Agreed, ZFS does exactly this, though without the remote file retrieval portion.

To elaborate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#ZFS_data_integrity

End-to-end file system checksumming is built in, but by itself this will only tell you the files are corrupt. To get the automatic correction, you also need to use one of the RAID-Z modes (multiple drives in a software raid). OP said they wanted to avoid that, but for this kind of data I think it should be done. Having both RAID and an offsite copy is the best course.

You could combine it with some scripts inside a storage appliance (or old PC) using something like Nas4Free (http://www.nas4free.org/), but I'm not sure what it has "out of the box" for doing something like the remote file retrieval. What it would give is the drive health checks that OP was talking about; this can be done with both S.M.A.R.T. info and emailing error reports every time the system does a scrub of the data (which can be scheduled).

Building something like this may cost a bit more than for just an external drive, but for this kind of irreplaceable data it is worth it. A small atom server board with 3-4 drives attached would be plenty, would take minimal power, and would allow access to the data from anywhere (for automated offsite backup pushes, viewing files from other devices in the house, etc).

I run a nas4free box at home with RAID-Z3 and have been very happy with the capabilities. In this configuration you can lose 3 drives completely and not lose any data.

Same poster - wasn't logged in above.

The resolution on the Photon Q is higher than the Epic 4G, so there is that, but overall I like either. The AMOLED has a certain "pop" to the colors that LCD doesn't, but it seems to me like the colors are more accurate on the LCD. AMOLED probably uses less power, but the Photon Q also has a bigger battery.

The nonremovable battery and hardwired sim are indeed poor choices - this would be a great international phone. There is a guy on one of the android forums who will wire in a sim slot - the contacts are there for it. It does require surgery though.

I never replaced the battery on my Epic, but if I had kept it any longer than the two years, I would have wanted to (it was holding less and less charge).

My contract was up and I wanted ICS and newer hardware, so I went for the Photon Q. I absolutely recommend it. Motorola makes a very good hardware keyboard (the various droid phones) and the Photon is no exception. The GPS is miles ahead of the Epic (SGS GPS was crap). It is also much snappier and of course has the newer android.

I typed this post on the Photon :-)

Increased size of the inferior parietal lobe, statistically significant increase in the level of glial cells, enlarged Sylvian fissure, vacant parietal operculum. That's what we discovered in Einstein's brain. Unfortunately, Einstein is only one statistical point. Without more genius brains, it's difficult to say what exactly caused his genius. Therefore, let's study -all- the brains of dead people. As many as we can get. The one thing we can say from that is that there are clearly physical differences in brains, although if you dismiss everything different as a defect and irrelevant, I guess that doesn't help much.

Also, as far as the computer comparison goes, I think that's particularly apt. Especially if you consider the practice of binning. Not all CPUs are created equal, even in manufacturing processes as close to identical as we can manage. Some work better. The same thing used to be done with guns. Before leaving the factory, sharpshooters would put a number of rounds through them, and some rifles would be more accurate than others. Those that went past a certain threshold would be put aside and sold separately, as the Winchester "One of One Thousands." It happens with screws, there are various grades to define how close to spec the threads are manufactured.

With the best precision manufacturing capability history has ever known, we still can't manufacture a screw to perfection every time. And you think that there won't be variations among brains?

Most people don't know that things could be better, so it's not a problem? That reminds me of how most people don't know what a rootkit is, so it shouldn't be a problem if Sony puts them on CDs.

The original DotA for WC3:RoC was very polished and MUCH less complicated.

The thing I liked about it was that it didn't have the "avalanche" effect that all-stars did. The characters could only level to 10, and the items were not ludicrously powerful - so there was no point at which certain heroes became absurdly powerful. I always felt allstars devolved into item farming.

+1 Obscure reference bonus (is it obscure? I think so...)

+1 Knows what the fuck begging the question means.

Having just seen it, I made the same connection - but I came to a different conclusion. It just makes the movie look more stupid. I mean it already looked pretty poor. The story might have worked if it was made 30-40 years ago, but with medical science where it is - the thing looks pretty anachronistic.

While I was watching it, a number of things jumped out at me as silly. One of them was the cybernetic nature of all the implants - and therefore their ability to be "repo'd" at all. "Replacement organs aren't going to be mechanical" I thought to myself, and mentioned to my friend, "they are going to be biological and derived from your own cells".

This achievement pretty much bears that out. There would be no use in taking back what is essentially a "custom" organ - like this kid's trachea. It is of no use to anyone else because it uses his cells. The best you could hope for in that sort of vein (no pun intended..) would be to take it out, restrip it, and reseed it with someone else's cells. Or transplant it the traditional way (say, if it was a kidney).

But I am betting artificial scaffolds will be developed in short order (they are already working on them), and they'll be able to just fabricate organs from scratch. This will be cheaper and easier than donors anyway. People waiting for transplants are very expensive to the system - cooking one up and getting them out of the hospital fast will appeal to even the most evil CEO.

I think the future will be a bit brighter than the movie portrayed - at least in terms of artificial human organs.

Hey, you really want to fight obesity, kill the corn subsidies so that we stop having high fructose corn syrup in fucking everything. That would be way more effective than unbanning ephedrine.

Well, there are people who would buy meth. Just because someone would buy it, doesn't mean it should be sold.

It used to be the case that scientists had a good theory about what weather there would be in different seasons, and this theory was usually right. They couldn't predict daily weather all that well, but they could predict that you could reasonably grow oranges in Florida without worrying about it being colder than Maine for a week and snowing a month later, and they could tell you that there would be snow in Vancouver and not in Dallas.

Now conditions are outside the boundaries that climate models are based on, and scientists really have no clue any more. And it's not just the scientific climate models that don't apply; common sense and experience are no longer relevant, because we don't have history that tells us what happens in this environment, measured, anecdotal, or otherwise. In all of our past experience, the arctic wind has blown eastwards around the pole. Then one year it blows across the pole into Europe. Two years later, it blows across the pole into North America. Is this going to be a regular occurrence? Nobody knows.

The extent to which climate change has a falsifiable hypothesis, it is rejecting the null hypothesis. That is, you can ask: is the environment now following the patterns we have previously observed? We find that we are observing patterns that we had not observed previously, including some that we would have noticed had they occurred in a substantial time period. On the other side, we've previously been able to demonstrate enough of an understanding of climate to know how to build houses and what crops to plant where. But the evidence that you should build houses in Florida to keep heat out and houses in Maine to keep heat in is getting less certain. The issue is not that scientists know that something bad is going to happen, it's that nobody has any clue if something bad is going to happen, even after taking into account that some bad things never happened before, because the situation is just different in some measurable ways.

Personally, my guess is that the planet has major negative feedback, or it wouldn't have stayed in a reasonably narrow range of climates long enough for life to get this far. More greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will trigger more cooling by some other mechanism, which might be okay or might be all of the continents turning into highly-reflective deserts instead of light-absorbent arable land. We really can't make an accurate prediction.

There's got to be a significant correlation between having the seasonal flu vaccine recommended for you, and being exposed to swine flu. Surely we should expect that people who choose to get seasonal flu shots do so in part because they're more likely than average to come down with the flu if they don't get a vaccine. Being at high risk for exposure to the flu is a clear mediating factor in leading to both getting every available flu shot and coming down with any strain that goes around that there isn't a vaccine for.

To put it another way, we vaccinate some people go keep them from spreading the flu. If there's a link between getting the vaccine and getting the flu if you don't get the vaccine, then we're vaccinating the right people, and we should go on vaccinating them. (But it's worth making sure people know that they can't act like they're immune to the flu this year.)

Of course, the study could have found an actual danger to the vaccine, but we can't tell until the peer review is complete; peer review is where people will come to some sort of consensus on what the risk is that this value should be compared to.

The movie "The Island" has that plot.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/

They threw in a genetic memory subplot too, for good measure :-P

PsTools is XP and above only, but it covers all that stuff.