The northerner solution to that situation is to park our butts at home and wait it out. Hills + polished/wet ice = trapped at the bottom of the hill.

Sometimes, the blizzards hit late at night, and the county is cheap, so you're dealing with the roads you've got. Not every place is urbanized, especially between Fort Wayne, IN and Lansing, MI.

If you've never dealt with black ice, let me assure you that you don't want to. What you had was visible ice. Easy to behave right because it's visible and obvious. The black kind, it looks like safe pavement, but isn't. The gentlest touch of the brakes and your traction slips. A gentle touch to the gas and the rear end of the truck wants to come around. No pre-warning it was going to happen. So you stop doing whatever you were doing when the slipping started. You downshift to slow down, or back off the gas.

And mostly, as mentioned, you don't drive on it if you can avoid it. Because it's ice and without skates it's hard to move on it.

We get black ice on the highways here in Michigan all the time. The difference is that we don't panic. My truck loses its grip, I quickly stop doing the thing that made it lose its grip. If heavy snow starts, we don't all rush out into the streets at once. We tend to stagger our leave so that traffic has a chance to clear, and we have a chance to not be in the worst of it. We check road conditions before heading out. I've driven across multiple states during ice storms and blizzards without problem, and without plows or salt trucks providing any relief.

A million salt trucks wouldn't have saved Atlanta. The key is keeping your head and knowing what to do. Everybody in Atlanta buried their heads in the predicted snow, pretending it wouldn't happen, then lost their heads when it did. Their emergency management response was poor to non existant, and they paid the price. They're going to need a leadership change if they don't want this to happen again.

Now you're not trusting a single third party, you're trusting -every- third party. That's just begging to be compromised. If secrecy is important to you, take steps to make sure nobody realizes you're communicating. Eliminate or reduce the ability of outsiders to figure out who you're communicating with, because that can be just as damning as having them intercept the communication (e.g. the phone meta data that the phone company must maintain in order to do business). Don't use untrusted third parties to facilitate the communication (like services promising anonymity), because they don't have a stake in protecting your privacy. And most importantly, don't use services or tools that advertise the fact that you're trying to hide things. That only makes people curious, and while curiosity is said to have killed the cat, the cat's curiosity ended a lot more mice.

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Trust that at your peril. If you think the people who tracked down Osama bin Laden and killed him in his bedroom can't get ahold of your email, I'd like to make sure I'm not near you when the inevitable very bad thing happens. Too often bystanders are considered acceptable casualties.

It's like expecting your dog to ignore the roast you left on the counter while you went to work. Sure, it could happen, but there's no reason an intelligent person would expect it to happen.

When you trust a third party, with whom you have no actual connection, to keep your data private, you are pretty much asking to have it compromised. The best encryption and anonymity schemes in the world are useless in the face of a court order or questionable system administration. Did you really think some anonymous person was willing to go to jail for your privacy? You're both silly and naive if you think so.

I have a significantly higher interest in older technology than my kids. But my workshop is always open to them, on the off chance that they're interested in learning hand tool woodworking. Of course, that's not really old technology. It's still the way that fine furniture is made. It's just that they're unlikely to see solid wood furniture outside of our house. Unless you've got money to spend, you'll be buying the termite vomit from Ikea or Value City.

A friend of mine once suggested that the best possible question you could ask of a potential sysadmin was, 'Explain how traceroute works.' There are so many levels of 'right' answer that you can determine whether the interviewee is a rank amateur or whether she's currently communing with the spirit of Ada Lovelace and spontaneously generating CS zen koans using the AI in her programmable calculator.

So, just to bring this back on topic: What you're saying is that the size of your Furtwangler[*] DOES matter?

-----------------
[*] I'm assuming that's the German name for it....

A Fine Gael TD named Patrick
Vied for the cluelessness hat trick:
He blamed anonymity
For people's affinity
To gambling, drugs and well-stacked chicks.

He represents Limerick, for Christ's sake. He had it coming.

Well, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

RedHat gains in a number of ways:

• - Build adherence to the RPM/YUM ecosystem of Linux distros (as opposed to DEB-based distros);
• - Ensure that CentOS doesn't drift too far from the mothership, making CentOS a 'gateway drug', as it were, to RedHat;
• - Major karma bump among sysadmins and other professionals (valuable when planning discussions are happening and IT gets a voice);
• - Experiment and potentially learn a lot of important lessons without sullying the RedHat brand.

You might want to re-read my last line. It's tongue in cheek, but there for a reason. I'm not disregarding your faith; I'm simply replying to your comment that 'anything that is not based in truth does not serve God'.

Best regards.