These are basically fancy temp agencies. However, if they advertise as a contracting firm, they tend to offer things like health insurance and other such benefits that straight temp agencies tend not to. They also tend to offer a lot of contract to perm work, where you start with a low commitment temp contract, and then have a high probability, or even guaranteed, permanent position waiting for you at the end of the contract.
You can bounce around jobs a lot more with such an arrangement, since its basically temp work noone really expects you to be there for very long. So you can bounce around to different types of IT work and then when you've got a better idea what you want to do, push your recruiter to get you a permanent or contract to permanent position.
First, choose the genre you want to play. It's going to be hard regardless, if you don't truly love the music, you aren't going to get any good. Don't go by any "whats easier" lists. For me, the hardest I've tried is trance. I can spin UK hardcore fine... trance I'm lost in. Other people are different, can spin trance with no effort but can't spin UK hardcore to save their life. So with no really reliable way to judge whats going to be easy, go with what you love.
Mitigating that is the fact that A DJ's JOB IS TO ENTERTAIN PEOPLE. Don't get so elitist about your music that you forget that you were hired to entertain people. This may mean playing some less than favorite music, accept this. You should try to avoid playing music you hate, this will come across in your set, but you have to balance what you like with what the crowd likes.
Learn good track selection. You ever buy a compilation CD and loved the way it was put together? This is track selection. The tracks need to fit together. That said, if you find the techno-trance-hip hop progression that works, throwing out the rules that way can be incredibly cool. Just remember it is rare that such a crazy progression will actually work.
Then learn basic mixing. Depending on genre and context an unbeatmatched quick crossfade can be sufficient. Once you can do this credibly, focus on cueing, then beatmatching, then phrase matching, and then maybe learn harmonic mixing. BUt remember, the technical skills only exist to ensure a smooth transition from one track to the next, they are NOT the end in themselves. Too many newbie DJs focus on the technology or techniques, rather than the music.
Get the book "How to DJ Right". Excellent book. It won't replace the hours of practice, but it will help you make much more effective use of your hours of practice.
Get recording software, recording sets to your computer is probably the easiest way. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ is a good start. Free, reasonably powerful, supported on several platforms. Later on you can look at other packages to see if they would suit you better, but for now, start with the free one.
If you make enough to seriously dent your music/equipment expenses, be happy. If you break even, be ecstatic. If you can quit your day job... thats incredible. If you get rich, have someone pinch you, you are dreaming. Don't expect to make money. If you do, thats great, but not to be expected. If the expense and trouble wouldn't be worth it even stuck in your bedroom for life, then don't bother.
First is track selection. A DJ that plays the right tracks and blows an occasional mix is far more interesting to listen to than one that mixes flawlessly and plays tracks that don't make sense together.
Then comes beatmatching and phrase matching.
Harmonic mixing isn't always that important. Some gabber for instance, key is an afterthought- some of it is just loud and distorted and you wonder if the speakers are blown. Noize, well, I don't think you could find a key there no matter how hard you tried. For trance it is absolutely critical, but other genres not so much.
In addition to Final Scratch, there is also Serato Scratch Live. Most who have used both consider SSL superior, though there are a few that have shifted back to the FS camp since FS 2.0. There are a couple other options out there, but none as big as SSL or FS.
Another option of course, would be CD decks. The current top end models are nearly as flexible as vinyl, even for turntablism, and offer key correction, automated looping, multiple cue points... some incredible tools. I'd probably be primarily CD if I could afford these decks and the time to convert my vinyl.
I'd trust a dell over a system with the same specs I put together for under 400.
Dell doesn't use top end components, but their parts are quite a bit better than the real bottom of the barrel stuff you'd have to go with to meet their price points buying individual components. Most dell systems are pretty solid. There are ridiculous numbers of them out there, and except for the 270 series optiplexes, the vast majority will go their warranty period without a problem.
Have you really seen the true bottom of the barrel components that are on the market? Motherboards that are almost guaranteed six month failures. Cases that trap hot air around the processor. PCI slots that fall apart. Seriously, to meet Dells specs at the same price buying individual components, you'll be buidling a computer with *at best* half the lifespan of the dell. I've seen friends buy such parts. I've stupidly bought some myself. Dell quality far exceeds this stuff.
And I'm not saying its bad to recycle components, its just that some people will say they built their entire computer and it saved them like a hundered bucks... and don't mention until you prod them that they recycled at least 200 dollars worth of parts from the old system. It's a valid moneysaving strategy, but many people use it to misrepresent the costs of building to people who don't have parts worth recycling in the first place.
People who manage to save money by building a computer tend to not actually build a full computer.
Talk to them. "oh yeah I used my old video card, the hard drive, keyboard, mose, and monitor for the old system."
In other words, most of the time they aren't building, they are just upgrading.
Alternately, they skimp. Maybe their girlfriend just laughed at their manhood, so they get the best video card and fastest processor, and put them in a system with the cheapest parts available. Spec sheet it might look comparable to OEM systems, even better... until their bluescreens come up and hte power supply catches fire.
In higher end market segments the skimping can save money without being so stupid- a gamer might not need 300GB of hard drive space, so they cut back to maybe 80 so they can afford a faster video card. Get a better system for gaming, for less money, than the most closely equivalent OEM box, but they lose the data storage that said OEM box would give them. "Specialization" would probably be a better word than "skimping" for this savings strategy.
Of course, on the bottom end where you bought, even if its possible to save money building a theoretically equivalent system... I wouldn't trust such a thing with personal email much les anything important.
Well, their phone techs are vaguely competent, though a pain to work with. They don't accept that you have done diagnostics already. Even when they are the ones that had you do it five minutes ago. But, for the most part, either they know how to diagnose a system or the scripts were written by someone who does.
then, you get to shipping the part out. Confirming the address three times on the phone and it gets sent to the wrong place. Oh, and this is after half an hour waiting, and for the onsite techs, another half hour explaining they are the onsite tech not the customer. "no, I don't need to give you a credit card number, I'm not the customer, I'm the tech that is supposed to recieve the part and you sent it to the wrong place"
Then after four times doing that, and the parts getting kicked back every time, they send three motherboards and four processors for a single laptop.
The reason the techs are a pain to deal wiht sometimes is because Gateway fucks around with us at least as much as they do you. By the time they get their shit together, we've probably been dealing with them over their fuckups on this call for at least two weeks and we just want nothing to do with it. And of course the contract doesnt' let us openly blame gateway for it, we basically have to let it look like it is our fault.
Then there is the truly insane design of many of their systems from a servicability standpoint. Gateways, except for standard tower systems, are horribly designed for servicability. A repair that would take ten minutes on a Dell will take at least 30 on the most closely equivalent Gateway.
Not anonymous because I no longer have that job and thuse don't need to worry about getting fired for work bitch comments... can't exactly be a field tech when your car rolls over. Thank god for Hyundai engineering and construction though, the roof held up(down?) and I walked away from the upside down car.
The window controls are specific to the window, not the app. I will grant though, they should have a set of such controls on the menubar to work with the entire app. The shortcut for killing the app is cmd-q.
I like finder better than the start menu- no sliding the mouse pointer off and losing it, not nearly as easy to accidentally click the wrong item. Though, large numbers of apps can often be easier to navigate wiht a start menu vs the finder. As for the dock, I like that a lot. It isn't suited for use as a primary application launcher, but as a quick launch tool I find it pretty good.
I haven't seen any issues with antialiasing. This may be a purely YMMV situation.
OSX certainly isn't perfect, hell i've started to hunt down third party hacks to customize a few of my annoyances. But it is easy, as long as you don't expect things to work the same way the adjustment shouldn't be too hard. Annoying at times perhaps, but not difficult.
"And that's total bullshit. OS X is arguably easier to learn for someone who's new to computers altogether, but anyone who has only ever used Windows before, faced with a Mac, is going to have a terribly frustrating time just trying to resize a window ("I click on the left edge and drag, to make it wider, and the window moves instead! What's with that?"), let alone figuring out how on earth the Dock is supposed to work."
Not really. I picked all that up in about 20 minutes, had it down well enough to find it easier than Windows in less than an hour. And I hadn't touched a mac in about 10 years- that long ago they were probably more different from OSX than Windows is.
I'm not entirely sure what his game is. He doesn't do a horrible job as AG, but his statements to the media sound like total BS gloryhounding, saying it to make people love him rather than that he actually intends to do something about it.
I'm pretty sure he's targeting a run for some office in the near future. Exactly what I'm not sure. Probably either Congress or the Governors office. He'll have a fight on his hands if he takes on Mama Rell though, for Rell to have come out from under Rowland without anything sticking to her, she's a formidable politician even if she really was totally unawares.
Well, to anyone reading this not familiar with the state AG, he's basically glory hound. I am pretty skeptical of anything he says... things just look like he wants his name mentioned everywhere.
Granted, he does an ok job as AG, but that often seems to be secondary to the blatant glory hounding that infects everything he says to the media.
A good beginners language should be more than easy to learn syntax. A good beginners language should introduce the learner to multiple programming styles. The beginner should not be forced into a given paradigm, and should be exposed to how things actually work- things shouldn't be hidden to the extent of VB. You might not use the internal workings knowledge on a daily basis, but understanding it will help.
I'd advocate C++. C++ has direct support for several programming paradigms, and the features can be used to support other styles as well without undue difficulty. The syntax and some of the minutae can be rather challenging for a beginner, but it does expose many programing and design strategies and doesn't inherently hide details needed to understand how things work(except for the hardware specific stuff- but that isn't too important. some behind the scenes understanding is good, but you don't need total understanding)
From what I understand of Delphi it might be better, but I don't have more than passing familiarity with it so I can't really advocate for or agaisnt it.
undernet #computers had an autokick script for a while. We had one guy with an unhealthy potato obsession, any time anyone said the word "potato" the idiot got kicked.
Did he run across these documents in the normal course of his work?
Or, was he up to naughty stuff like corporate espionage, insider trading, or gathering blackmail material and found this?
If the latter, just because you do something good with the proceeds of a crime should not eliminate your punishment for said crime. It should certainly be considered a mitigating factor at sentencing, but should not let you get off the hook entirely.
The question of exactly how he got the documents is rather critical here.
And how exactly would they tie the kiddie porn to *your* ipod?
Unless you are stupid enough to be caught in the act, chances you'd even come up as a suspect are pretty slim. The police would certainly try to find the person, but unless you really are quite stupid about it the most evidence they are likely to have against you is "he didn't like the boss much". Chances are they'd have the same evidence against many others as well.
An ipod has a well defined function that has nothing to do with data storage at first glance, so its less likely to be percieved as a threat.
Yes, I know that data storage is a critical part of it's functioning, but it isn't *the* function, and isn't what most people think of when they see one. Actually thinking about it it is obvious, but thinking is rather rare these days.
What about time dilation? As the outer portion of the sphere approaches c, time will slow down dramatically. So it may never actually reach c. It will get closer, and closer, and closer, yet never reach it as time itself is warping as it goes.
It might travel 187 thousand miles in one second, but when one second maps to five years... its not even coming close to c.
We'll be ok. Humans can move really fast when up against the wall.
Not that the transfer will be completely painless, but there are two alternate energy technologies that work, and are compatable with most of the existing petroleum infrastructure. All they really need is a significant economic incentive to scale up the infrastructure we don't have in place yet.
Biodiesel for one. Turning animal and plant based oils into somethign that can burn in diesel engines. Current state of this tech lets it run in unmodified diesel engines if it is processed properly. There has been a lot of research into high oil yield organisms- there are some algae that look promising. THrow a lot of them out in the desert, where they thrive, and a huge dent can be made in vehicular use of petroleum in the US. This has the added benefit of being environmentally friendly, and it can be used both on its own or mixed with petro diesel.
Also, thermal depolymerization. Take garbage, process it, and out comes crude oil which can then be processed like crude out of the ground. While it still would burn as dirty as petroleum, it would put a bit of a dent into the landfill situation, and eliminate the need for vast oil fields tearing up the ground. So while not quite as "green" as biodiesel, it does have some green advantages, and you can use it for *everything* we currently use petroleum for, not just for fuel. It also has a much better energy return... biodiesel is currently around 3 units of useful energy released for every 1 used, TD is around 6.
You have a very good point here. Backups could help here, in that you wouldn't lose use of the files, but that wouldn't do anything about the privacy implications of someone ganking your stuff.
I had failed to consider this. You get a gold star!
Slashdot Mirror
Get with a contracting firm.
These are basically fancy temp agencies. However, if they advertise as a contracting firm, they tend to offer things like health insurance and other such benefits that straight temp agencies tend not to. They also tend to offer a lot of contract to perm work, where you start with a low commitment temp contract, and then have a high probability, or even guaranteed, permanent position waiting for you at the end of the contract.
You can bounce around jobs a lot more with such an arrangement, since its basically temp work noone really expects you to be there for very long. So you can bounce around to different types of IT work and then when you've got a better idea what you want to do, push your recruiter to get you a permanent or contract to permanent position.
First, choose the genre you want to play. It's going to be hard regardless, if you don't truly love the music, you aren't going to get any good. Don't go by any "whats easier" lists. For me, the hardest I've tried is trance. I can spin UK hardcore fine... trance I'm lost in. Other people are different, can spin trance with no effort but can't spin UK hardcore to save their life. So with no really reliable way to judge whats going to be easy, go with what you love.
Mitigating that is the fact that A DJ's JOB IS TO ENTERTAIN PEOPLE. Don't get so elitist about your music that you forget that you were hired to entertain people. This may mean playing some less than favorite music, accept this. You should try to avoid playing music you hate, this will come across in your set, but you have to balance what you like with what the crowd likes.
Learn good track selection. You ever buy a compilation CD and loved the way it was put together? This is track selection. The tracks need to fit together. That said, if you find the techno-trance-hip hop progression that works, throwing out the rules that way can be incredibly cool. Just remember it is rare that such a crazy progression will actually work.
Then learn basic mixing. Depending on genre and context an unbeatmatched quick crossfade can be sufficient. Once you can do this credibly, focus on cueing, then beatmatching, then phrase matching, and then maybe learn harmonic mixing. BUt remember, the technical skills only exist to ensure a smooth transition from one track to the next, they are NOT the end in themselves. Too many newbie DJs focus on the technology or techniques, rather than the music.
Get the book "How to DJ Right". Excellent book. It won't replace the hours of practice, but it will help you make much more effective use of your hours of practice.
Get recording software, recording sets to your computer is probably the easiest way. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ is a good start. Free, reasonably powerful, supported on several platforms. Later on you can look at other packages to see if they would suit you better, but for now, start with the free one.
If you make enough to seriously dent your music/equipment expenses, be happy. If you break even, be ecstatic. If you can quit your day job... thats incredible. If you get rich, have someone pinch you, you are dreaming. Don't expect to make money. If you do, thats great, but not to be expected. If the expense and trouble wouldn't be worth it even stuck in your bedroom for life, then don't bother.
Steps in wrong order completely.
First is track selection. A DJ that plays the right tracks and blows an occasional mix is far more interesting to listen to than one that mixes flawlessly and plays tracks that don't make sense together.
Then comes beatmatching and phrase matching.
Harmonic mixing isn't always that important. Some gabber for instance, key is an afterthought- some of it is just loud and distorted and you wonder if the speakers are blown. Noize, well, I don't think you could find a key there no matter how hard you tried. For trance it is absolutely critical, but other genres not so much.
In addition to Final Scratch, there is also Serato Scratch Live. Most who have used both consider SSL superior, though there are a few that have shifted back to the FS camp since FS 2.0. There are a couple other options out there, but none as big as SSL or FS.
Another option of course, would be CD decks. The current top end models are nearly as flexible as vinyl, even for turntablism, and offer key correction, automated looping, multiple cue points... some incredible tools. I'd probably be primarily CD if I could afford these decks and the time to convert my vinyl.
I'd trust a dell over a system with the same specs I put together for under 400.
Dell doesn't use top end components, but their parts are quite a bit better than the real bottom of the barrel stuff you'd have to go with to meet their price points buying individual components. Most dell systems are pretty solid. There are ridiculous numbers of them out there, and except for the 270 series optiplexes, the vast majority will go their warranty period without a problem.
Have you really seen the true bottom of the barrel components that are on the market? Motherboards that are almost guaranteed six month failures. Cases that trap hot air around the processor. PCI slots that fall apart. Seriously, to meet Dells specs at the same price buying individual components, you'll be buidling a computer with *at best* half the lifespan of the dell. I've seen friends buy such parts. I've stupidly bought some myself. Dell quality far exceeds this stuff.
And I'm not saying its bad to recycle components, its just that some people will say they built their entire computer and it saved them like a hundered bucks... and don't mention until you prod them that they recycled at least 200 dollars worth of parts from the old system. It's a valid moneysaving strategy, but many people use it to misrepresent the costs of building to people who don't have parts worth recycling in the first place.
People who manage to save money by building a computer tend to not actually build a full computer.
Talk to them. "oh yeah I used my old video card, the hard drive, keyboard, mose, and monitor for the old system."
In other words, most of the time they aren't building, they are just upgrading.
Alternately, they skimp. Maybe their girlfriend just laughed at their manhood, so they get the best video card and fastest processor, and put them in a system with the cheapest parts available. Spec sheet it might look comparable to OEM systems, even better... until their bluescreens come up and hte power supply catches fire.
In higher end market segments the skimping can save money without being so stupid- a gamer might not need 300GB of hard drive space, so they cut back to maybe 80 so they can afford a faster video card. Get a better system for gaming, for less money, than the most closely equivalent OEM box, but they lose the data storage that said OEM box would give them. "Specialization" would probably be a better word than "skimping" for this savings strategy.
Of course, on the bottom end where you bought, even if its possible to save money building a theoretically equivalent system... I wouldn't trust such a thing with personal email much les anything important.
Gateway has no fucking clue.
Well, their phone techs are vaguely competent, though a pain to work with. They don't accept that you have done diagnostics already. Even when they are the ones that had you do it five minutes ago. But, for the most part, either they know how to diagnose a system or the scripts were written by someone who does.
then, you get to shipping the part out. Confirming the address three times on the phone and it gets sent to the wrong place. Oh, and this is after half an hour waiting, and for the onsite techs, another half hour explaining they are the onsite tech not the customer. "no, I don't need to give you a credit card number, I'm not the customer, I'm the tech that is supposed to recieve the part and you sent it to the wrong place"
Then after four times doing that, and the parts getting kicked back every time, they send three motherboards and four processors for a single laptop.
The reason the techs are a pain to deal wiht sometimes is because Gateway fucks around with us at least as much as they do you. By the time they get their shit together, we've probably been dealing with them over their fuckups on this call for at least two weeks and we just want nothing to do with it. And of course the contract doesnt' let us openly blame gateway for it, we basically have to let it look like it is our fault.
Then there is the truly insane design of many of their systems from a servicability standpoint. Gateways, except for standard tower systems, are horribly designed for servicability. A repair that would take ten minutes on a Dell will take at least 30 on the most closely equivalent Gateway.
Not anonymous because I no longer have that job and thuse don't need to worry about getting fired for work bitch comments... can't exactly be a field tech when your car rolls over. Thank god for Hyundai engineering and construction though, the roof held up(down?) and I walked away from the upside down car.
wow thanks... while I generally prefer finder, this does add an extra option i'll probably use at some point.
The window controls are specific to the window, not the app. I will grant though, they should have a set of such controls on the menubar to work with the entire app. The shortcut for killing the app is cmd-q.
I like finder better than the start menu- no sliding the mouse pointer off and losing it, not nearly as easy to accidentally click the wrong item. Though, large numbers of apps can often be easier to navigate wiht a start menu vs the finder. As for the dock, I like that a lot. It isn't suited for use as a primary application launcher, but as a quick launch tool I find it pretty good.
I haven't seen any issues with antialiasing. This may be a purely YMMV situation.
OSX certainly isn't perfect, hell i've started to hunt down third party hacks to customize a few of my annoyances. But it is easy, as long as you don't expect things to work the same way the adjustment shouldn't be too hard. Annoying at times perhaps, but not difficult.
Good point on the engineering level, but the user interface needs work.
Doesn't necesarily need to clone MS, but Linux distros should work harder to present an internally consistent user interface.
bah, a 486 can run NT4 quite well.
ok, not well, but rock solid stable.
"And that's total bullshit. OS X is arguably easier to learn for someone who's new to computers altogether, but anyone who has only ever used Windows before, faced with a Mac, is going to have a terribly frustrating time just trying to resize a window ("I click on the left edge and drag, to make it wider, and the window moves instead! What's with that?"), let alone figuring out how on earth the Dock is supposed to work."
Not really. I picked all that up in about 20 minutes, had it down well enough to find it easier than Windows in less than an hour. And I hadn't touched a mac in about 10 years- that long ago they were probably more different from OSX than Windows is.
"politician noise"
You've about summed up Richard Blumenthal.
I'm not entirely sure what his game is. He doesn't do a horrible job as AG, but his statements to the media sound like total BS gloryhounding, saying it to make people love him rather than that he actually intends to do something about it.
I'm pretty sure he's targeting a run for some office in the near future. Exactly what I'm not sure. Probably either Congress or the Governors office. He'll have a fight on his hands if he takes on Mama Rell though, for Rell to have come out from under Rowland without anything sticking to her, she's a formidable politician even if she really was totally unawares.
Blumenthal mentioned on Slashdot.
Well, to anyone reading this not familiar with the state AG, he's basically glory hound. I am pretty skeptical of anything he says... things just look like he wants his name mentioned everywhere.
Granted, he does an ok job as AG, but that often seems to be secondary to the blatant glory hounding that infects everything he says to the media.
A good beginners language should be more than easy to learn syntax. A good beginners language should introduce the learner to multiple programming styles. The beginner should not be forced into a given paradigm, and should be exposed to how things actually work- things shouldn't be hidden to the extent of VB. You might not use the internal workings knowledge on a daily basis, but understanding it will help.
I'd advocate C++. C++ has direct support for several programming paradigms, and the features can be used to support other styles as well without undue difficulty. The syntax and some of the minutae can be rather challenging for a beginner, but it does expose many programing and design strategies and doesn't inherently hide details needed to understand how things work(except for the hardware specific stuff- but that isn't too important. some behind the scenes understanding is good, but you don't need total understanding)
From what I understand of Delphi it might be better, but I don't have more than passing familiarity with it so I can't really advocate for or agaisnt it.
undernet #computers had an autokick script for a while. We had one guy with an unhealthy potato obsession, any time anyone said the word "potato" the idiot got kicked.
Did he run across these documents in the normal course of his work?
Or, was he up to naughty stuff like corporate espionage, insider trading, or gathering blackmail material and found this?
If the latter, just because you do something good with the proceeds of a crime should not eliminate your punishment for said crime. It should certainly be considered a mitigating factor at sentencing, but should not let you get off the hook entirely.
The question of exactly how he got the documents is rather critical here.
My XP install doesn't have any more graphical nonsense than the typical 2k install. It's quite trivial to turn all that stuff off.
Granted, it would be nice if they had an option in the installer to install with all that crap turned off.
And how exactly would they tie the kiddie porn to *your* ipod?
Unless you are stupid enough to be caught in the act, chances you'd even come up as a suspect are pretty slim. The police would certainly try to find the person, but unless you really are quite stupid about it the most evidence they are likely to have against you is "he didn't like the boss much". Chances are they'd have the same evidence against many others as well.
An ipod has a well defined function that has nothing to do with data storage at first glance, so its less likely to be percieved as a threat.
Yes, I know that data storage is a critical part of it's functioning, but it isn't *the* function, and isn't what most people think of when they see one. Actually thinking about it it is obvious, but thinking is rather rare these days.
It would still be effective harrasment of your target, even if it doesn't land them in jail.
The targets wife might not be so understanding. His kids too. Or his mother.
Sure, these people can probably be convinced, but there will always be a seed of doubt there.
What about time dilation? As the outer portion of the sphere approaches c, time will slow down dramatically. So it may never actually reach c. It will get closer, and closer, and closer, yet never reach it as time itself is warping as it goes.
It might travel 187 thousand miles in one second, but when one second maps to five years... its not even coming close to c.
Hey now, don't insult idiotic pop stars here. Thats just uncalled for.
At least compare him to a politician.
We'll be ok. Humans can move really fast when up against the wall.
Not that the transfer will be completely painless, but there are two alternate energy technologies that work, and are compatable with most of the existing petroleum infrastructure. All they really need is a significant economic incentive to scale up the infrastructure we don't have in place yet.
Biodiesel for one. Turning animal and plant based oils into somethign that can burn in diesel engines. Current state of this tech lets it run in unmodified diesel engines if it is processed properly. There has been a lot of research into high oil yield organisms- there are some algae that look promising. THrow a lot of them out in the desert, where they thrive, and a huge dent can be made in vehicular use of petroleum in the US. This has the added benefit of being environmentally friendly, and it can be used both on its own or mixed with petro diesel.
Also, thermal depolymerization. Take garbage, process it, and out comes crude oil which can then be processed like crude out of the ground. While it still would burn as dirty as petroleum, it would put a bit of a dent into the landfill situation, and eliminate the need for vast oil fields tearing up the ground. So while not quite as "green" as biodiesel, it does have some green advantages, and you can use it for *everything* we currently use petroleum for, not just for fuel. It also has a much better energy return... biodiesel is currently around 3 units of useful energy released for every 1 used, TD is around 6.
You have a very good point here. Backups could help here, in that you wouldn't lose use of the files, but that wouldn't do anything about the privacy implications of someone ganking your stuff.
I had failed to consider this. You get a gold star!
I read his comment as meaning "verifiable guarantee" rather than "personal assurance".
Big difference in the two. The latter can be assumed to be given, the former... not so much.