Man, you are new around here! :)

What if I want to attach a file to a piece of email?

Most of the time, when people say "Slashdot isn't the same as it was 15 years ago!", I reply with "You're not the same as you were 15 years ago!". Things change, and they can't always be like they were in the beginning. But this is one of those things that I miss too - having people who actually run the site comment on what's going on. And, although he probably won't see this reply due to nesting, I totally admire whipslash for diving into these threads like he/she has.

Sounds a bit wobbly. Maybe silicon instead?

Man, I forgot that I was writing that on Slashdot and that somebody would take the time to go dig up the answer. I'm actually well enough versed in relativistic physics and astronomy to know that my dumb question was wildly oversimplified (I stopped at the Masters level instead of going on for a PhD), but thanks for posting the response anyway - it has more details in it than I had taken the time to read before.

If the universe is 14 billion years old and 46 billion light years in radius, that means it has expanded at an average of about 3.29 light years per year since the big bang. But... shouldn't it be limited to expanding at a rate of one light year per year?

Computer science _is_ the math. If you ignore the math, you're ignoring the entire field.

There's a pretty major intersection in the town I live in that was wildly reworked in around 2005 or 2006, and Apple's maps still don't know about the change. Every single other mapping site I've looked at has it right. Take a look at the wonky intersection here:

https://maps.google.com/?ll=35...

and compare it to the same view in Apple's maps. It's like going back in time 8 years!

Wait a minute... what does the base unit "mate" mean then?

I read this summary just so I could see how many times the obscure acronym was used without definition. It met my expectations!

Absolutely right. These suggestions are laughable, and that second one gives people a dangerous false sense of security. Mirroring is not backup - it will help save you from a catastrophic failure that is not able to mirror itself, but it won't safe you from the more common problem of deleting an important file the day before you need it.

I wish I knew 15 years ago that it would be cool to have a really low slashdot UID, otherwise I wouldn't have waited so long to sign up for one.

Four digits to the rescue!

Jon gave a talk at LISA a couple of years ago about this same project:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa11/project-cau%C3%A3

[Citation needed]