The problem is that everybody in power wants more power, which means more budget for their own projects, which means bigger government instead of smaller government. Ever notice how both parties always want less government while the other party is in power. Government sucks because the people who run universally suck, because the people who wouldn't suck have no real interest in politics or holding public office.
Depends on the college. At many schools, the teachers (even lecturers) choose the books for the class, so even two different people teaching the same class may not use the same book. I've never heard of textbooks being chosen higher than a departmental level.
Or did you mean that only a Regents level position would be able to set textbook policies for enough students to make textbook publishers care?
Won't work. Unless you're paying extra money to my ISP, my ISP won't route traffic to your server over the faster private links. Further, it's impossible to determine the route a TCP packet took to get to you. All the packet contains is the source and destination.
You might be able to serve 404s to users who work for companies that pay money for *their* traffic to be carried over such a net, though it is unlikely that any of them will ever visit your site while on the job anyway, making it a lot of work for no actual impact.
No, the net neutrality movement also impacts individuals and small businesses (which are usually not corporations). For example, there's nothing inherently corporate about VoIP. I could run an asterisk server and you could run an asterisk server, and as long as neither of us needs to call out onto real telephone lines, we can use VoIP between us. For that matter, there's also A/V chat via FaceTime, AIM, FaceBook, and other services that, although technically using a server, use a server solely to obtain an IP number for the other party. As such, these systems are basically peer-to-peer connections with minimal corporate involvement.
As Jabber and other protocols become commonplace, we're going to see more and more high-bandwidth, telephony-grade peer-to-peer networking with less and less dependence on a particular corporation or service. Net neutrality is absolutely essential for such a future to be possible. If, for example, your ISP (say Comcast) is allowed to offer VoIP service and decides to prioritize only their own VoIP traffic to give it an unfair usability advantage, all of those other technologies become largely moot.
I have no less than 6-7 obvious choices for broadband right now, including Sprint, Quest, DirecTV, Cox, AT&T, Verizon (yes, you can use 3G/4G for Internet access), you name it.
That's great for you. My parents, by contrast, have one. Their cable company. There's no DSL, no usable cellular broadband from either Verizon or AT&T, no service at all from Sprint. In theory, there's DirecTV, but with the round-trip latency to geostationary orbit, that doesn't really qualify as broadband in my book. Please tell me how the free market will protect them when their ISP gets uppity.
Heck, even here in the Bay Area, I don't have 6-7 obvious choices. I could get AT&T or Verizon 3G cell service, but that's massively expensive compared with normal home broadband; you'd have to be pretty nuts to go that route. DirecTV, again, isn't really broadband by any useful definition of the term. The cable company is a crappy minor player that last I checked didn't offer Internet service. So the only two real choices are AT&T U-Verse and Covad DSL. Everybody else is either a reseller of AT&T DSL (which might no longer exist, not sure) or Covad DSL. Either way, same service, just more expensive and with extra layers of incompetent service people between you and the person who can actually diagnose and fix the problem.
Except that by moving that content closer to the users, the upstream bandwidth is freed, so that effectively makes everyone else's traffic faster, which means that it is okay for the ISP to take longer to upgrade their long haul links because they are under less load.
*shrugs* That depends on what you are maintaining, I suppose.
I maintain a tool with 328 test cases at the moment, split across five different test suites for different functional units. One of those tests an outside tool. The rest of the test suites test either parts of a parser, the parser as a whole, or code that wraps around the parser and uses its results in a specific way.
Because of the complexity of a parser, often a change that fixes one problem causes a harmless but technically distinct change in the output of... all of the core parser tests. Anecdotally, I find that about a quarter of the time, test case "regressions" are both expected and harmless. This is not at all unusual for a test of a complex functional unit.
For example, say I add a new piece of code to catch an edge case somewhere. This code requires adding a new key-value pair to the parser state object to indicate that the parser is doing something special at the moment. The result is that the state object at the end of the test now has an extra key-value pair that is zero for all the test cases (we hope), but the key is still there and wasn't there before.
In theory, I could add code so that this doesn't generate a test failure, but there's always the possibility that such a change could actually be a sign of a real regression---a code path being followed that was not followed before causing a key-value pair to be added. Similarly, I could go through my code and make sure all variables are preinitialized in the data structure, but because this is written in Perl, I would take a sizable performance hit for the initialization, making that undesirable.
Thus, if I made it torture to change the test cases, I'd be making my life miserable. I update one or more test case files in any given week. I'd have that long password memorized before very long. Besides, since this is released as open source code, the test results have to go into version control along with the source code, so it wouldn't be very practical to try to create a forced account separation.
Ultimately, you really have to have self control. Trying to fake self control by adding barriers to doing something might work for some people in some cases, but usually people just incorporate those barriers into their routine and they cease to be barriers.
I agree that traffic should be tiered, but it should be tiered not on a pay-to-play basis, but rather on the technical merits of prioritizing a particular class of traffic. Traffic that requires low latency for correctness (live audio/video streaming) should have highest priority, followed by light web browsing, followed by long-running downloads that run for hours at a time, simply because delaying packets for those different types of traffic cause vastly different impact on the customer's experience.
If a company wants to pay for faster bandwidth, that's certainly within their right by mirroring their content closer to the end users. They should not be allowed to pay to artificially degrade the traffic of other companies, however. That's a fine line. Moving a server closer to the customer doesn't impact the speed of anybody else's traffic. Creating a high speed secondary backbone for pay-to-play, by contrast, does because that second backbone between ISPs is bandwidth that would otherwise be used for bulk traffic.
The most important thing, however, is really that any protocol-specific optimization *must* be done in a consistent and nondiscriminatory fashion. Companies like Comcast should not be allowed to do QoS prioritization for their own VoIP service but refuse to do so for Skype, Vonage, et al. That's a clear antitrust violation, and that's the sort of thing that NN rules really need to address, since there have been accusations of such abuse happening already.
No, back in the day we fought so that nobody would control the Internet. Initially, corporations didn't have enough power to screw things up, so the only people we had to keep from abusing their power was the government. Now, they do, so we have to convince somebody more powerful (the government) to step in and keep them in check. It's about balancing one bad guy against another so that the harm cancels out....
A fun bit of psychology: assuming you're from a country where traffic lights follow the usual red-yellow-green pattern, you should make successful tests show the word "OK" in uppercase green. Make unsuccessful tests show the word "fail" or "Fail" in lowercase/mixed-case red. This causes you to feel a sense of satisfaction when tests come up green, and in some subtle way causes you to enjoy creating more tests because things turn green.
You do, however, have to be careful not to allow yourself to fall into the trap of changing the test result data to match the actual results just to get more green (unless you're sure that the changes really are expected, of course). That requires a great deal of discipline.
There's a difference. In that day and age, it used to cost a lot of money to take photos, which means that you only took photos of things that you really cared about. You took pictures of your family at reunions, pictures of your kids growing up, etc. You didn't take 1,600 photos on your trip to Italy. The handful of photos you would have taken when it cost a lot are the sorts of photos that are particularly memorable.
The vast majority of photos people take now are things that you probably won't ever look at again. The occasional "Ooh, I have a picture of that" moment ceases to be interesting if they aren't readily available. It's not that pictures aren't valuable if you don't have them with you, so much as that very few pictures are valuable if you don't have them with you, and now that it is cheap and easy to carry pictures with you, nobody, and I mean nobody is going to want to go back to the dark days of having their photo albums locked away in a closet somewhere and brought out for family reunions.
It's not like you can avoid backups just because you have an SSD.
No, but the purpose of having a reliable drive is not so that you can avoid having a backup. The purpose is to minimize the chances of having to restore from a backup and losing any work since you last backed up. Statistically speaking you're almost guaranteed to lose data when your hard drive crashes, no matter how regularly you back up. It's almost inevitable. Therefore, if the price is even close to comparable, it makes sense to spend a little more for better reliability.
Put another way, hard drive reliability seems to be getting worse, judging purely anecdotally from my personal drive failure rates. I'm already uncomfortable having only one backup of anything important. SSDs start to look awfully good when you lose four or five hard drives in a year, even if you're good about backing up. Doubly so if one of those was your backup drive.
I'm sure everyone has their own opinion on what's important, but if you ask me, the benefits to an SSD (even in a portable device) are (1) speed, (2) power, and maybe then (3) reliability.
Speed is nice and all, but flash provides minimal speed boost during the 99.9% of the time that you're not booting or launching an application. You can get the same benefit with just a few gigs of flash cache for a lot less money than a full SSD.
Power is mostly a red herring. A laptop hard drive draws about two to three watts on average. A SSD takes about a watt. So you're saving 1W or 2W out of a laptop's 15-45W power budget. If your machine is completely idle with the backlight turned way down, that might be a little over a 10% increase in battery life. If your CPU is running pretty hard with the backlight at full blast, that gets lost in the noise.... Either way, if you regularly have to worry about a 10% difference in battery life, you should probably be carrying a second battery anyway.
They're also probably files you'll want to keep longer than the computer anyway, so an external HD, for most people, is a perfectly sane solution.
No, they're files you'll want to have backed up on an external HD. That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a copy on your laptop. How are you going to show your photos to people if they're locked up on a hard drive on your desk at home? How are you going to watch movies on the plane if they're on an external hard drive that's sitting on your desk at home? And so on. And before you say, "Use a bus-powered hard drive," I would remind you that those are still laptop drives we're talking about, so it's of no consequence whether we're talking about the size of an internal drive or an external drive at that point....
Funny, my cache is 15MB
That 1 GB of cache was my Safari cache size. Your results may vary with other browsers on other platforms, and may vary dramatically depending on the sites you visit.
This I can agree with. But, portable has and always will be more limited than stationary. If portable is your primary concern, then you sacrifice one of a)cash to pay for the big SSD b) battery life to support the spinning disk or c) some of those media files.
And that was basically my point. Right now, the vast majority of people choose spinning disks because they would rather be able to keep 500 GB of media than have the extra battery life and reliability afforded by SSDs. There probably is a size beyond which most users won't need extra capacity, but right now, that size is at least several hundred megabytes, and it doubles every few years. A 64 GB drive just isn't practical, so almost nobody is buying machines with 64 GB SSDs.
Until the price point of SSDs comes down to the point that you can buy an SSD that is as large as the largest laptop HD and not pay more than about a $200-300 premium for it, SSDs will continue to be used only by people who value performance over capacity, which doesn't describe most computer users, from what I've seen. Right now, you're looking at almost a thousand dollar premium at 500 GB, or two grand at a terabyte. Most people just don't have that much money to burn. Even the small SSDs cost more than a 500 GB hard drive. That's just nuts.
The big reason to move away from spinning drives to SSDs is not performance. It's reliability. Spinning hard drives in a portable device are a head crash waiting to happen. We don't need to buy smaller SSDs plus spinning drives to save money. That will just keep SSD prices high relative to Winchester disks. We need to increase large-capacity SSD manufacturing so that economies of scale make them as cheap as spinning drives.
Dude, even my borderline-computer-illiterate friends have and fill multi-gigabyte flash cards frequently. I might be a little unusual at 60 gigs, but I suspect I'm within one standard deviation of the mean, judging from what I've seen. Some people go through them and throw away 90% of the photos that they take, so those people do use much less, but with the cost of disk space, that's quickly becoming the exception, not the norm.
The serious photographers are outliers, but their collections are measured in terabytes, not gigabytes.
Either way, you're still tethered. If I can't carry my photos with me, there's little point in having taken them in the first place. A NAS box doesn't help you much when you want to show somebody a photo and you're not near a network connection. Which, statistically speaking, is almost all of the time except at home or work, plus the occasional hotel or airport. So what you're saying is that instead of a $100 hard drive, I should:
buy a $100 NAS system.
pay significantly more for a high speed internet connection with fast enough upload speeds so that it doesn't take 13 minutes to download that 12 MB RAW photo at 128kbps while away from home.
set up photo gallery software to help you organize things so that you can view thumbnails to find the picture you're looking for in under a day.
pay another $30-50 per month for cellular data service so you can use it when you're not at a Wi-Fi hotspot.
For somebody like me, that is moderately practical; I have a 768kbit upload with static IPs and an external server that provides a cache of the photos themselves with an even faster connection. However, I can guarantee you that most normal people who like to take pictures can't handle that.... Yes, they could use a photo gallery website instead, but even then, you can still only see your pictures near a hotspot.
Regarding the UK issue, it clearly was two separate offenses. The driver sped up too early in one spot and was caught by a camera. Twice. The same camera. Not two different cameras. Therefore, short of the road being circular, it cannot possibly have been a single offense.
Regarding two citations for speeding in the same stop, the officer can ticket you all he wants. That doesn't mean the judge won't throw out one of them, and did in this case, judging from the comments. Given that the decision to give multiple tickets was probably driven by quotas or other revenue reasons (which are illegal in most places), such an action by an officer might even get *both* tickets thrown out, depending on jurisdiction and on how well your lawyer argues the case.
Were it the case that you could charge someone twice for the same offense, localities would simply put up three speed trap cameras in a row, ten feet apart, and ticket people three times for every violation. Such abuse would never hold up in court---I don't care what jurisdiction you're talking about---unless we're talking about someplace with massive corruption where the sheriff is the judge's husband or something.
It's legal to give you a ticket for doing 66 in a 65. And to do so with cameras so you don't even know you got it. And to give you another ticket another mile down the road for the same crime-- every mile all the way home.
No, it's not. If they did not stop you to give you the first ticket, then there was only a single infraction. You only exceeded the speed limit once, for a period of several hours. You did not exceed the speed limit several times, once per speed sensor/camera....
Your OS, drivers, and applications will easily eat half of that 64 GB without saving a single file of user data.
A web browser's on-disk cache typically hovers at another gig or so.
My photo collection alone is 60 GB. Sure, I take lots of pictures, but as megapixel counts increase, the size of photo collections does, too. That's mostly from shooting at the smallest size on my DSLR....
In this day and age, most computer users buy laptops as their primary machines because they are portable. External hard drives are the opposite of that.
External hard drives drain your battery much faster than a larger internal drive. Much, MUCH faster.
My current laptop HD is 500 GB. I have only 50 GB free. Now about 240 GB of the space taken up is in the form of large files that could reasonably live on an external HD because I don't really need or want it with me. Still, that means I have 210 GB of stuff that I legitimately would want to carry around at all times, up from 160 GB two years ago when the last drive died, meaning that I pack on an estimated 25 GB per year of new material. And even that pales compared with people who do lots of movie downloading (legal or otherwise). (Yes, you could argue that those downloads could be put on an external drive, but that becomes a management headache when deciding what movies to bring with you on a trip, and... you get the idea.)
With the upswing in downloadable content (both movies and software), the need for hard drive space is in a rapid upswing. If most people only needed 60 GB drives, you'd still be able to buy spinning drives that small, and the few percent of users who needed the bigger capacity would have to deal by adding external drives. Since we're not seeing any sign of the demand for larger drives slowing, I think it's safe to say that 64 GB is not enough for most users. I doubt it is enough even for most casual users.
I guess pre-filtering the water would make sense. Still (pun intended), bacteria don't evaporate with the water, so if any bacteria are present in distilled water, they were either already in the bottle before the water was added or are the result of contamination later in the process. My guess would be bacterial contamination of the water used to wash out the bottles before filling....
Distilling systems shouldn't use or need filters. The distillation process involves evaporating water and then condensing it. Must have been some other process you're thinking of. I mean sure, ostensibly you could get mold growth or something if they don't ever clean the chamber, but....
Thus, one could argue that if Geek Squad is afforded trademark protection, it would be misappropriating an existing phrase. I don't think this is likely to go well for BB.
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The problem is that everybody in power wants more power, which means more budget for their own projects, which means bigger government instead of smaller government. Ever notice how both parties always want less government while the other party is in power. Government sucks because the people who run universally suck, because the people who wouldn't suck have no real interest in politics or holding public office.
Depends on the college. At many schools, the teachers (even lecturers) choose the books for the class, so even two different people teaching the same class may not use the same book. I've never heard of textbooks being chosen higher than a departmental level.
Or did you mean that only a Regents level position would be able to set textbook policies for enough students to make textbook publishers care?
In shop talk, though, updating a SKU means releasing a new revision of a product. It's fairly common usage.
Won't work. Unless you're paying extra money to my ISP, my ISP won't route traffic to your server over the faster private links. Further, it's impossible to determine the route a TCP packet took to get to you. All the packet contains is the source and destination.
You might be able to serve 404s to users who work for companies that pay money for *their* traffic to be carried over such a net, though it is unlikely that any of them will ever visit your site while on the job anyway, making it a lot of work for no actual impact.
No, the net neutrality movement also impacts individuals and small businesses (which are usually not corporations). For example, there's nothing inherently corporate about VoIP. I could run an asterisk server and you could run an asterisk server, and as long as neither of us needs to call out onto real telephone lines, we can use VoIP between us. For that matter, there's also A/V chat via FaceTime, AIM, FaceBook, and other services that, although technically using a server, use a server solely to obtain an IP number for the other party. As such, these systems are basically peer-to-peer connections with minimal corporate involvement.
As Jabber and other protocols become commonplace, we're going to see more and more high-bandwidth, telephony-grade peer-to-peer networking with less and less dependence on a particular corporation or service. Net neutrality is absolutely essential for such a future to be possible. If, for example, your ISP (say Comcast) is allowed to offer VoIP service and decides to prioritize only their own VoIP traffic to give it an unfair usability advantage, all of those other technologies become largely moot.
That's great for you. My parents, by contrast, have one. Their cable company. There's no DSL, no usable cellular broadband from either Verizon or AT&T, no service at all from Sprint. In theory, there's DirecTV, but with the round-trip latency to geostationary orbit, that doesn't really qualify as broadband in my book. Please tell me how the free market will protect them when their ISP gets uppity.
Heck, even here in the Bay Area, I don't have 6-7 obvious choices. I could get AT&T or Verizon 3G cell service, but that's massively expensive compared with normal home broadband; you'd have to be pretty nuts to go that route. DirecTV, again, isn't really broadband by any useful definition of the term. The cable company is a crappy minor player that last I checked didn't offer Internet service. So the only two real choices are AT&T U-Verse and Covad DSL. Everybody else is either a reseller of AT&T DSL (which might no longer exist, not sure) or Covad DSL. Either way, same service, just more expensive and with extra layers of incompetent service people between you and the person who can actually diagnose and fix the problem.
Except that by moving that content closer to the users, the upstream bandwidth is freed, so that effectively makes everyone else's traffic faster, which means that it is okay for the ISP to take longer to upgrade their long haul links because they are under less load.
*shrugs* That depends on what you are maintaining, I suppose.
I maintain a tool with 328 test cases at the moment, split across five different test suites for different functional units. One of those tests an outside tool. The rest of the test suites test either parts of a parser, the parser as a whole, or code that wraps around the parser and uses its results in a specific way .
Because of the complexity of a parser, often a change that fixes one problem causes a harmless but technically distinct change in the output of... all of the core parser tests. Anecdotally, I find that about a quarter of the time, test case "regressions" are both expected and harmless. This is not at all unusual for a test of a complex functional unit.
For example, say I add a new piece of code to catch an edge case somewhere. This code requires adding a new key-value pair to the parser state object to indicate that the parser is doing something special at the moment. The result is that the state object at the end of the test now has an extra key-value pair that is zero for all the test cases (we hope), but the key is still there and wasn't there before.
In theory, I could add code so that this doesn't generate a test failure, but there's always the possibility that such a change could actually be a sign of a real regression---a code path being followed that was not followed before causing a key-value pair to be added. Similarly, I could go through my code and make sure all variables are preinitialized in the data structure, but because this is written in Perl, I would take a sizable performance hit for the initialization, making that undesirable.
Thus, if I made it torture to change the test cases, I'd be making my life miserable. I update one or more test case files in any given week. I'd have that long password memorized before very long. Besides, since this is released as open source code, the test results have to go into version control along with the source code, so it wouldn't be very practical to try to create a forced account separation.
Ultimately, you really have to have self control. Trying to fake self control by adding barriers to doing something might work for some people in some cases, but usually people just incorporate those barriers into their routine and they cease to be barriers.
I agree that traffic should be tiered, but it should be tiered not on a pay-to-play basis, but rather on the technical merits of prioritizing a particular class of traffic. Traffic that requires low latency for correctness (live audio/video streaming) should have highest priority, followed by light web browsing, followed by long-running downloads that run for hours at a time, simply because delaying packets for those different types of traffic cause vastly different impact on the customer's experience.
If a company wants to pay for faster bandwidth, that's certainly within their right by mirroring their content closer to the end users. They should not be allowed to pay to artificially degrade the traffic of other companies, however. That's a fine line. Moving a server closer to the customer doesn't impact the speed of anybody else's traffic. Creating a high speed secondary backbone for pay-to-play, by contrast, does because that second backbone between ISPs is bandwidth that would otherwise be used for bulk traffic.
The most important thing, however, is really that any protocol-specific optimization *must* be done in a consistent and nondiscriminatory fashion. Companies like Comcast should not be allowed to do QoS prioritization for their own VoIP service but refuse to do so for Skype, Vonage, et al. That's a clear antitrust violation, and that's the sort of thing that NN rules really need to address, since there have been accusations of such abuse happening already.
No, back in the day we fought so that nobody would control the Internet. Initially, corporations didn't have enough power to screw things up, so the only people we had to keep from abusing their power was the government. Now, they do, so we have to convince somebody more powerful (the government) to step in and keep them in check. It's about balancing one bad guy against another so that the harm cancels out....
A fun bit of psychology: assuming you're from a country where traffic lights follow the usual red-yellow-green pattern, you should make successful tests show the word "OK" in uppercase green. Make unsuccessful tests show the word "fail" or "Fail" in lowercase/mixed-case red. This causes you to feel a sense of satisfaction when tests come up green, and in some subtle way causes you to enjoy creating more tests because things turn green.
You do, however, have to be careful not to allow yourself to fall into the trap of changing the test result data to match the actual results just to get more green (unless you're sure that the changes really are expected, of course). That requires a great deal of discipline.
There's a difference. In that day and age, it used to cost a lot of money to take photos, which means that you only took photos of things that you really cared about. You took pictures of your family at reunions, pictures of your kids growing up, etc. You didn't take 1,600 photos on your trip to Italy. The handful of photos you would have taken when it cost a lot are the sorts of photos that are particularly memorable.
The vast majority of photos people take now are things that you probably won't ever look at again. The occasional "Ooh, I have a picture of that" moment ceases to be interesting if they aren't readily available. It's not that pictures aren't valuable if you don't have them with you, so much as that very few pictures are valuable if you don't have them with you, and now that it is cheap and easy to carry pictures with you, nobody, and I mean nobody is going to want to go back to the dark days of having their photo albums locked away in a closet somewhere and brought out for family reunions.
No, but the purpose of having a reliable drive is not so that you can avoid having a backup. The purpose is to minimize the chances of having to restore from a backup and losing any work since you last backed up. Statistically speaking you're almost guaranteed to lose data when your hard drive crashes, no matter how regularly you back up. It's almost inevitable. Therefore, if the price is even close to comparable, it makes sense to spend a little more for better reliability.
Put another way, hard drive reliability seems to be getting worse, judging purely anecdotally from my personal drive failure rates. I'm already uncomfortable having only one backup of anything important. SSDs start to look awfully good when you lose four or five hard drives in a year, even if you're good about backing up. Doubly so if one of those was your backup drive.
Speed is nice and all, but flash provides minimal speed boost during the 99.9% of the time that you're not booting or launching an application. You can get the same benefit with just a few gigs of flash cache for a lot less money than a full SSD.
Power is mostly a red herring. A laptop hard drive draws about two to three watts on average. A SSD takes about a watt. So you're saving 1W or 2W out of a laptop's 15-45W power budget. If your machine is completely idle with the backlight turned way down, that might be a little over a 10% increase in battery life. If your CPU is running pretty hard with the backlight at full blast, that gets lost in the noise.... Either way, if you regularly have to worry about a 10% difference in battery life, you should probably be carrying a second battery anyway.
No, they're files you'll want to have backed up on an external HD. That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a copy on your laptop. How are you going to show your photos to people if they're locked up on a hard drive on your desk at home? How are you going to watch movies on the plane if they're on an external hard drive that's sitting on your desk at home? And so on. And before you say, "Use a bus-powered hard drive," I would remind you that those are still laptop drives we're talking about, so it's of no consequence whether we're talking about the size of an internal drive or an external drive at that point....
That 1 GB of cache was my Safari cache size. Your results may vary with other browsers on other platforms, and may vary dramatically depending on the sites you visit.
And that was basically my point. Right now, the vast majority of people choose spinning disks because they would rather be able to keep 500 GB of media than have the extra battery life and reliability afforded by SSDs. There probably is a size beyond which most users won't need extra capacity, but right now, that size is at least several hundred megabytes, and it doubles every few years. A 64 GB drive just isn't practical, so almost nobody is buying machines with 64 GB SSDs.
Until the price point of SSDs comes down to the point that you can buy an SSD that is as large as the largest laptop HD and not pay more than about a $200-300 premium for it, SSDs will continue to be used only by people who value performance over capacity, which doesn't describe most computer users, from what I've seen. Right now, you're looking at almost a thousand dollar premium at 500 GB, or two grand at a terabyte. Most people just don't have that much money to burn. Even the small SSDs cost more than a 500 GB hard drive. That's just nuts.
You're assuming that you can download it again without paying for it again.
The big reason to move away from spinning drives to SSDs is not performance. It's reliability. Spinning hard drives in a portable device are a head crash waiting to happen. We don't need to buy smaller SSDs plus spinning drives to save money. That will just keep SSD prices high relative to Winchester disks. We need to increase large-capacity SSD manufacturing so that economies of scale make them as cheap as spinning drives.
Dude, even my borderline-computer-illiterate friends have and fill multi-gigabyte flash cards frequently. I might be a little unusual at 60 gigs, but I suspect I'm within one standard deviation of the mean, judging from what I've seen. Some people go through them and throw away 90% of the photos that they take, so those people do use much less, but with the cost of disk space, that's quickly becoming the exception, not the norm.
The serious photographers are outliers, but their collections are measured in terabytes, not gigabytes.
Either way, you're still tethered. If I can't carry my photos with me, there's little point in having taken them in the first place. A NAS box doesn't help you much when you want to show somebody a photo and you're not near a network connection. Which, statistically speaking, is almost all of the time except at home or work, plus the occasional hotel or airport. So what you're saying is that instead of a $100 hard drive, I should:
For somebody like me, that is moderately practical; I have a 768kbit upload with static IPs and an external server that provides a cache of the photos themselves with an even faster connection. However, I can guarantee you that most normal people who like to take pictures can't handle that.... Yes, they could use a photo gallery website instead, but even then, you can still only see your pictures near a hotspot.
Regarding the UK issue, it clearly was two separate offenses. The driver sped up too early in one spot and was caught by a camera. Twice. The same camera. Not two different cameras. Therefore, short of the road being circular, it cannot possibly have been a single offense.
Regarding two citations for speeding in the same stop, the officer can ticket you all he wants. That doesn't mean the judge won't throw out one of them, and did in this case, judging from the comments. Given that the decision to give multiple tickets was probably driven by quotas or other revenue reasons (which are illegal in most places), such an action by an officer might even get *both* tickets thrown out, depending on jurisdiction and on how well your lawyer argues the case.
Were it the case that you could charge someone twice for the same offense, localities would simply put up three speed trap cameras in a row, ten feet apart, and ticket people three times for every violation. Such abuse would never hold up in court---I don't care what jurisdiction you're talking about---unless we're talking about someplace with massive corruption where the sheriff is the judge's husband or something.
No, it's not. If they did not stop you to give you the first ticket, then there was only a single infraction. You only exceeded the speed limit once, for a period of several hours. You did not exceed the speed limit several times, once per speed sensor/camera....
I couldn't disagree more, for several reasons:
My current laptop HD is 500 GB. I have only 50 GB free. Now about 240 GB of the space taken up is in the form of large files that could reasonably live on an external HD because I don't really need or want it with me. Still, that means I have 210 GB of stuff that I legitimately would want to carry around at all times, up from 160 GB two years ago when the last drive died, meaning that I pack on an estimated 25 GB per year of new material. And even that pales compared with people who do lots of movie downloading (legal or otherwise). (Yes, you could argue that those downloads could be put on an external drive, but that becomes a management headache when deciding what movies to bring with you on a trip, and... you get the idea.)
With the upswing in downloadable content (both movies and software), the need for hard drive space is in a rapid upswing. If most people only needed 60 GB drives, you'd still be able to buy spinning drives that small, and the few percent of users who needed the bigger capacity would have to deal by adding external drives. Since we're not seeing any sign of the demand for larger drives slowing, I think it's safe to say that 64 GB is not enough for most users. I doubt it is enough even for most casual users.
I guess pre-filtering the water would make sense. Still (pun intended), bacteria don't evaporate with the water, so if any bacteria are present in distilled water, they were either already in the bottle before the water was added or are the result of contamination later in the process. My guess would be bacterial contamination of the water used to wash out the bottles before filling....
Distilling systems shouldn't use or need filters. The distillation process involves evaporating water and then condensing it. Must have been some other process you're thinking of. I mean sure, ostensibly you could get mold growth or something if they don't ever clean the chamber, but....
Matters not. The term "God Squad" predates the "Geek Squad" by more than half a decade.
Thus, one could argue that if Geek Squad is afforded trademark protection, it would be misappropriating an existing phrase. I don't think this is likely to go well for BB.
Yeah, and then we can share images of Debian all over the internet... no, wait....