I understand that, it's just that using ECC gives you very good control over the error rate, and I would have thought that manufacturers would want to push it much lower than 1/10^14.
Out of my ass. They were meant to be an example, not actual numbers. I'd imagine the actual numbers for both are quite a bit lower than what I quoted, but I really don't know. The point being that it's essentially impossible to get away from coal pollution, whereas nuclear waste doesn't affect you unless you happen to live literally right next to it, and nobody does.
But nuclear waste is also vastly more concentrated, so nobody is near it.
What's worse: coal pollution that causes 0.1% birth defects in the entire population, or nuclear waste that causes 10% birth defects in anyone who lives within 100ft of it?
It's not crazy to not be able to properly back up every single piece of data you have, because it's not all that important. I divide my data into three categories:
Whatever
Really don't want to lose this
If I lose this then I am totally fucked
Everything gets backed up to a second drive I have in my computer. I use Apple's Time Machine for this, obviously there are a lot of good solutions for this out there since this is the easy way. This step is also entirely optional. I do it simply because it means that if my main drive dies, my downtime will be measured in hours instead of days. Since I use this computer for my job that's important, but from a pure data integrity point of view I could skip it.
Categories 2 and 3 get backed up off site to a server I have an account on.
Category 3 gets backed up to multiple locations, included encrypted backups e-mailed to a gmail account. The stuff in category 3 is small enough (mainly personal source code and some other documents) that the space available in a gmail account is more than sufficient.
Now, if you actually have 3TB of must-never-lose stuff, then you have a big problem. But from your description it sounds like most of your stuff fits into category 1, and you ought to be able to set up offsite backups for categories 2 and 3 without spending a bunch of cash you may not have.
Modern drives make extensive use of error-correcting codes. It's not that expensive, space-wise, to have a code which can recover from problems to almost any desired degree of confidence. I'd be shocked of any hard drive manufacturer wasn't using an ECC that gave their devices a very near zero chance of any user experiencing a corrupted read for the entire lifetime of the drive.
Buying a computer system you cannot afford to properly use is crazy. Yes, some people are crazy, and those crazy people are going to lose data, but there's no sense in defending it.
You can never fully account for stupid, but Chernobyl didn't account for stupid at all.
The most obvious case of this is the lack of a containment structure. Every Western civilian power reactor core is surrounded by a six foot thick reinforced concrete containment dome, which is supposed to be a big dumb last-ditch measure to mitigate even the worst stupid. It may not work all the time, but Chernobyl simply didn't have one at all. If it had had a containment dome but made no other changes at all, the accident would have certainly been vastly less bad.
The people of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and many other countries will probably disagree with you. The body count hasn't decreased at all since the bomb. Quite the contrary, it has gone up. It has simply moved to hurt third-world nations more and first-world nations less.
That's nice, but I don't see what it has to do with what I said. These guys actually did break their phones by jailbreaking, and in that case the warranty does not apply to the breakage caused. (Note that it would still apply to other areas, for example if their screen was broken.) In many other cases, jailbreaking is unrelated to the warranty service requested, Apple's refusal to provide service is illegal, and restoring the phone to a pre-jailbreak state to obtain service is perfectly reasonable.
Please do not be such an idiot. Even if you want to take that side, said invasion happened in 1833. Unless I have grossly misunderstood things, Great Britain didn't have nuclear weapons at the time.
My understanding is that the ridiculously thick containment structure around the TMI reactor (the lack of which is one of Chernobyl's unforgivable flaws) would have saved the day anyway. And things have improved since then, my point was merely that it wasn't bad even to begin with.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
In fact, North Korea probably doesn't even have any nuclear weapons. They claim to, but their single nuclear test was a dud, if in fact it was a test at all. Even if they have them, they are likely to be so primitive as to be far too large to fit on a missile, leaving them with a bomb that can't actually be moved to where it will destroy its target.
It's even worse than technology that had flaws in its infancy. Chernobyl is the only serious civilian power-generation reactor accident. And Chernobyl had a tremendously bad design that never would have been approved in the West, even in the period when everything nuclear was considered to be good, and what killed it was a horribly conceived experiment run by idiots that never would have been allowed in the West, again not even during that optimistic period.
It's great to take lessons from Chernobyl, but it's wrong to take away the lesson that nuclear power is dangerous.
Well yes, I would not expect them to run firewalls. I mean, my ISP doesn't run firewalls on my connection, and I would get extremely upset if they did. My ISP also does not police P2P traffic based on illegal content. To the extent that they police traffic, whether P2P, spam, or other stuff, it's to reduce the impact on their network. I would not expect this to be any different just because your ISP is also your university.
My ISP also does not protect from killing sprees. Enforcing the law is the job of the police, not service providers.
But again, hepatitis C doesn't appear to cause rapid incapacitation, and even if it did, this guy has been free of it for quite a while but still requires special attention for years from the FAA.
I find it to be particularly ironic because he mostly needs his medical to tow gliders. The guy on the rear end of the rope doesn't need a medical at all, even though the guy in the glider can pretty easily kill the tow pilot but not vice versa.
As for kidney stones, that seems an awful lot like closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped. Wikipedia claims a 10%/year chance of recurrence, which is pretty big, but there's still a significant chance for someone who has never had one to get one. Why should I be allowed to fly with a significant chance of getting a kidney stone, whereas somebody else would not be allowed to fly because they have a really significant chance?
Ultimately, the question isn't whether people can be incapacitated in the air. Obviously they can. One question is whether people can be effectively pre-screened for incapacitation, and that's hard to say. Another question is whether it's worth pre-screening people at any given certification level, and the FAA has its own answer to that. In my mind the FAA is already far too strict on this question in many cases, so there's no reason to self-police to a greater degree than required. If you can't pass a medical but can meet the requirements for Sport Pilot (and don't have an obviously disabling condition) then go forth and fly!
Well I agree with your general point, that you would want to thoroughly inspect anything that had been "bumped" by another vehicle. But your wording was vastly more general than that. I've seen aircraft being flown immediately after getting whacked with small personal items, and even after taking out a runway light. If you bump it with your car then you should probably have it looked at by a professional, but there's a lot of stuff that can graze your plane without really creating the need for an inspection.
You're right, I won't consider 80 to be raining out of the sky. My golden standard in this is road fatalities, which are roughly 40,000/year in the US alone, and still around 20,000/year when you remove the ones due to alcohol. When airline security problems approach a similar level, then I will start to think about possibly considering them to be significant.
(Yes, before you come out and think you've "caught" me at something, this puts me in a position of claiming that 9/11 was not significant. It wasn't, except for how people reacted to it. The vast majority of the damage was done to ourselves by ourselves.)
As for my "record", that's some amazingly twisted thinking. I cannot even begin to comprehend why you think I would give two shits about a "record" on my anonymous Slashdot account in a discussion that nobody cares about and will not be reading in a week's time.
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I understand that, it's just that using ECC gives you very good control over the error rate, and I would have thought that manufacturers would want to push it much lower than 1/10^14.
If you put it where I think you did then that is precisely the point I was trying to make.
Out of my ass. They were meant to be an example, not actual numbers. I'd imagine the actual numbers for both are quite a bit lower than what I quoted, but I really don't know. The point being that it's essentially impossible to get away from coal pollution, whereas nuclear waste doesn't affect you unless you happen to live literally right next to it, and nobody does.
But nuclear waste is also vastly more concentrated, so nobody is near it.
What's worse: coal pollution that causes 0.1% birth defects in the entire population, or nuclear waste that causes 10% birth defects in anyone who lives within 100ft of it?
Do any of them actually do that, though?
It's not crazy to not be able to properly back up every single piece of data you have, because it's not all that important. I divide my data into three categories:
Everything gets backed up to a second drive I have in my computer. I use Apple's Time Machine for this, obviously there are a lot of good solutions for this out there since this is the easy way. This step is also entirely optional. I do it simply because it means that if my main drive dies, my downtime will be measured in hours instead of days. Since I use this computer for my job that's important, but from a pure data integrity point of view I could skip it.
Categories 2 and 3 get backed up off site to a server I have an account on.
Category 3 gets backed up to multiple locations, included encrypted backups e-mailed to a gmail account. The stuff in category 3 is small enough (mainly personal source code and some other documents) that the space available in a gmail account is more than sufficient.
Now, if you actually have 3TB of must-never-lose stuff, then you have a big problem. But from your description it sounds like most of your stuff fits into category 1, and you ought to be able to set up offsite backups for categories 2 and 3 without spending a bunch of cash you may not have.
Modern drives make extensive use of error-correcting codes. It's not that expensive, space-wise, to have a code which can recover from problems to almost any desired degree of confidence. I'd be shocked of any hard drive manufacturer wasn't using an ECC that gave their devices a very near zero chance of any user experiencing a corrupted read for the entire lifetime of the drive.
Buying a computer system you cannot afford to properly use is crazy. Yes, some people are crazy, and those crazy people are going to lose data, but there's no sense in defending it.
Even more sad is how our political response to them for decades has been to give in to their Dr. Evil-style blackmail.
You can never fully account for stupid, but Chernobyl didn't account for stupid at all.
The most obvious case of this is the lack of a containment structure. Every Western civilian power reactor core is surrounded by a six foot thick reinforced concrete containment dome, which is supposed to be a big dumb last-ditch measure to mitigate even the worst stupid. It may not work all the time, but Chernobyl simply didn't have one at all. If it had had a containment dome but made no other changes at all, the accident would have certainly been vastly less bad.
The people of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and many other countries will probably disagree with you. The body count hasn't decreased at all since the bomb. Quite the contrary, it has gone up. It has simply moved to hurt third-world nations more and first-world nations less.
That's nice, but I don't see what it has to do with what I said. These guys actually did break their phones by jailbreaking, and in that case the warranty does not apply to the breakage caused. (Note that it would still apply to other areas, for example if their screen was broken.) In many other cases, jailbreaking is unrelated to the warranty service requested, Apple's refusal to provide service is illegal, and restoring the phone to a pre-jailbreak state to obtain service is perfectly reasonable.
Nah, I wasn't responding to your troll, I was responding to how it wasn't even a sensible troll. :-)
Not geography, just a simple brain fart. Thanks for the correction in any case.
Please do not be such an idiot. Even if you want to take that side, said invasion happened in 1833. Unless I have grossly misunderstood things, Great Britain didn't have nuclear weapons at the time.
My understanding is that the ridiculously thick containment structure around the TMI reactor (the lack of which is one of Chernobyl's unforgivable flaws) would have saved the day anyway. And things have improved since then, my point was merely that it wasn't bad even to begin with.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
Ever hear about this little place in the South Pacific called the Falkland Islands? You should check it out, it may be interesting to you.
In fact, North Korea probably doesn't even have any nuclear weapons. They claim to, but their single nuclear test was a dud, if in fact it was a test at all. Even if they have them, they are likely to be so primitive as to be far too large to fit on a missile, leaving them with a bomb that can't actually be moved to where it will destroy its target.
It's even worse than technology that had flaws in its infancy. Chernobyl is the only serious civilian power-generation reactor accident. And Chernobyl had a tremendously bad design that never would have been approved in the West, even in the period when everything nuclear was considered to be good, and what killed it was a horribly conceived experiment run by idiots that never would have been allowed in the West, again not even during that optimistic period.
It's great to take lessons from Chernobyl, but it's wrong to take away the lesson that nuclear power is dangerous.
Well yes, I would not expect them to run firewalls. I mean, my ISP doesn't run firewalls on my connection, and I would get extremely upset if they did. My ISP also does not police P2P traffic based on illegal content. To the extent that they police traffic, whether P2P, spam, or other stuff, it's to reduce the impact on their network. I would not expect this to be any different just because your ISP is also your university.
My ISP also does not protect from killing sprees. Enforcing the law is the job of the police, not service providers.
But again, hepatitis C doesn't appear to cause rapid incapacitation, and even if it did, this guy has been free of it for quite a while but still requires special attention for years from the FAA.
I find it to be particularly ironic because he mostly needs his medical to tow gliders. The guy on the rear end of the rope doesn't need a medical at all, even though the guy in the glider can pretty easily kill the tow pilot but not vice versa.
As for kidney stones, that seems an awful lot like closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped. Wikipedia claims a 10%/year chance of recurrence, which is pretty big, but there's still a significant chance for someone who has never had one to get one. Why should I be allowed to fly with a significant chance of getting a kidney stone, whereas somebody else would not be allowed to fly because they have a really significant chance?
Ultimately, the question isn't whether people can be incapacitated in the air. Obviously they can. One question is whether people can be effectively pre-screened for incapacitation, and that's hard to say. Another question is whether it's worth pre-screening people at any given certification level, and the FAA has its own answer to that. In my mind the FAA is already far too strict on this question in many cases, so there's no reason to self-police to a greater degree than required. If you can't pass a medical but can meet the requirements for Sport Pilot (and don't have an obviously disabling condition) then go forth and fly!
The question is not whether they could do a proper job for less. The question is whether they should be doing this job at all.
Um, everywhere? That is the article's premise. For example:
The main difference between these two tech giants is in their respective models of application distribution.
I mean, did you even read the thing?
Well I agree with your general point, that you would want to thoroughly inspect anything that had been "bumped" by another vehicle. But your wording was vastly more general than that. I've seen aircraft being flown immediately after getting whacked with small personal items, and even after taking out a runway light. If you bump it with your car then you should probably have it looked at by a professional, but there's a lot of stuff that can graze your plane without really creating the need for an inspection.
You're right, I won't consider 80 to be raining out of the sky. My golden standard in this is road fatalities, which are roughly 40,000/year in the US alone, and still around 20,000/year when you remove the ones due to alcohol. When airline security problems approach a similar level, then I will start to think about possibly considering them to be significant.
(Yes, before you come out and think you've "caught" me at something, this puts me in a position of claiming that 9/11 was not significant. It wasn't, except for how people reacted to it. The vast majority of the damage was done to ourselves by ourselves.)
As for my "record", that's some amazingly twisted thinking. I cannot even begin to comprehend why you think I would give two shits about a "record" on my anonymous Slashdot account in a discussion that nobody cares about and will not be reading in a week's time.