Well, if you want me to read the first amendment, then I'm not finding anything about that. If you want me to look at the invisible exceptions that judges have 'interpreted' into the constitution, then I guess you're right.
I think this Supreme Court quote from Robertson v. Baldwin (1897) pretty much sums it up:
The law is perfectly well settled that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the "Bill of Rights," were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guaranties and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors, and which had, from time immemorial, been subject to certain well recognized exceptions arising from the necessities of the case. In incorporating these principles into the fundamental law, there was no intention of disregarding the exceptions, which continued to be recognized as if they had been formally expressed. Thus, the freedom of speech and of the press (Art. I) does not permit the publication of libels (...)
From your post it sounds like we first discovered this "unconstitutionality" now or that it's been retcon'd in by judges later. Reality is that these exceptions have been implicitly understood to be there since the beginning and have mostly gone unchallenged for centuries. Sure, if you want to go into an over-literal reading of the first amendment, then I will remind you that what you're writing now is not constitutionally protected since only speech is protected. That text or other forms of expression are protected is just something judges have 'interpreted' into the constitution, and we can have none of that.
False. We're trying to tell them they can't go the same way we went, because the planet can't sustain it. It's still hypocritical, but it's NOT the same thing you're saying. There are ways to have these things without destroying the planet. China is not exploring these ways.
Why then can't the rich nations like the US use those ways and reduce their emissions down to what they ask of others then? You're just not very credible when you point out a way, but you won't meet up at the end of it. It just reeks of "we don't actually know where it leads, it'll be hard and expensive but it'll let us continue the American way of life a bit longer." I wouldn't buy that and neither does China.
In principle I agree, but in practice having a gatekeeper with a whitelist you must get on sounds like a really bad solution. "I have here these X million of web users and unless you pay me, they're not going to see your ads" sounds too much like an extortion racket.
Institutions don't know anything, people do. You don't get competence on SQL Server by buying a book and putting on the shelf. Why do people think it's different for custom built software? Sure, having documentation certainly beats not having documentation and you can train people to operate it but understanding the design, architecture and code structure behind it if you ever want to change it or adapt it isn't done in a month or even three. Knowledge transfer is a much less than perfect process when you move from concrete operations into abstract design, even if you have some nice charts and overviews.
I don't think TANSTAAFL really applies. I mean, so my lunch isn't free. OK. What's the price? I suffer? Because, ads or no ads, no money is changing hands here. People who cry that Web sites get money from ads always make the false connection that merely by having me look at ads, the advertiser benefits. That simply isn't the case.
Is it 1999 again? Because that's when everybody and their dog was extremely focused on click-through, no you're not going to jump up and go buy but it helps condition you. Billboards, newspaper ads, radio ads, TV ads, you think none of these work? No, not every commercial will apply to you - but if you're willing to hand over the marketing data they're happy to custom tailor the ads to you - but some of the ads work some of the time for pretty much everyone, most that say they're not affected are simply wrong.
Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
You're already not a car buyer. Marketing only cares about finding people that will buy, not what everyone else who never would buy it anyway think.
In the long run, advertisers are only going to want to advertise where it's effective. If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone?
Because you're reasoning under the wildly inaccurate assumption that people block advertising because it doesn't work. People don't need advertising, it's a waste of their time but if it's the least bothersome option they'll watch the ads and the ads will work. In fact, the more that is blocked and the less ad spots are available, the more valuable the remaining ones become.
The only thing you're forcing is to integrate the ads more with the content, rather than separate it. Make it impossible for you to get to the content without clicking past ads, put in ad pages between content, integrate it into the video or some other way you can't easily get rid of. Of courser users want 100% content, 0% ads at no cost. And a free pony.
What part of "7% revenue drop" isn't impressive? We're discussing an industry whose stock prices fluctuate 2-5% based on missing revenue projections by a tenth of a percent.
If those changes are representative of the future, perhaps. Yes, things are slow now but all the companies and individuals that have put their purchase on hold still want a new computer, it's not really affecting the balance of power between AMD and Intel - it's just a temporary slowdown. Yes, 7% is significant but the bulk of the stock price is based on who will continue to dominate the CPU industry the next 5-10-20 years.
Amateur. First you cut R&D, that's long term. Then you cut the engineers, that's mid term. Then you cut support/service, which is short term. Then you bail for a competing company so you're forced to sell your options and shares. As it crash and burns, paint yourself as the great CEO that was the only thing holding that company together. Do it with enough confidence and they won't see you were the one tearing it apart. Non-sociopaths tend to believe sociopaths because they themselves couldn't pull off such a baldfaced lie. That's how they get to hop from one top position to the next...
If you assume everything's going to go back to the way it was, then yes. But you assume people aren't creatures of habit and will always to a proper evaluation of the alternatives, particularly a SSD they've never tried. Right now they have an opprtunity to say "Hey SSDs are expensive but HDDs are expensive now too. So why not try an SSD?" and chances are they'll like it. You have to believe that in a few years SSDs will be big enough and cheap enough for "most people" and that this will accelerate that transition in volume, mindshare and so on. Of course nothing is going to compete with the 3-4TB drives in cost/GB, neither now nor when it returns to normal but most people don't actually store terabytes of stuff.
Checking some dictionaries you're right, shortsighedness can mean the eye disorder. The dictionaries didn't say anything about UK vs US English either, so I guess it's just in my head. In a listing like that it's certainly ambiguous...
So you have an e-book version that (thanks to DRM) you can guarantee will get sold to every single student who takes a class using it, plus you save the 15% on production costs. You can probably sell it for 1/3 of the amount you sell the dead tree version for, undercut used book prices, and still make more than you used to. On top of that, if you can get most students to use the e-book instead of the physical book, you can slow down your release cycle (since you no longer have to worry as much about students cutting into your profits by buying used) and save still more money.
I see where we differ, I was thinking no better for students. Yes, the publishers will make a killing and on top of that students will need to cash out for an iPad with no option of doing it on the cheap. If three people can use a $50 book through used sales it's not better for them than each paying $20 for a DRM'd version.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
Which of course makes the argument bogus, if you lost the resale value they didn't actually become any better value. But that's what you get when you use math from the ed-uh-cation department.
Note that Asia is for all practical purposes already out of addresses, they've been in a special last-block allocation mode now since April where no regular user will get a IPv4 address, just ISP-wide NATs and such. In reality they're already millions of addresses short.
Standard/. car (err, motorcycle) analogy: Imagine the motorcycle is invented, and its the first form of 2 wheel transportation to exist (no bicycles). (...) Bye bye training wheels to all but the 6 year old kids.
Somehow 6 year old kids on motorcycles, with or without training wheels doesn't seem like a good idea...
Linus open-sourced Linux because he thought it would be more useful that way, not because he thought that he was doing something morally right.
It's also worth noting that Linus first released Linux in 1991, but continued to study at the university of Helsinki until 1996. He did get some free stock from Red Hat and VA Linux that hit $20 million at the top of the dotcom, but by the time he could sell it the dot-bust had already happened and it was a tiny fraction of that. I think this quote is quite telling:
Torvalds hesitated before buying himself his first expensive bauble, a two-seater BMW convertible. "I was a bit nervous about people's reaction," he confesses. "Are they going to think I've gone over to the dark side?" In the end he decided that the shape and price of the hunk of metal he drove to and from work each day was his own business. Despite counsel to the contrary, Torvalds wisely sold all of his stock and spent almost all of the windfall on his home and his cars, trusting that he'd always be able to earn a good salary as an engineer.
You got to love his style but he's not exactly out there to make money, if you're looking to make a business, earn money and get rich he's not exactly the best example to follow. Then you'd better look to Gates or Jobs or some of the other closed source fellows who are happy to be billionaires. If you start worrying when you buy a BMW, then I think he'd die of guilt from that kind of money.
First, their method only works when the probability of winning is >0.5, which never happens in any real casino.
Against the house, no. Against other poker players for example, it's possible if you've identified weaknesses in the other players. But even if you've identified a 52% chance to win, how hard should you play to extract the most possible money while not getting yourself eliminated by bad hands? After all you still have a 48% chance of losing. The blinds going up means you have time pressure, you can't keep playing tiny bets forever. Not that I think poker players think this way, but it doesn't seem that useless.
Only part of the population can think abstractly
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book
Only part of the population can think abstractly. The exact percentage differs somewhat depending on what standard you use, but about 40 to 60% of the population is able to think using purely abstract models in well developed countries, without a good education far less. The rest may be very smart if they're dealing with physical objects or people, but the less it works like the "real world" the more lost they get. I've noticed this myself with simple cubes for reporting. Once you pass three dimensions that you can draw up physically, people start to zone out. Programming is dark magic, as is writing an SQL query - for me I'm just making an abstract skeleton where "The hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to the leg bone" and so on.
In theory, that sounds like a huge market but just because they can do it with some effort, doesn't mean it comes easily to people. The people that can easily, effortlessly think in the abstract and would like to do it in their daily computing is probably in the single digit range. And most of them are here on slashdot and swear by the CLI, which is the ultimate in abstraction. No graphical hints, no feedback, just type in a command and abstractly understand what it and any switches you apply will do, particularly if you daisy chain it though sed, awk and grep. You might argue that there should be a middle ground here where the UI is both powerful and easy to understand, but the people on either side aren't going to see it that way.
If you've done any serious UI development using real toolkits like Motif, MFC, wxWidgets, Swing, SWT, WinForms, and even Gtk+, you'll immediately see how stupid this JavaScript/XUL approach is.
Sorry, but my stupid-o-meter doesn't have the resolution in the "utterly dumb crappy cluster fuck" range, which is where several of these toolkits are. Never used XUL, but as far as real toolkits go you certainly missed Qt.
Federal Judge Kent Dawson, who presided over the trial of Irwin Schiff, a well-known "income tax" protester, instructed the jury that they MUST find Mr Schiff guilty on all counts or THEY would would be personally guilty of a federal crime. (...) Several months after the trial, it came out that several jurors on the trial who were aware of jury nulliication stated they would have voted to acquit, but for the chilling effect of that jury instruction.
I'd love to see what would happen if a juror said "By the fifth amendment of the US constitution, specifically the right against self-incrimination, I refuse to render a verdict." That would have become a funny process....
dvd/blu-ray rips [that can take an hour + each to rip:(:(:(:(:(:(:(]
I was about to feel sorry for you but LOL, if that's the saddest moment you can't have lost much. Backup the stuff you've made yourself, family photos and all that other shit and if you lose a DVD/BluRay rip, go get it off TPB or something. Seriously. Personally I have three stages. Most is backed up by nothing, stuff I can rip again or download again. The more important stuff is on two physical HDDs (just copy-pasted, not RAID), it'll protect against single disk failure. Finally the really important stuff is also backed up at my parent's place, in case of fire, my whole machine getting stolen or whatever else disaster should strike here.
I screwed up bad with RAID5 once, lost the entire array because of one dead disk and one flaky disk that'd fail on every rebuild. Now I do JBOD and copy-paste, if you don't need high availability then it's actually not a bad backup method. Easy to understand, no software required. For things that are incremental like photos you don't need a version control, if it's tiny then just do date stamped folders and full copies. No stress at all.
15 hours? Basically two working days? Where I come from doctorates are measured in years of work.
From WP:
In college, students typically receive credit based on the number of "lecture hours" per week in class, for one term; formally, Student Hours. Students are generally expected to spend another four to five hours outside class studying and doing homework for every hour spent in class.
So more like 15 hours * 4-5 = 60-75 hours for one semester or 30-37.5 hours for a full year. No, obviously not two days duh.
Yep, the feedback reaction is also due to the fractional fulfillment many companies do. So if we really need 100 HDDs, think we'll only get 33% of what we ask then we put in an order for 300 HDDs. We get 100 HDDs now, we might get 200 HDDs later but oh well they'll just go in storage until we need them. The important thing is that we get what we need right now. So you start dealing with more and more imaginary numbers on both sides...
Ah, but they don't care so much about the odd pirates as which products can claim official support. And those products are hooked to a DRM license agreement, even though DVDs are broken as shit you will still get in trouble if you make a DVD player without a CSS license. Does Amazon care that you free your ebooks? Not really as long as none of the other competing eReaders can put that on their feature list. As the music industry discovered, DRM is power even though mp3s were everywhere long before iTunes.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) generates about 2.5 kWh/day and about 45-50 kWh/day of waste heat (with half life of almost 90 years).
Yes, curling up next to a lump of plutonium will make you warm but you'll also die from radiation poisoning. Add in shielding and a closed loop heat transfer system and it doesn't look nearly as good. Works damn well on robotic probes though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you want me to read the first amendment, then I'm not finding anything about that. If you want me to look at the invisible exceptions that judges have 'interpreted' into the constitution, then I guess you're right.
I think this Supreme Court quote from Robertson v. Baldwin (1897) pretty much sums it up:
The law is perfectly well settled that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the "Bill of Rights," were not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guaranties and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors, and which had, from time immemorial, been subject to certain well recognized exceptions arising from the necessities of the case. In incorporating these principles into the fundamental law, there was no intention of disregarding the exceptions, which continued to be recognized as if they had been formally expressed. Thus, the freedom of speech and of the press (Art. I) does not permit the publication of libels (...)
From your post it sounds like we first discovered this "unconstitutionality" now or that it's been retcon'd in by judges later. Reality is that these exceptions have been implicitly understood to be there since the beginning and have mostly gone unchallenged for centuries. Sure, if you want to go into an over-literal reading of the first amendment, then I will remind you that what you're writing now is not constitutionally protected since only speech is protected. That text or other forms of expression are protected is just something judges have 'interpreted' into the constitution, and we can have none of that.
False. We're trying to tell them they can't go the same way we went, because the planet can't sustain it. It's still hypocritical, but it's NOT the same thing you're saying. There are ways to have these things without destroying the planet. China is not exploring these ways.
Why then can't the rich nations like the US use those ways and reduce their emissions down to what they ask of others then? You're just not very credible when you point out a way, but you won't meet up at the end of it. It just reeks of "we don't actually know where it leads, it'll be hard and expensive but it'll let us continue the American way of life a bit longer." I wouldn't buy that and neither does China.
In principle I agree, but in practice having a gatekeeper with a whitelist you must get on sounds like a really bad solution. "I have here these X million of web users and unless you pay me, they're not going to see your ads" sounds too much like an extortion racket.
Institutions don't know anything, people do. You don't get competence on SQL Server by buying a book and putting on the shelf. Why do people think it's different for custom built software? Sure, having documentation certainly beats not having documentation and you can train people to operate it but understanding the design, architecture and code structure behind it if you ever want to change it or adapt it isn't done in a month or even three. Knowledge transfer is a much less than perfect process when you move from concrete operations into abstract design, even if you have some nice charts and overviews.
I don't think TANSTAAFL really applies. I mean, so my lunch isn't free. OK. What's the price? I suffer? Because, ads or no ads, no money is changing hands here. People who cry that Web sites get money from ads always make the false connection that merely by having me look at ads, the advertiser benefits. That simply isn't the case.
Is it 1999 again? Because that's when everybody and their dog was extremely focused on click-through, no you're not going to jump up and go buy but it helps condition you. Billboards, newspaper ads, radio ads, TV ads, you think none of these work? No, not every commercial will apply to you - but if you're willing to hand over the marketing data they're happy to custom tailor the ads to you - but some of the ads work some of the time for pretty much everyone, most that say they're not affected are simply wrong.
Also, maybe I get so tired of seeing the same car ad every 10 minutes in a Hulu video that I start to hate that car and its manufacturer?
You're already not a car buyer. Marketing only cares about finding people that will buy, not what everyone else who never would buy it anyway think.
In the long run, advertisers are only going to want to advertise where it's effective. If some people are so hostile to advertising that they use AdBlock, why not leave them alone?
Because you're reasoning under the wildly inaccurate assumption that people block advertising because it doesn't work. People don't need advertising, it's a waste of their time but if it's the least bothersome option they'll watch the ads and the ads will work. In fact, the more that is blocked and the less ad spots are available, the more valuable the remaining ones become.
The only thing you're forcing is to integrate the ads more with the content, rather than separate it. Make it impossible for you to get to the content without clicking past ads, put in ad pages between content, integrate it into the video or some other way you can't easily get rid of. Of courser users want 100% content, 0% ads at no cost. And a free pony.
What part of "7% revenue drop" isn't impressive? We're discussing an industry whose stock prices fluctuate 2-5% based on missing revenue projections by a tenth of a percent.
If those changes are representative of the future, perhaps. Yes, things are slow now but all the companies and individuals that have put their purchase on hold still want a new computer, it's not really affecting the balance of power between AMD and Intel - it's just a temporary slowdown. Yes, 7% is significant but the bulk of the stock price is based on who will continue to dominate the CPU industry the next 5-10-20 years.
Amateur. First you cut R&D, that's long term. Then you cut the engineers, that's mid term. Then you cut support/service, which is short term. Then you bail for a competing company so you're forced to sell your options and shares. As it crash and burns, paint yourself as the great CEO that was the only thing holding that company together. Do it with enough confidence and they won't see you were the one tearing it apart. Non-sociopaths tend to believe sociopaths because they themselves couldn't pull off such a baldfaced lie. That's how they get to hop from one top position to the next...
If you assume everything's going to go back to the way it was, then yes. But you assume people aren't creatures of habit and will always to a proper evaluation of the alternatives, particularly a SSD they've never tried. Right now they have an opprtunity to say "Hey SSDs are expensive but HDDs are expensive now too. So why not try an SSD?" and chances are they'll like it. You have to believe that in a few years SSDs will be big enough and cheap enough for "most people" and that this will accelerate that transition in volume, mindshare and so on. Of course nothing is going to compete with the 3-4TB drives in cost/GB, neither now nor when it returns to normal but most people don't actually store terabytes of stuff.
Checking some dictionaries you're right, shortsighedness can mean the eye disorder. The dictionaries didn't say anything about UK vs US English either, so I guess it's just in my head. In a listing like that it's certainly ambiguous...
So you have an e-book version that (thanks to DRM) you can guarantee will get sold to every single student who takes a class using it, plus you save the 15% on production costs. You can probably sell it for 1/3 of the amount you sell the dead tree version for, undercut used book prices, and still make more than you used to. On top of that, if you can get most students to use the e-book instead of the physical book, you can slow down your release cycle (since you no longer have to worry as much about students cutting into your profits by buying used) and save still more money.
I see where we differ, I was thinking no better for students. Yes, the publishers will make a killing and on top of that students will need to cash out for an iPad with no option of doing it on the cheap. If three people can use a $50 book through used sales it's not better for them than each paying $20 for a DRM'd version.
my short-sightedness
You may mean nearsightedness, unless you really meant being shortsighted = not good at planning.
A dollar for me, one for you, one for me, one for.... oh well, here's 41 cents at least.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
Which of course makes the argument bogus, if you lost the resale value they didn't actually become any better value. But that's what you get when you use math from the ed-uh-cation department.
Note that Asia is for all practical purposes already out of addresses, they've been in a special last-block allocation mode now since April where no regular user will get a IPv4 address, just ISP-wide NATs and such. In reality they're already millions of addresses short.
Standard /. car (err, motorcycle) analogy: Imagine the motorcycle is invented, and its the first form of 2 wheel transportation to exist (no bicycles). (...) Bye bye training wheels to all but the 6 year old kids.
Somehow 6 year old kids on motorcycles, with or without training wheels doesn't seem like a good idea...
Linus open-sourced Linux because he thought it would be more useful that way, not because he thought that he was doing something morally right.
It's also worth noting that Linus first released Linux in 1991, but continued to study at the university of Helsinki until 1996. He did get some free stock from Red Hat and VA Linux that hit $20 million at the top of the dotcom, but by the time he could sell it the dot-bust had already happened and it was a tiny fraction of that. I think this quote is quite telling:
Torvalds hesitated before buying himself his first expensive bauble, a two-seater BMW convertible. "I was a bit nervous about people's reaction," he confesses. "Are they going to think I've gone over to the dark side?" In the end he decided that the shape and price of the hunk of metal he drove to and from work each day was his own business. Despite counsel to the contrary, Torvalds wisely sold all of his stock and spent almost all of the windfall on his home and his cars, trusting that he'd always be able to earn a good salary as an engineer.
You got to love his style but he's not exactly out there to make money, if you're looking to make a business, earn money and get rich he's not exactly the best example to follow. Then you'd better look to Gates or Jobs or some of the other closed source fellows who are happy to be billionaires. If you start worrying when you buy a BMW, then I think he'd die of guilt from that kind of money.
First, their method only works when the probability of winning is >0.5, which never happens in any real casino.
Against the house, no. Against other poker players for example, it's possible if you've identified weaknesses in the other players. But even if you've identified a 52% chance to win, how hard should you play to extract the most possible money while not getting yourself eliminated by bad hands? After all you still have a 48% chance of losing. The blinds going up means you have time pressure, you can't keep playing tiny bets forever. Not that I think poker players think this way, but it doesn't seem that useless.
Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book
Only part of the population can think abstractly. The exact percentage differs somewhat depending on what standard you use, but about 40 to 60% of the population is able to think using purely abstract models in well developed countries, without a good education far less. The rest may be very smart if they're dealing with physical objects or people, but the less it works like the "real world" the more lost they get. I've noticed this myself with simple cubes for reporting. Once you pass three dimensions that you can draw up physically, people start to zone out. Programming is dark magic, as is writing an SQL query - for me I'm just making an abstract skeleton where "The hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to the leg bone" and so on.
In theory, that sounds like a huge market but just because they can do it with some effort, doesn't mean it comes easily to people. The people that can easily, effortlessly think in the abstract and would like to do it in their daily computing is probably in the single digit range. And most of them are here on slashdot and swear by the CLI, which is the ultimate in abstraction. No graphical hints, no feedback, just type in a command and abstractly understand what it and any switches you apply will do, particularly if you daisy chain it though sed, awk and grep. You might argue that there should be a middle ground here where the UI is both powerful and easy to understand, but the people on either side aren't going to see it that way.
If you've done any serious UI development using real toolkits like Motif, MFC, wxWidgets, Swing, SWT, WinForms, and even Gtk+, you'll immediately see how stupid this JavaScript/XUL approach is.
Sorry, but my stupid-o-meter doesn't have the resolution in the "utterly dumb crappy cluster fuck" range, which is where several of these toolkits are. Never used XUL, but as far as real toolkits go you certainly missed Qt.
Federal Judge Kent Dawson, who presided over the trial of Irwin Schiff, a well-known "income tax" protester, instructed the jury that they MUST find Mr Schiff guilty on all counts or THEY would would be personally guilty of a federal crime. (...) Several months after the trial, it came out that several jurors on the trial who were aware of jury nulliication stated they would have voted to acquit, but for the chilling effect of that jury instruction.
I'd love to see what would happen if a juror said "By the fifth amendment of the US constitution, specifically the right against self-incrimination, I refuse to render a verdict." That would have become a funny process....
dvd/blu-ray rips [that can take an hour + each to rip :(:(:(:(:(:(:(]
I was about to feel sorry for you but LOL, if that's the saddest moment you can't have lost much. Backup the stuff you've made yourself, family photos and all that other shit and if you lose a DVD/BluRay rip, go get it off TPB or something. Seriously. Personally I have three stages. Most is backed up by nothing, stuff I can rip again or download again. The more important stuff is on two physical HDDs (just copy-pasted, not RAID), it'll protect against single disk failure. Finally the really important stuff is also backed up at my parent's place, in case of fire, my whole machine getting stolen or whatever else disaster should strike here.
I screwed up bad with RAID5 once, lost the entire array because of one dead disk and one flaky disk that'd fail on every rebuild. Now I do JBOD and copy-paste, if you don't need high availability then it's actually not a bad backup method. Easy to understand, no software required. For things that are incremental like photos you don't need a version control, if it's tiny then just do date stamped folders and full copies. No stress at all.
15 hours? Basically two working days? Where I come from doctorates are measured in years of work.
From WP:
In college, students typically receive credit based on the number of "lecture hours" per week in class, for one term; formally, Student Hours. Students are generally expected to spend another four to five hours outside class studying and doing homework for every hour spent in class.
So more like 15 hours * 4-5 = 60-75 hours for one semester or 30-37.5 hours for a full year. No, obviously not two days duh.
Yep, the feedback reaction is also due to the fractional fulfillment many companies do. So if we really need 100 HDDs, think we'll only get 33% of what we ask then we put in an order for 300 HDDs. We get 100 HDDs now, we might get 200 HDDs later but oh well they'll just go in storage until we need them. The important thing is that we get what we need right now. So you start dealing with more and more imaginary numbers on both sides...
Ah, but they don't care so much about the odd pirates as which products can claim official support. And those products are hooked to a DRM license agreement, even though DVDs are broken as shit you will still get in trouble if you make a DVD player without a CSS license. Does Amazon care that you free your ebooks? Not really as long as none of the other competing eReaders can put that on their feature list. As the music industry discovered, DRM is power even though mp3s were everywhere long before iTunes.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) generates about 2.5 kWh/day and about 45-50 kWh/day of waste heat (with half life of almost 90 years).
Yes, curling up next to a lump of plutonium will make you warm but you'll also die from radiation poisoning. Add in shielding and a closed loop heat transfer system and it doesn't look nearly as good. Works damn well on robotic probes though.