecks than just disk I/O."

Generally, I disagree with the statement as written. I would say that there are other LIMITS. Not bottlenecks. Although for something like video encoding you could easily turn things around and say 'Look! Your hard-drive is bottlenecked by your encoder!'. Yeah yeah. So I guess I agree more than I want to admit.

Almost by definition, there's always going to be a bottleneck somewhere in your system: the chances of ALL of your PC's components working at *exactly* 100% of their capacity is pretty close to zero. And that's for a particular task. Randomize the task and it all goes to hell. So the question we are discussing is really 'If I remove bottleneck n, how many seconds does it shave of the time to run task x?', averaged over a set of 'common' tasks. But if we made our external drives all as fast as DRAM (or whatever. as above), there would be no other single bottleneck left in the system that you could remove which would give you even a handful of percentage points of improvement. Except maybe un-installing Outlook. Or banning Subversion repositories from your enterprise environment -_-.

For most components in a PC, you have to square the performance to see a significant performance difference, all else being held equal. Tasks that lag noticeably, and that are not dramatically improved by a simple doubling of disk performance, ( 3.5ms seek, 150MB sustained transfer ) are pretty rare. Video encoding, for instance. Certainly getting more common. But with a good video card and a cheap harddrive, you're getting pretty close if not exceeding maximum write speeds on the drive while doing a CUDA rip.

I think that if Microsoft had released a little monitor that displayed the cumulative time spent blocked on [Disk|CPU|Graphics|Memory|Network] (a column in Task Manager, for instance. Hint, hint) back in Windows 95, spinning disks would be considered quaint anachronisms by now. Look at how much gamers spend on video cards, for almost no benefit.

Minute 2 of the Samsung SSD advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs is pretty interesting, if you haven't seen it yet.

Actually, the risk of Apophis hitting the planet being 1 in 250,000 or so ( http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html ) then the risk of getting hit (well, killed) by Apophis as an individual is probably somewhere along the lines of 1 in, oohhh, say ten million.

Odds of winning powerball jackpot: 1:195,249,054. So, order of magnitude estimate, you are somewhere around 20 times as likely to die because of Apophis as you are to win Powerball. And it is 800 times more likely that Apophis will hit the Earth than any single random powerball ticket being the jackpot winner.

Knowing the risk doesn't somehow change the meaning of the odds.

Oh, I agree! I guess my statement could easily be as snarky towards Amazon. Not intended at all.

Any competitive advantage which relies on the silence of thousands of employees earning nearly-minimum wage with no benefits, isn't.

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I do know that a certain E-Sata 'hot swappable' card I installed a while ago *COULD NOT* be set to 'disable write caching' in XP. It was a mounted volume, and Damnit We're Going To Treat it As Such. I was a bit pissed about that. You know *MAYBE* I bought a hot-swappable E-Sata card so I could use it with a removable disk? Perhaps!? Thankfully there's a 3rd party program that flushes mounted volumes so you can 'eject' them - and Win7 handles it natively. But srsly.

The option being disabled makes a lot more sense now. I just kinda assumed (doh!) that it was Windows handling the caching.

Nope, no better. Windows 7 just likes to tell you that 'Disk cannot be removed: A file is open on one of the eighty thousand services and programs which windows starts at boot time. Please figure out which poorly written piece of shit failed to remove the file lock which it shouldn't have registered in the first place from the text file which you attached to an email sent three days ago, and try again.'

Only, were Windows even remotely close to that helpful I would have known to close Outlook. Though Outlook is FAR from the only program to lock files which it has zero business locking, and then failing to remove said locks.

I will admit that I'm surprised that WinXP enabled write-caching by default on a USB drive. Not because that would be an incredibly stupid default (Ha!), but because I thought I remembered having to turn it ON for a scratch drive a while ago.

Supposedly he invented the water bed in that book, too.

Remember the portrait of the "Government Software Developer" painted in Snow Crash? This sounds like where you work.

If your higher ups won't let you make the decision to listen to music, or not, on your own, I simply cannot imagine that they are going to be handing you opportunities to stretch your development skills into valuable (pronounced 'marketable') new directions.

While the timing is horrible, I'd suggest you begin the search for a new job. Allow your current company to turn into HP without you.

"I know you might prefer to listen to music, but remember that is only a preference. If it becomes an essential part of your daily routine then you are not doing yourself any favours."

I have ADD. Music is not a preference. Period.

Furthermore, I would be stunned to find a single study that correlates your implied argument ( 'anyone can work through distractions, if they try / practice' ). Whereas I know that there are plenty of studies which show the opposite: distractions cost knowledge workers massive amounts of time - the numbers I've seen bandied about range from ~5 to 15 minutes of time lost for a single, simple interruption (change in primary focus).

Noise canceling headphones FTW.

-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?

No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.

-- The point of prison has never been to punish the prisoner.
It may not have that effect, but the ultimate *stated* point of non-life prison sentences is punishment and deterrent.

-- The only real purpose of prison is to remove the people who harm society from the society they harm.
If this were the case there would only be life-sentences. Removing an individual from society for a few years (at a cost ~40K a year) does *provably* far more harm than good, if you're only consideration is 'getting the off the streets'. Remember, that 40k does not include the benefit of having a productive member of society in jail. And most people who end up in jail for a year or so are generally not jobless, and almost certainly aren't jobless *and* stealing/doing 40K or so worth of damage/theft per year while out of prison.

-- So repeat after me
What a disturbing phrase.

The reason our sentencing laws are so draconian is because too many people ignore them, and have never stopped to consider what would happen to their life if they spent even one week in jail on charge to which they'd been found guilty. A significant percentage of Americans would find that they'd been fired, can't get hired at a similar job, their credit has been affected, and that it's all legal. So they can't make their mortgage, can't pay their debt etc etc. Extrapolate the curve.

Prisons exist in America as they are today because we've allowed the prison industry to become profitable. The regulations now exist to serve the private prison industry, because the only industry that pays any attention to the prison system is the private prison industry. It is *NOT* that we don't have regulations in place. It is that normal Americans just aren't paying attention - as we are wont to do - and a capitalist response has filled the vacuum. I'm not against capitalism in any way, I'm just stating a fact. Also, I'm blaming 'us', the citizens who are not paying attention, not the corporations - despite the fact that I think every company I've every looked into which makes money off of prisons is disgusting.

I will admit that the advertising seen whenever a major prison bill comes up always appeals to exactly your viewpoint. The advertising paid for by the prison industry, that is.

To summarize:
Prisons and draconian sentencing laws exist because of a desire for profits.
The conditions which have allowed industry to add even more stupidly long sentencing has been, in order.
- Citizen apathy.
- A general lack of empathy in our society - we rarely attempt to 'put ourselves in their place' before making snap judgments, which we then stick to.
- Voter ignorance, combined with.
-- appeals to fear (get them off my streets!)
-- appeals to vengeance (Punish those bastards! See second point also).
-- 'not my problem', or worse
-- 'MAKE THIS not my problem'.

I specify vengeance, not punishment or 'justice'. Nobody screams 'Punish them!' unless that which they truly desire is vengeance.

It is really easy to tell if you are punishing someone or are extracting vengeance: if you feel good about it, it's vengeance. Try punishing a three year old for trying to start across a street without looking if you don't believe me.

Portland (like most cities) uses a mix of HPS/Halide. I can't recall seeing any mercury vapor lamps, but sometimes they blend in pretty well. Mercury vapor tend to be in the lower power ranges, and I think PDX uses HPS preferentially.

The driving issue behind going LED has very little to do with efficiency, except perhaps as greenwashing. Yes, it almost certainly does save money on power, and without a doubt generates less CO2, in the long run. But Portland gets most of its power from hydro - particularly from ~8pm to 5am, aka offpeak. Percent savings due to power will be much lower than elsewhere (LA, for instance).

Beyond all the obvious benefits the largest cost savings comes from maintenance. HID lights don't really 'burn out', as such. They degrade. As they degrade, the current required to keep them lit hits point where the ballast can't keep up. Ahhh, then the magic! As the bulb cools, the current required to light it drops - presto! Annoying flickering street light.

All cities, to my knowledge, replace all the bulbs on a particular street on a schedule. This is expensive, but nothing compared to the cost of spot replacements. Sending a crew (perhaps a crew of one, but whatever) out to replace a single bulb on some random street will never cost less than a hundred bucks. For a four to forty dollar bulb. Chances are, when you take into account salary, cost of the lift equipment, drive time, aborted calls (the on-off cycle for a dying HID lamp can be hours), etc etc etc, you'll probably end up with somewhere around $300 bucks per spot-replacement. City lights. We won't be replacing those crazy gajillion candlepower highway interchange lamps with LEDs anytime soon. But you bet your @$$ it's going to be a couple of grand to drag out the equipment needed to reach and replace some lights on a 100 foot tall post.

With LEDs you've got hundreds of lamps per fixture. If you simply declare 'We replace lamps with 90 thousand hours (whole street replacement), bad ballasts (spot replacement), and lamps with less than 70% nominal output (spot, if reported). You've wiped out ALL aborted calls (either the ballast is dead or it isn't, either ~30% of the LEDs are dead or they aren't), and 99.5% of all spot replacements. That's a lot of bucks.

It'll never run without Flarp.

a: Visit your local feed store.

b: Buy 100 meters of chicken wire.

c: Wrap voting booths.

I am of course being somewhat sarcastic. But not much. If you ground a wire cage as described you'd be fine. The question I'm hazy about is what frequencies are being scanned. You may need something with a finer mesh than chicken wire. Now that I actually consider it, this might also just reduce the range of the scan, rather than eliminate the possibility. Any EE's care to enlighten?