They same fainting couch was fallen upon with great false tears back with the Lightning connector change, and absolutely nothing came of that. I fall to see how this will be ay different, in fact it's a far smaller change.
Almost nobody used the 30-pin connector for anything other than charging, because so-called universal docks were never compatible with whatever new device Apple shipped six months later. I doubt more than 1% of users used it for anything other than plugging in the cord that came with it to charge the device, if that, and even then, they used it for some minor ancillary use—usually not while walking around doing stuff.
That's not true for headphones. At least one out of three iPhone users use headphones of some kind on a regular basis, and the majority of them are wired headphones, so this affects at least an order of magnitude more users than the Lightning connector change, percentage-wise, and it affects primary uses of the device (phone calls, music) while carrying the device around with you, which means the impact on each of those users is much, much bigger.
Mosquitoes are killing us. It would be stupid not to fight back. That's how natural selection works.
But if we kill all the mosquitoes, how will the hyper-intelligent amphibians in 10 billion years create a Cenozoic/Holocene Park and use fish DNA to fill in the missing bits needed to recreate us?
I'm submitting from one of these. The question I have is am I trading a 1 in 50,000 chance of fire for a 1 in 1 chamce of crappy charging and low battery life. If the problem was an aggressive charge cycle the resolution might well ne to wimpify it.
They said that only batteries from one of their two battery suppliers had problem, so I'm guessing the fix is to identify whether your battery is from that battery manufacturer or not. If not, it would come back as "no problem found", else they would replace it with a battery from the other supplier while trying to find a third supplier to ensure that there aren't supply problems later.
If he were running for Congress, you'd have a point, but this is the POTUS job we're talking about. It has little to do with political science and everything to do with serving as an executive in charge of a colossal staff, coupled with being the head of the military and schmoozing politicians. Fortunately, there are solid people at the top of the military, so the POTUS can get good advice and doesn't need to be a military strategist (most aren't). So that leaves running the executive branch and schmoozing with Congress.
An ideal candidate for office would be a smart, savvy businessperson who could find ways to set executive policies in ways that cut wasteful spending and make government more effective. So if Trump were actually a great businessperson instead of a mediocre one, he'd be a good candidate. Sadly, this is not the case.
Of course, Clinton has even less experience in that area, but more experience schmoozing politicians. Clinton is marginally better, but I'd still elect the aforementioned ham sandwich over either of them any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I could see being confused about the difference between a G3 and G4 tower if you're colorblind, but a G5? I mean, it was either grey plastic or it looked like a cheese grater....
Oops. Just noticed I didn't finish one sentence there.
before either terminating at one of the new BART stations along the Caltrain route near Old Monterey Rd., or turning north and joining the main BART line at the nearest combined Caltrain-BART station on that line.
There's no reason that any extension (beyond the current planned extension) would have to do so, of course. You could just decide that everything newly added to the system will use a normal gauge, albeit with a higher maintenance cost from having to maintain two different train designs. And then at some point you could start single-tracking the leg to that last station while you upgrade to standard gauge, progressively shifting the transfer point farther and farther back one station at a time until you've standardized things.
Even better, you could come up with trains that could switch gauges at a junction point, then build all the new stuff with the new gauge and start upgrading the old rails without interrupting service at all (other than single-tracking while the crews are actually at work) by adding a section of new rail, then removing a section of old rail, shifting the overlap point. And then your next batch of cars (along with any cars that don't have to service the old rails) can be the normal gauge.
Then again, most of the cost of wide gauge is caused by economies of scale, not by the gauge per se. If BART were all over the Bay and were ordering 4,000 cars at a time instead of 700, the tooling cost of setting up for the wide gauge would be distributed over ~6x as many cars, and the price per car would come way down. Obviously that wouldn't make it possible to cut costs by selling their used trains to other cities or borrow other cities' trains to fill in for malfunctioning hardware, but it would still go a long way towards reducing the cost difference.
You were making a joke, right? Downtowns are often also where service industries located, such as courts, lawyers, accountants, etc. Many focused the corporate offices into those so desirable downtown spaces.
But corporate offices absolutely don't belong there. For the reasons you mentioned, service industries and retail work well together. People get food or shop for shoes on their way back from meeting with their accountant. They don't stop at a corporate office on their way back from meeting with their accountant unless they work there, so there's no synergy between corporate offices and the other firms in a downtown area. The corporate offices benefit greatly from being near food, but the reverse isn't true unless the restaurant isn't getting enough business to stay full (which usually points to inadequate parking—something else that corporate offices tend to make worse).
Shopping doesn't benefit that much from being near those corporate offices, either. When you get done with work, most people want to get home. They don't want to go shopping. Now they might be hungry, in which case those shopping areas benefit from being near food, but hungry people will go to get food anyway even if it isn't in the next building over from the corporate office, so the proximity there makes very little difference.
It's because all the startups want to be there (within walking distance of caltrain).
And all the people also want to live there within walking distance of Caltrain. This in part points to a completely broken public transit system. For comparison purposes, let's compare the peninsula area with Manhattan.
Manhattan:
About two miles wide
Has four or five (depending on location) parallel north-south subway lines
Has stations about every half mile.
Runs every few minutes.
Runs 24/7
The peninsula (or at least the part on the Bay side of the mountains):
About eight miles wide.
Has a single north-south train service.
Has stations about every 2 miles.
Often runs as infrequently as once per hour.
Shuts down for several hours every night.
Now admittedly, Caltrain does have a useful purpose—as a means of moving people long distances. What's missing is a parallel subway system for short trips. If we had that—if BART extended down the peninsula like it should with connections at every Caltrain station plus a couple of stops in between each station—then we could remove about two-thirds of the Caltrain stations (turning them into BART-only stations with no Caltrain stops), allowing them to run the long-haul trains at full speed for longer stretches, which would dramatically improve travel time for everyone (albeit at the cost of an extra connection for many) and would also dramatically increase the number of desirable locations to locate businesses.
Ideally, there would be a parallel BART run at Alameda de las Pulgas, meeting 280 by the time you get as far north as San Bruno, with additional stops at (among others) Lake Merced, Taraval St., Noriega St., Judah St., Geary/Lands End, Presidio, Fisherman's Wharf, and several other spots along the Embarcadero, before terminating at the Transbay terminal where it would meet a proposed spur from the existing BART line. At the other end of that line, it should split at Fremont Ave. in Sunnyvale as follows:
The northern branch should run near Fremont Ave. to El Camino, terminating at the new Santa Clara BART station.
The middle branch should follow 280 past both Apple campuses and Westfield Valley Fair/Santana Row, before terminating at San Jose Diridon Station.
The southern branch should follow 85 and then split near Prospect Rd. into:
A northern branch that goes through Campbell on Hamilton Ave. until it gets to Bascom and then slants towards Capitol Station (light rail)
A southern branch that stops at or near downtown Saratoga, West Valley College, and Vasona Lake where it should meet a north-south line (which I'll describe later). It should then follow Blossom Hill Rd., Coleman Rd., Santa Teresa Blvd. before either terminating at one of the new BART stations along the Caltrain route near Old Monterey Rd.
Ideally, there should also be a northern parallel run that goes just north of the 101, branching off from the existing line at Millbrae. This run should swing by the main Google campus before crossing under the 101 near Ellis (to avoid going under Moffett and to allow a stop near the Google Quad Campus and various other large companies in the Bermuda Triangle) and should meet the existing light rail at Middlefield. The light rail takes care of the northernmost route, so the northern BART route should instead follow Maude to Wolfe to Arques to Scott to Central to the new Santa Clara BART station which will be a short people-mover trip from SJC.
There should be short north-south connecting trains at some or all of San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and somewhere near the border of Sunnyvale and Mountain View. There should also be a north-south branch from the Santa Clara station to the Westfield Valley Fair station, following Winchester through Campbell, and Los Gatos before going under the Santa Cruz Mountains (non
Offices, yes, but offices for things like lawyers or accountants or maybe dentists or barbers—the sorts of offices that normal people would visit on a regular basis. They're not retail, but they're still in the overarching "personal services" category of businesses. Banks also fall into that category (as long as they're branches and not just bank office buildings).
Those sorts of businesses need to be clustered together because they depend on mutual business for their success. For example, restaurants do well when they are near movie theaters (particularly if they have pizza by the slice and other quick food) because kids want to grab something quick to eat before (or after) seeing a movie. Downtowns work when their businesses complement one another.
Tech firms don't belong in the core part of the downtown for the same reason that manufacturing plants don't belong there. Non-employees don't go downtown to visit a Google or Apple or Cisco office. Those sorts of offices should be within a reasonable distance from at least some services (particularly food) because that makes life easier for the workers, but such businesses can easily be a few blocks removed from the main strip without adversely affecting the success of the business. And if they start using space that would normally be used by retail and personal services businesses, they start to adversely affect those other businesses, eventually leading to the total collapse of the downtown area.
That pretty much sums it up, yes, but there's a lot more wrong than that.
Prop 13 means that homeowners can't afford to move closer to where they work, because they would get hit by huge property tax penalties. Meanwhile, rental property owners often keep homes for decades and thus don't pay their fair share based on market prices.
Businesses bizarrely think everyone wants to live in San Francisco, or at best in various places down the peninsula and in the South Bay. Meanwhile, half their workers are commuting in from Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Morgan Hill/Gilroy, Watsonville/Salinas, Monterey, etc. because there are no tech companies near where they can afford to buy a home.
Because businesses build in areas where no one lives, there are no urban services near the workplace. So every business has to come up with its own meal program because there aren't any restaurants within walking distance. And even if there were residents, restaurants still couldn't afford to locate in those areas because the businesses are all crammed into one tiny little part of the region.
If I were in charge of Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc., I would require a minimum of a 20:1 ratio between new residential square footage and new commercial square footage, to force more businesses to locate in areas farther from that geographical core and make more housing available for the businesses that already exist. Unfortunately, the city governments like the taxes that they get from big businesses, so they won't do that. And the result is the mess we have now.
The purpose of a downtown is to be a shopping and restaurant district. If you clog the place up with a bunch of tech firms, the city ceases to be viable for its residents. There's nothing nefarious here; there's just a desire for Palo Alto to remain a normal city with actual residents mixed in with those tech firms, rather than becoming just a place that people commute to.
I would argue that Newtonian physics was considered "proven" until more accurate measurements proved that our understanding was incomplete....
Besides, it isn't necessarily a violation of the law of conservation of energy if, for example, energy appears in one place and disappears somewhere else, or possibly somewhen else.
No, there are no "loopholes" in the Physical Laws.
There are a lot of loopholes in the physical laws. Fifty years ago, if you had told someone that you could take a ceramic insulator and turn it into a near-zero-resistance conductor by cooling it to near absolute zero, they would have assumed you were wrong—the laws of electricity as known at the time just didn't allow for that. And if you told them that you could float magnets on top of such a superconductor, they'd have hauled you off to a sanitarium.
A hundred years ago, if you could have somehow launched GPS satellites, everyone would think that the clocks were broken, because the time would keep drifting due to relativistic effects, and that concept didn't exist yet.
We're constantly learning new exceptions to the established rules, and we have been doing so throughout all of our planet's history, from the moment we discovered that you could bang two rocks together and start a fire. It is thus utterly ridiculous to assume that at this particular point in history, we magically haver reached the pinnacle of human understanding.
Now don't get me wrong here; this supposed "EM drive" is probably bogus. There's probably some particle emission caused by electrical charge propagation through the material or some other similar curiosity. But it isn't impossible that this is something new that we don't know about—just very, very unlikely. And there's also a very slight possibility that we might learn something new about the physics of matter or gravity or who-knows-what-else from studying this, so either way, it is fascinating, and should not just be dismissed as a hoax out of hand until we know why it is happening and whether the answer to that question tells us something new that we didn't know before.
Is that analogy supposed to rest on the idea they don't already have satellite phones?
Worse. It rests on the idea that Twitter knows who the terrorists are.
Providing something to someone in good faith isn't a crime even if they later turn out to be a terrorist, as a rule. I mean sure, if you provide a firearm, you'd probably better have done due diligence, and if you send money to a charity in the Middle East, it is probably a good idea to do so, though not legally required. However, AT&T isn't committing a crime if they give cell service to somebody merely because they later find out that the person used that phone to commit an act of terror. The same applies here.
And this isn't even an ongoing service except for the existence of a particular account and the ability to look up the IP address for that account. So this is more like selling someone a set of walkie talkies. Once you've sold them, you can't readily take them back just because you later find out that they are terrorists. And the law can't reasonably expect you to do so. More to the point, it does not expect you to do so.
The best that the government can do is insist that Twitter shut down access to an account that they suspect is terror-related. And if they do that, Twitter will undoubtedly deactivate it. But the government apparently doesn't want to do that, as evidenced by the fact that they have not done so. We could speculate about whether the government's decision is based on futility (because a new account would just spring up five minutes later) or some actual security-related reason, but from the perspective of a prosecution of Twitter for giving material support, the government's reasons for not demanding account closure are irrelevant. The mere fact that the government did not tell them that a particular account is that of a suspected terrorist is a sufficiently airtight defense against those charges.
Except that Apple has a presence in multiple European countries, and there's no reason to believe that they saved much money by doing their accouning and money storage in one country instead of several, if you take the tax break out of the picture. It may be that Ireland got exactly as much as they otherwise would have, and that most of the taxes would have been paid in their Munich or Paris offices instead. If so, Ireland got those jobs in return for taking money out of the coffers of other countries—effectively free from their perspective.
Nonsense. One order of magnitude more, at most. On-line storage costs are on the order of $100 per TB per year.
I was going based on my experience with AWS, which is about $30 per TB per month for spinning storage, or $360 per TB per year. An 8 TB hard drive should typically last you about five years, and costs about $250, or about $6.25 per terabyte per year. That isn't quite two orders of magnitude, but it is pretty close. Of course if you're willing to wait several hours to start getting your data back, you can use glacier storage, and that's cheaper, but there are tradeoffs.:-)
Upload time sucks, but only for the initial upload, which I did two years ago. After that, incremental additions are pretty negligible.
Must be nice. I backed up over 12 GB Sunday night, and that was only one week worth of incremental backups for my personal laptop. Over my DSL connection (soon to be retired), that would have taken two days. It would take several hours even over my new cable modem service. It took five minutes to back up locally. That time difference makes the difference between me being willing to back up regularly and never backing up.
Obviously, YMMV, but I would imagine that somebody with multiple terabytes of personal data is probably either a photographer or videographer, and therefore has the same sorts of nightmare backups that I do. But I'm just guessing here. For all I know, it could be a porn collection.:-)
Online backup is cheap. Most start at ~$60 a year for unlimited backup.
I'm having a hard time believing that $5 per month is even possible for anything approaching truly unlimited storage. Just storing 2 TB on Amazon glacier storage would cost three times that much. I assume they count on most of their users treating unlimited as tens of gigabytes. If everybody were storing 2 TB, I'd expect those numbers to go way, way up.
But even if you assume that $5 is your total cost from the cloud provider, that still isn't your total cost. After all, time has value, plus your internet connection costs money. Backing up 2 TB over a typical home Internet connection can take anywhere from many days up to years, which means if your storage needs are that large, you're going to want a faster Internet connection or you'll lose your mind. Tack on another $30 a month for that.
In addition, storing your backup in the same location as your main copy is not smart, even if it is in a bunker or fire proof safe.
Hence my suggestion of periodically cloning your RAID and keeping the clone at work.
The problem with cloud-based solutions is that the cost for backing up several terabytes of data is typically several orders of magnitude higher than building your own RAID array, and the performance of Internet-based backup absolutely sucks beyond measure unless you're the sort of person whose data needs are measured in tens of megabytes.
To back up 2 TB over a typical cable modem (say 3 megabit upload speed) will take you 61 days. Over typical DSL (300 kilobits per second), it will take almost two years.
If you lose your original copy, getting the data back will be almost as painful. On a fairly fast cable modem (30 mbps), assuming the cloud-based backup server can completely saturate your downlink (which is by no means guaranteed), it will take you 6 days of continuous downloading to restore the backup. Over 3 megabit DSL, again, that number goes up to 60 days.
The ideal solution, if you can pull it off, would be to build a small concrete bunker in your yard, run power out to it, put a UPS and power conditioner in there to protect against bad power, put a RAID array in there, wire it with Ethernet to your house underground, put a watertight door on the thing, add a power cutoff that shuts down power if water does get inside (e.g. a GFI breaker and an unused extension cord whose output end is lower than your equipment), and hope for the best.
But more realistically, I would tend to suggest an IOSafe fireproof RAID array loaded up with five 6 TB drives (or maybe even 8 TB drives). Put it in a closet somewhere, and hope for the best. If you want to increase your protection a bit, you could also get two RAID expansion cabinets, store them at work, and periodically bring one home, clone your main RAID array to it, and bring it back
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I'm assuming that was a dyslexic moment, and that the GP meant 44.1.
Yes, but then the VP candidate would become president, and we'd almost certainly be no worse off, regardless of which ham sandwich won.
Almost nobody used the 30-pin connector for anything other than charging, because so-called universal docks were never compatible with whatever new device Apple shipped six months later. I doubt more than 1% of users used it for anything other than plugging in the cord that came with it to charge the device, if that, and even then, they used it for some minor ancillary use—usually not while walking around doing stuff.
That's not true for headphones. At least one out of three iPhone users use headphones of some kind on a regular basis, and the majority of them are wired headphones, so this affects at least an order of magnitude more users than the Lightning connector change, percentage-wise, and it affects primary uses of the device (phone calls, music) while carrying the device around with you, which means the impact on each of those users is much, much bigger.
But if we kill all the mosquitoes, how will the hyper-intelligent amphibians in 10 billion years create a Cenozoic/Holocene Park and use fish DNA to fill in the missing bits needed to recreate us?
They said that only batteries from one of their two battery suppliers had problem, so I'm guessing the fix is to identify whether your battery is from that battery manufacturer or not. If not, it would come back as "no problem found", else they would replace it with a battery from the other supplier while trying to find a third supplier to ensure that there aren't supply problems later.
If he were running for Congress, you'd have a point, but this is the POTUS job we're talking about. It has little to do with political science and everything to do with serving as an executive in charge of a colossal staff, coupled with being the head of the military and schmoozing politicians. Fortunately, there are solid people at the top of the military, so the POTUS can get good advice and doesn't need to be a military strategist (most aren't). So that leaves running the executive branch and schmoozing with Congress.
An ideal candidate for office would be a smart, savvy businessperson who could find ways to set executive policies in ways that cut wasteful spending and make government more effective. So if Trump were actually a great businessperson instead of a mediocre one, he'd be a good candidate. Sadly, this is not the case.
Of course, Clinton has even less experience in that area, but more experience schmoozing politicians. Clinton is marginally better, but I'd still elect the aforementioned ham sandwich over either of them any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I could see being confused about the difference between a G3 and G4 tower if you're colorblind, but a G5? I mean, it was either grey plastic or it looked like a cheese grater....
Not money so much as random inspections without notice.
Oops. Just noticed I didn't finish one sentence there.
There's no reason that any extension (beyond the current planned extension) would have to do so, of course. You could just decide that everything newly added to the system will use a normal gauge, albeit with a higher maintenance cost from having to maintain two different train designs. And then at some point you could start single-tracking the leg to that last station while you upgrade to standard gauge, progressively shifting the transfer point farther and farther back one station at a time until you've standardized things.
Even better, you could come up with trains that could switch gauges at a junction point, then build all the new stuff with the new gauge and start upgrading the old rails without interrupting service at all (other than single-tracking while the crews are actually at work) by adding a section of new rail, then removing a section of old rail, shifting the overlap point. And then your next batch of cars (along with any cars that don't have to service the old rails) can be the normal gauge.
Then again, most of the cost of wide gauge is caused by economies of scale, not by the gauge per se. If BART were all over the Bay and were ordering 4,000 cars at a time instead of 700, the tooling cost of setting up for the wide gauge would be distributed over ~6x as many cars, and the price per car would come way down. Obviously that wouldn't make it possible to cut costs by selling their used trains to other cities or borrow other cities' trains to fill in for malfunctioning hardware, but it would still go a long way towards reducing the cost difference.
Pokébook—gotta catch 'em all.
Yeah. Who here read that headline as "... Facebook's Plan for Global Internet Domination ..."?
But corporate offices absolutely don't belong there. For the reasons you mentioned, service industries and retail work well together. People get food or shop for shoes on their way back from meeting with their accountant. They don't stop at a corporate office on their way back from meeting with their accountant unless they work there, so there's no synergy between corporate offices and the other firms in a downtown area. The corporate offices benefit greatly from being near food, but the reverse isn't true unless the restaurant isn't getting enough business to stay full (which usually points to inadequate parking—something else that corporate offices tend to make worse).
Shopping doesn't benefit that much from being near those corporate offices, either. When you get done with work, most people want to get home. They don't want to go shopping. Now they might be hungry, in which case those shopping areas benefit from being near food, but hungry people will go to get food anyway even if it isn't in the next building over from the corporate office, so the proximity there makes very little difference.
And all the people also want to live there within walking distance of Caltrain. This in part points to a completely broken public transit system. For comparison purposes, let's compare the peninsula area with Manhattan.
Manhattan:
The peninsula (or at least the part on the Bay side of the mountains):
Now admittedly, Caltrain does have a useful purpose—as a means of moving people long distances. What's missing is a parallel subway system for short trips. If we had that—if BART extended down the peninsula like it should with connections at every Caltrain station plus a couple of stops in between each station—then we could remove about two-thirds of the Caltrain stations (turning them into BART-only stations with no Caltrain stops), allowing them to run the long-haul trains at full speed for longer stretches, which would dramatically improve travel time for everyone (albeit at the cost of an extra connection for many) and would also dramatically increase the number of desirable locations to locate businesses.
Ideally, there would be a parallel BART run at Alameda de las Pulgas, meeting 280 by the time you get as far north as San Bruno, with additional stops at (among others) Lake Merced, Taraval St., Noriega St., Judah St., Geary/Lands End, Presidio, Fisherman's Wharf, and several other spots along the Embarcadero, before terminating at the Transbay terminal where it would meet a proposed spur from the existing BART line. At the other end of that line, it should split at Fremont Ave. in Sunnyvale as follows:
Ideally, there should also be a northern parallel run that goes just north of the 101, branching off from the existing line at Millbrae. This run should swing by the main Google campus before crossing under the 101 near Ellis (to avoid going under Moffett and to allow a stop near the Google Quad Campus and various other large companies in the Bermuda Triangle) and should meet the existing light rail at Middlefield. The light rail takes care of the northernmost route, so the northern BART route should instead follow Maude to Wolfe to Arques to Scott to Central to the new Santa Clara BART station which will be a short people-mover trip from SJC.
There should be short north-south connecting trains at some or all of San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and somewhere near the border of Sunnyvale and Mountain View. There should also be a north-south branch from the Santa Clara station to the Westfield Valley Fair station, following Winchester through Campbell, and Los Gatos before going under the Santa Cruz Mountains (non
Offices, yes, but offices for things like lawyers or accountants or maybe dentists or barbers—the sorts of offices that normal people would visit on a regular basis. They're not retail, but they're still in the overarching "personal services" category of businesses. Banks also fall into that category (as long as they're branches and not just bank office buildings).
Those sorts of businesses need to be clustered together because they depend on mutual business for their success. For example, restaurants do well when they are near movie theaters (particularly if they have pizza by the slice and other quick food) because kids want to grab something quick to eat before (or after) seeing a movie. Downtowns work when their businesses complement one another.
Tech firms don't belong in the core part of the downtown for the same reason that manufacturing plants don't belong there. Non-employees don't go downtown to visit a Google or Apple or Cisco office. Those sorts of offices should be within a reasonable distance from at least some services (particularly food) because that makes life easier for the workers, but such businesses can easily be a few blocks removed from the main strip without adversely affecting the success of the business. And if they start using space that would normally be used by retail and personal services businesses, they start to adversely affect those other businesses, eventually leading to the total collapse of the downtown area.
Okay, so my dates are way off. That'll teach me to look things up before I pull numbers out of my backside. Or not. :-D
That pretty much sums it up, yes, but there's a lot more wrong than that.
If I were in charge of Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc., I would require a minimum of a 20:1 ratio between new residential square footage and new commercial square footage, to force more businesses to locate in areas farther from that geographical core and make more housing available for the businesses that already exist. Unfortunately, the city governments like the taxes that they get from big businesses, so they won't do that. And the result is the mess we have now.
The purpose of a downtown is to be a shopping and restaurant district. If you clog the place up with a bunch of tech firms, the city ceases to be viable for its residents. There's nothing nefarious here; there's just a desire for Palo Alto to remain a normal city with actual residents mixed in with those tech firms, rather than becoming just a place that people commute to.
I would argue that Newtonian physics was considered "proven" until more accurate measurements proved that our understanding was incomplete....
Besides, it isn't necessarily a violation of the law of conservation of energy if, for example, energy appears in one place and disappears somewhere else, or possibly somewhen else.
There are a lot of loopholes in the physical laws. Fifty years ago, if you had told someone that you could take a ceramic insulator and turn it into a near-zero-resistance conductor by cooling it to near absolute zero, they would have assumed you were wrong—the laws of electricity as known at the time just didn't allow for that. And if you told them that you could float magnets on top of such a superconductor, they'd have hauled you off to a sanitarium.
A hundred years ago, if you could have somehow launched GPS satellites, everyone would think that the clocks were broken, because the time would keep drifting due to relativistic effects, and that concept didn't exist yet.
We're constantly learning new exceptions to the established rules, and we have been doing so throughout all of our planet's history, from the moment we discovered that you could bang two rocks together and start a fire. It is thus utterly ridiculous to assume that at this particular point in history, we magically haver reached the pinnacle of human understanding.
Now don't get me wrong here; this supposed "EM drive" is probably bogus. There's probably some particle emission caused by electrical charge propagation through the material or some other similar curiosity. But it isn't impossible that this is something new that we don't know about—just very, very unlikely. And there's also a very slight possibility that we might learn something new about the physics of matter or gravity or who-knows-what-else from studying this, so either way, it is fascinating, and should not just be dismissed as a hoax out of hand until we know why it is happening and whether the answer to that question tells us something new that we didn't know before.
Worse. It rests on the idea that Twitter knows who the terrorists are.
Providing something to someone in good faith isn't a crime even if they later turn out to be a terrorist, as a rule. I mean sure, if you provide a firearm, you'd probably better have done due diligence, and if you send money to a charity in the Middle East, it is probably a good idea to do so, though not legally required. However, AT&T isn't committing a crime if they give cell service to somebody merely because they later find out that the person used that phone to commit an act of terror. The same applies here.
And this isn't even an ongoing service except for the existence of a particular account and the ability to look up the IP address for that account. So this is more like selling someone a set of walkie talkies. Once you've sold them, you can't readily take them back just because you later find out that they are terrorists. And the law can't reasonably expect you to do so. More to the point, it does not expect you to do so.
The best that the government can do is insist that Twitter shut down access to an account that they suspect is terror-related. And if they do that, Twitter will undoubtedly deactivate it. But the government apparently doesn't want to do that, as evidenced by the fact that they have not done so. We could speculate about whether the government's decision is based on futility (because a new account would just spring up five minutes later) or some actual security-related reason, but from the perspective of a prosecution of Twitter for giving material support, the government's reasons for not demanding account closure are irrelevant. The mere fact that the government did not tell them that a particular account is that of a suspected terrorist is a sufficiently airtight defense against those charges.
Except that Apple has a presence in multiple European countries, and there's no reason to believe that they saved much money by doing their accouning and money storage in one country instead of several, if you take the tax break out of the picture. It may be that Ireland got exactly as much as they otherwise would have, and that most of the taxes would have been paid in their Munich or Paris offices instead. If so, Ireland got those jobs in return for taking money out of the coffers of other countries—effectively free from their perspective.
I was going based on my experience with AWS, which is about $30 per TB per month for spinning storage, or $360 per TB per year. An 8 TB hard drive should typically last you about five years, and costs about $250, or about $6.25 per terabyte per year. That isn't quite two orders of magnitude, but it is pretty close. Of course if you're willing to wait several hours to start getting your data back, you can use glacier storage, and that's cheaper, but there are tradeoffs. :-)
Must be nice. I backed up over 12 GB Sunday night, and that was only one week worth of incremental backups for my personal laptop. Over my DSL connection (soon to be retired), that would have taken two days. It would take several hours even over my new cable modem service. It took five minutes to back up locally. That time difference makes the difference between me being willing to back up regularly and never backing up.
Obviously, YMMV, but I would imagine that somebody with multiple terabytes of personal data is probably either a photographer or videographer, and therefore has the same sorts of nightmare backups that I do. But I'm just guessing here. For all I know, it could be a porn collection. :-)
I'm having a hard time believing that $5 per month is even possible for anything approaching truly unlimited storage. Just storing 2 TB on Amazon glacier storage would cost three times that much. I assume they count on most of their users treating unlimited as tens of gigabytes. If everybody were storing 2 TB, I'd expect those numbers to go way, way up.
But even if you assume that $5 is your total cost from the cloud provider, that still isn't your total cost. After all, time has value, plus your internet connection costs money. Backing up 2 TB over a typical home Internet connection can take anywhere from many days up to years, which means if your storage needs are that large, you're going to want a faster Internet connection or you'll lose your mind. Tack on another $30 a month for that.
Hence my suggestion of periodically cloning your RAID and keeping the clone at work.
The problem with cloud-based solutions is that the cost for backing up several terabytes of data is typically several orders of magnitude higher than building your own RAID array, and the performance of Internet-based backup absolutely sucks beyond measure unless you're the sort of person whose data needs are measured in tens of megabytes.
The ideal solution, if you can pull it off, would be to build a small concrete bunker in your yard, run power out to it, put a UPS and power conditioner in there to protect against bad power, put a RAID array in there, wire it with Ethernet to your house underground, put a watertight door on the thing, add a power cutoff that shuts down power if water does get inside (e.g. a GFI breaker and an unused extension cord whose output end is lower than your equipment), and hope for the best.
But more realistically, I would tend to suggest an IOSafe fireproof RAID array loaded up with five 6 TB drives (or maybe even 8 TB drives). Put it in a closet somewhere, and hope for the best. If you want to increase your protection a bit, you could also get two RAID expansion cabinets, store them at work, and periodically bring one home, clone your main RAID array to it, and bring it back