If you talk pure implementation time, that's one thing. But having scipts that do things consistantly - hopefully consistantly RIGHT - can be a huge timesaver for everyone. Just today I had another case of those merry-go-round emails come to me because someone didn't fill out one value, and so nobody could do what they were supposed to do and kept going in circles until it ended up escalated to me. I'd say in 90%+ of the cases, 90%+ of the time is connecting the problem with the right person who knows the solution. The support system isn't exactly helping, but without it noone would get anything but support done.
Not anymore than the Internet is P2P anyway. It'll be a slight more advanced form of distribution from someone in control of the DRM to those without control of the DRM. The whole point of peer-to-peer is that it's millions of peers sharing all sorts of shit. Everything from the mainstream to the obscure. of course not all the obscure things are on TPB but there are much more specialized niche sites. There's usually something for everyone. That's what makes it popular, who cares what this is?
Is there anybody that think that iTunes don't have the server capacity? Bullshit. If you're paying you might as well pay another 5 cent so they host the bandwidth. That's cheap central bandwidth, unlike your expensive last mile bandwidth. What peer-to-peer did was to distribute that already low cost from one server to all the peers, so that people actually operate torrent sites without killing themselves on bandwidth as opposed to the old ftp servers. That way you didn't have to start with micropayments, and just share.
So yeah whatever make a DRM'd P2P network. It won't have any of the appeal of free P2P or any real advantage over centralized DRM. Good luck on that.
P.S. Actually the Atari emulator called StellaX was a Linux program. It didn't crash but it didn't operate as well as the Windows version either, only handling 70% of the games in my collection.
I went to the site, only found a Windows download, in fact it says at the top of the page "The Atari 2600 emulator for Windows 9x, NT and 2000". I search my repositories (running kubuntu), no StellaX package. Ran a search and it came up with several Amiga emulators, but noone called anything like that. So would you please tell me where you found a Linux version of StellaX?
Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are all about wine. Your ISP software is probably trying to change some windows network/dialup settings that don't exist in Linux, use the native broadband configuration. Your "web accelerator" is probably a http proxy setting so again it's trying to modify things that don't exist, use the native proxy configuration. Wine is a system to run Windows applications under Linux. If you think you can do Linux system administration and change system settings through wine, then that is your problem. It's certainly not been my problem with any ISP since 2000, though I've only used it on the desktop for 1-2 years.
There are much better native browsers and as far as I can tell also native Amiga emulators, though I don't know the quality of them. So you come from Windows and expect Linux to run all your windows applications. Not unusual, but not really helpful either because then the only Linux project you're interested in is wine. Software not designed for Linux or cross-platform would normally not run at all, sometimes I wish newbies were forbidden from using wine until they've at least tried to use a Linux application. Yes, I know there's some irreplaceable windows software, but still.
Now the two things that are problems with Linux software: About the files, yeah that is stupid. I discovered the same using ark, if you try to unzip ten archives it'll start ten processes at the same time and go crazy trashing the disk instead of queuing them up. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Don't know why it's this way. To be fair the music players typically have a normal add to playlist dialog, but from a file browser the behavior is terrible.
As for 640x480, I don't know when I was last in that mode, I'd call it an obscure problem getting stuck in it, but you can get out of it holding down the ALT button though I admit that's not obvious for someone coming from Windows. I'm guessing StellaX switched resolution to 640x480, then it crashed and left you in a 640x480 desktop? I know the problem from other games, it's again that wine isn't working like a native application so the original resolution won't be restored in case of the application crashing and taking wine with it. So really this problem also traces back to wine.
Sure, it's not perfect. But you're constantly finding fault running Windows applications under Linux, not Linux applications under Linux. Personally I've found that the answer is more Linux, but I guess you never reached that tipping point. Windows applications are the square peg with Linux being a round hole, and wine is the hammer. Sometimes it works but it never fits well. It's a learning curve but except gaming I've found that there's usually an equivalent Linux application that's good enough for my purposes.
Slashdotters like to jump at it and go "cool, does that mean I can hack on it like my toaster?". They in marketing probably have absolutely no interest in that, they want to sell an appliance. Whether it's running Linux or BSD or WinCE or whatever else embedded OS, that's not what they want to talk about. That's not what they want the marketing message to be. They don't want people thinking of it as a computer in drag because computers are complex and their device is easy and user friendly. Funny how a marketing director might want to focus on features and not the internals of the OS running the thing. So it runs Linux, great. Could we get back to telling you why this is a product people will want?
Suspicion of? Apparently he was given sudo power because his old man is root on the server, but it was revoked. And like all sons he was fired upwards to sit at the CEO's right hand, they even made one helluva PR stunt out of it. Dying isn't quite the sacrifice it used to be when you don't stay dead and get an eternity in heaven, I'm fairly sure many would take that severance package, even if the crucifiction is somewhat naster than being escorted out by the security guard.
As much as I'd like to agree, often what you want is to create a small island in the toxic sea. The company may suck but your work, when you're so reasonably left alone to do work may be good, the benefits might be good, the commute can be good and so on. Someone once said it as "The pasture isn't greener on the other side, only the brown spots are in different places". I'm not saying you should go out there as the next Machiavelli, but understanding a little corporate self-defense can make a lot more workplaces acceptable to work at and prevent you getting laid off from. In every big organization I've been at, there sometimes comes crap from the top and the managers all down the chain have to spread it around. A good manager will shield you from most of it, but it always pays to make sure he knows you're not the one to throw the rest at.
It was an attempt to distract from the superiority of the AMD chips at that time, especially the Opteron.
Why would they try to distract from anything, once they had the Core processors? They were the comeback of Intel after the poor performance of the Pentium IV. I'm guessing it was more "let's ditch a brand that's gotten tarred and make a splash with a new brand" like how Vista is replaced with Windows 7.
Yep... the Turbo Boost is a great idea for desktops, it always gives you the maximum performance within a given thermal envelope. But to laptops, it's pretty much the anti-steedstep, making it spend as much power as possible when it's almost idle. However, it seems they didn't test the real minimum by disabling turbo. I'm assuming the laptops can control this from software, anything else would be silly. Sure, it'll also drop your performance from 3.06 to 1.73GHz but since power is roughly proportional with frequency squared it should also lower the CPU to about (1.73 / 3.06)^2 = 32% power consumption.
Intel always had the lead in manufacturing capability, and it seems that this is one of the nice results.
This time it's little to do with their manufacturing capability in terms of process size, it's R&D specifically to achieve this. They basicly created a new "shut-off" form of transistor that effectively blocks off everything behind it. You can read more about it here.
In short, there are very strong non-infringing uses of people sharing long series of 0s and 1s. But there seems to be strong opposition towards that view of the world, even if they somewhat understand technology it seems to be they think it's like sending books and pictures and CDs or DVDs through the Internet. It's not a terrible understanding, but very few seem to understand that data can be morphed in any way, over any protocol. They think like a DVD must always look like a DVD, so we can set up a checkpoint and stop it like in the real world. That even in bits and pieces it's like having little bits of the DVD platter than can be identified as part of the puzzle. That view is easy, understanable and wrong.
Obviously there's those that basically announce "come here to break the law" but that's another story, but they've also attacked many places where people have simply set up a sharing grounds without ads, without promoting the sharing of illegal material in any way except the passive existence of the site. They want you to police the impossible, because every time you block something it can be trivially changed. For example, creating a zip with a random text file so all the hashes change. Or password protect and put in filename "Blockbuster2009.pw_is_12345.zip", or write it in pig latin and so on. Even worse, we can split off into two channels like one place where we share encrypted files and a different place we share the encryption keys to the files. It can not work.
Sure, sometimes we defend some that maybe doesn't really deserve defending. But they're also the outermost defenses against the basic sharing of information that they so clearly have expressed a desire to stop. Even so far that the constitutional committee in France found the parliament's desired way to pursue file sharers unconstitutional. I think the US supreme court will have to take the Thomas case too. Basically, they want no tool so flexible that it allows people to share what they want. There must always be a site to police it, or it must be so crippled it's not effective at doing it, or it must be so harsh penalties for operating it that noone dares. The last was the death of the DC++ hubs, most weren't profiting from or promoting anything but they still got charged almost like mafia bosses.
There are literal translations of the words yen, dollar, renminbi, ringgit, peso, and several other currencies, but you don't translate those, do you?/quote
We're simply not very consistent in this area, but "krone" is translated in English. I think all of Scandinavia (Norwegian crowns, Swedish crowns, Danish crowns) agree on this. Just like we translate some city name, country names and whatever but not others.
About the XKCD... munitions yeah, but do you think it's the sort of munitions they'd let you have? The military already got a lot of neat stuff you don't get to play with.
And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over (not that I've ever practiced law but as a citizen it's the most I can find) despite my analysis being correct!
Because you quote academic guidelines, which have a million other rules not applicable to normal life and examples of takedowns that have absolutely no weight whatsoever? It's been shown many times you can get takedowns on anything, just by sending the letter. Only court cases matters to determine fair use, I'd be tempted to mod some of these troll myself.
Trying to clarify copyright law in the way you want is impossible, it's like trying to name all the ways you can be criminally negligent and not just gullible or sloppy. The exact border will depend on a million cricumstances even though some things are clearly accidents and others very clear disregard of duties.
For example, let's say that you formalized the portion limits, and made it clear that any use under x% is legal. How long do you think it'd last before you have bittorrent clients that'd only share x% of a file? Different people sharing different parts of the file for a complete seed of course. The other way is even more hopeless, you want to define how much you must parody something?
You will not be able to find any sane definition of fair use unless you include intent. There's nothing different about the copy if I am making a backup or making a copy to sell on eBay. Intent is always debatable, so even if they put into law you can do X with intent to do Y, you'd still end up in court to determine your intent.
It is really not that difficult to understand the intent of fair use. It's not meant to be a end run around copyright - if you bave found a "fair use" way to stop buying CDs, DVDs and watching ads it's probably not. It's also against fair use to take away your ability to do something that might be fair use, also known as DRM. We just don't find the balance because noone on either side seems to be looking for it.
Earth is a Single Point of Failure for the human race.
Even a dinosaur killer plus wouldn't take out the human race - more people would survive in deep bunkers here on Earth and with better chances of long-time survival than on an off-planet colony, same with a gamma ray burst. Which by the way would probably be wide enough to take out Mars too. And while humanity can be pretty destructive, I don't think we'd manage to kill off everyone. The only SPOF-threat is really a rock big enough to destroy earth, which is of course possible we could just as easily have spent another million years or so being primates. There's nothing to indicate we're threatened here, so why use that argument? The chance to explore, find new worlds, bring humanity new places, sure. But if you try to pose it as a risk, I really can't take it seriously.
RAID 1 has much less reliability than RAID 6. Assume a typical case: one disk totally fails. You then start to reconstruct - in a RAID 1 scheme a single sector error will result in the rebuild failing. Not great.
Obviously, it was about RAID6+1 vs adding a third parity set, so you'd still have RAID6 as a fallback for that. Of course I pulled it to an extreme since these disks would only last 10 reads compared to current disks which claim 1 in 10^15 bits on 2TB = 500 reads between errors but that number has kept going down. The disk I presented would clearly be unusable, on the other hand I made some very kind assumptions about the rotation cycle, the effect of massive activity over short time and predictable failures.
My point was that if you're starting to enter hit size/reliabtility ratios where rebuilds trigger more rebuilds, you can't take the naive "What's the odds of THREE disks going down at once?" Take a bunch of disks of approximately same generation, being suddenly asked to work very hard to rebuild terabytes of data. What's the odds of a third drive going bad but not a fourth? Pretty slim if they're all falling off the same cliff, and that's the only time another parity set would help.
People will get around this easily - just zip the executable in a passworded zip file, put that passworded zip file into another passworded zip. Or rename the passworded zip file as.bin or something.
A home/ISP virus scanner probably have to let those through, but not a corporate one. You can try sending me a passworded zip, it won't get through as the scanner will reject it. And yes, it peeks at the attachments and recognizes most file types, renaming a zip or exe will get you nowhere. It's a royal pain in the ass for the few legitimate cases but overall it's very effective at stopping spam.
And when RAID 6 has a high enough risk that it's worth expanding the scheme everyone will start switching from double parity schemes to triple parity schemes since their much less expensive in terms of spindle count than RAID 6+1.
I don't think you've quite understood the problem described. You can have an infinite number of parity disks, but it does you no good if recovering one data disk causes another data disk to fail.
Imagine a disk fails on every 100TB of reads (10^14). You have ten 1TB data disks. Imagine you keep them in perfect rotation so they've spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100% of their lifetime. The last disk dies and you replace it with a new drive (0%). To rebuild the drive you read 1TB from each data disk and use whatever parity you need. They've now spent 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 and 1% (your new disk) of their lifetime and you can read another 9TB before you need a new disk.
Now we try doing the same with ten 10TB disks and the same reliability. The last disk dies and you replace it, only now you must read 10TB from each disk. Instead of adding 1% to the lifetime it adds 10% so that they've spent 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and 10% (your new disk) of their lifetime. But now another disk fails, you can recover that but then another will fail and another and another and another.
Basically, parity does not solve that issue. If you had a mirror, you would instead copy the mirrored disk with significantly less wear on the disks. RAID is very nice as a high-level check that the data isn't corrupted but it's a very inefficient way of rebuilding a whole disk.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
Yes, for abject stupidity.
Why? It's a computer where apparently public internet access is accepted, being tricked into installing spyware is stupidity but hardly criminally negligent stupidity. To me it sounds like a major WTF in security design (one pc for both) and permissions (how did she manage to execute the spyware), but her actions are just simple gullability that millions of users fall for.
Surprisingly, many people tell the truth. I myself used to write crap like that, but I found I was really just being an asshat. These days I write something real for the demographics, I won't tell you my birth date but you'll get the age right. Not my address but the country. Basically close enough to be statistically useful, but not accurate enough to bother me.
The question is who sets the schedule. Some jobs like being a clerk or sales assistant require you to be present from X to Y, other jobs may be "code this in three days, if you do it 3PM or 3AM I don't care". Same with WoW, if you just show up and leave whenever you want then fine, if you have to be on raid schedule from X to Y it's pretty limiting. If you got two schedules already, I can understand there's little time for a family. At least for that family to feel important.
Slashdot Mirror
If you talk pure implementation time, that's one thing. But having scipts that do things consistantly - hopefully consistantly RIGHT - can be a huge timesaver for everyone. Just today I had another case of those merry-go-round emails come to me because someone didn't fill out one value, and so nobody could do what they were supposed to do and kept going in circles until it ended up escalated to me. I'd say in 90%+ of the cases, 90%+ of the time is connecting the problem with the right person who knows the solution. The support system isn't exactly helping, but without it noone would get anything but support done.
Not anymore than the Internet is P2P anyway. It'll be a slight more advanced form of distribution from someone in control of the DRM to those without control of the DRM. The whole point of peer-to-peer is that it's millions of peers sharing all sorts of shit. Everything from the mainstream to the obscure. of course not all the obscure things are on TPB but there are much more specialized niche sites. There's usually something for everyone. That's what makes it popular, who cares what this is?
Is there anybody that think that iTunes don't have the server capacity? Bullshit. If you're paying you might as well pay another 5 cent so they host the bandwidth. That's cheap central bandwidth, unlike your expensive last mile bandwidth. What peer-to-peer did was to distribute that already low cost from one server to all the peers, so that people actually operate torrent sites without killing themselves on bandwidth as opposed to the old ftp servers. That way you didn't have to start with micropayments, and just share.
So yeah whatever make a DRM'd P2P network. It won't have any of the appeal of free P2P or any real advantage over centralized DRM. Good luck on that.
P.S. Actually the Atari emulator called StellaX was a Linux program. It didn't crash but it didn't operate as well as the Windows version either, only handling 70% of the games in my collection.
I went to the site, only found a Windows download, in fact it says at the top of the page "The Atari 2600 emulator for Windows 9x, NT and 2000". I search my repositories (running kubuntu), no StellaX package. Ran a search and it came up with several Amiga emulators, but noone called anything like that. So would you please tell me where you found a Linux version of StellaX?
Unless of course you want any new hardware support at all. If you're lucky you get security fixes backported, but that device driver? Good luck.
Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are all about wine. Your ISP software is probably trying to change some windows network/dialup settings that don't exist in Linux, use the native broadband configuration. Your "web accelerator" is probably a http proxy setting so again it's trying to modify things that don't exist, use the native proxy configuration. Wine is a system to run Windows applications under Linux. If you think you can do Linux system administration and change system settings through wine, then that is your problem. It's certainly not been my problem with any ISP since 2000, though I've only used it on the desktop for 1-2 years.
There are much better native browsers and as far as I can tell also native Amiga emulators, though I don't know the quality of them. So you come from Windows and expect Linux to run all your windows applications. Not unusual, but not really helpful either because then the only Linux project you're interested in is wine. Software not designed for Linux or cross-platform would normally not run at all, sometimes I wish newbies were forbidden from using wine until they've at least tried to use a Linux application. Yes, I know there's some irreplaceable windows software, but still.
Now the two things that are problems with Linux software: About the files, yeah that is stupid. I discovered the same using ark, if you try to unzip ten archives it'll start ten processes at the same time and go crazy trashing the disk instead of queuing them up. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Don't know why it's this way. To be fair the music players typically have a normal add to playlist dialog, but from a file browser the behavior is terrible.
As for 640x480, I don't know when I was last in that mode, I'd call it an obscure problem getting stuck in it, but you can get out of it holding down the ALT button though I admit that's not obvious for someone coming from Windows. I'm guessing StellaX switched resolution to 640x480, then it crashed and left you in a 640x480 desktop? I know the problem from other games, it's again that wine isn't working like a native application so the original resolution won't be restored in case of the application crashing and taking wine with it. So really this problem also traces back to wine.
Sure, it's not perfect. But you're constantly finding fault running Windows applications under Linux, not Linux applications under Linux. Personally I've found that the answer is more Linux, but I guess you never reached that tipping point. Windows applications are the square peg with Linux being a round hole, and wine is the hammer. Sometimes it works but it never fits well. It's a learning curve but except gaming I've found that there's usually an equivalent Linux application that's good enough for my purposes.
Slashdotters like to jump at it and go "cool, does that mean I can hack on it like my toaster?". They in marketing probably have absolutely no interest in that, they want to sell an appliance. Whether it's running Linux or BSD or WinCE or whatever else embedded OS, that's not what they want to talk about. That's not what they want the marketing message to be. They don't want people thinking of it as a computer in drag because computers are complex and their device is easy and user friendly. Funny how a marketing director might want to focus on features and not the internals of the OS running the thing. So it runs Linux, great. Could we get back to telling you why this is a product people will want?
Suspicion of? Apparently he was given sudo power because his old man is root on the server, but it was revoked. And like all sons he was fired upwards to sit at the CEO's right hand, they even made one helluva PR stunt out of it. Dying isn't quite the sacrifice it used to be when you don't stay dead and get an eternity in heaven, I'm fairly sure many would take that severance package, even if the crucifiction is somewhat naster than being escorted out by the security guard.
As much as I'd like to agree, often what you want is to create a small island in the toxic sea. The company may suck but your work, when you're so reasonably left alone to do work may be good, the benefits might be good, the commute can be good and so on. Someone once said it as "The pasture isn't greener on the other side, only the brown spots are in different places". I'm not saying you should go out there as the next Machiavelli, but understanding a little corporate self-defense can make a lot more workplaces acceptable to work at and prevent you getting laid off from. In every big organization I've been at, there sometimes comes crap from the top and the managers all down the chain have to spread it around. A good manager will shield you from most of it, but it always pays to make sure he knows you're not the one to throw the rest at.
Actually, except suicides the program closes on you.
That's why we embalm or cremate folks now. That whole rising from the dead thing causes nothing but problems
Clearly someone has not seen the Mummy etc.
It was an attempt to distract from the superiority of the AMD chips at that time, especially the Opteron.
Why would they try to distract from anything, once they had the Core processors? They were the comeback of Intel after the poor performance of the Pentium IV. I'm guessing it was more "let's ditch a brand that's gotten tarred and make a splash with a new brand" like how Vista is replaced with Windows 7.
Yep... the Turbo Boost is a great idea for desktops, it always gives you the maximum performance within a given thermal envelope. But to laptops, it's pretty much the anti-steedstep, making it spend as much power as possible when it's almost idle. However, it seems they didn't test the real minimum by disabling turbo. I'm assuming the laptops can control this from software, anything else would be silly. Sure, it'll also drop your performance from 3.06 to 1.73GHz but since power is roughly proportional with frequency squared it should also lower the CPU to about (1.73 / 3.06)^2 = 32% power consumption.
Intel always had the lead in manufacturing capability, and it seems that this is one of the nice results.
This time it's little to do with their manufacturing capability in terms of process size, it's R&D specifically to achieve this. They basicly created a new "shut-off" form of transistor that effectively blocks off everything behind it. You can read more about it here.
I'm just waiting for them to tag an Ultra Extreme on top of that.
In short, there are very strong non-infringing uses of people sharing long series of 0s and 1s. But there seems to be strong opposition towards that view of the world, even if they somewhat understand technology it seems to be they think it's like sending books and pictures and CDs or DVDs through the Internet. It's not a terrible understanding, but very few seem to understand that data can be morphed in any way, over any protocol. They think like a DVD must always look like a DVD, so we can set up a checkpoint and stop it like in the real world. That even in bits and pieces it's like having little bits of the DVD platter than can be identified as part of the puzzle. That view is easy, understanable and wrong.
Obviously there's those that basically announce "come here to break the law" but that's another story, but they've also attacked many places where people have simply set up a sharing grounds without ads, without promoting the sharing of illegal material in any way except the passive existence of the site. They want you to police the impossible, because every time you block something it can be trivially changed. For example, creating a zip with a random text file so all the hashes change. Or password protect and put in filename "Blockbuster2009.pw_is_12345.zip", or write it in pig latin and so on. Even worse, we can split off into two channels like one place where we share encrypted files and a different place we share the encryption keys to the files. It can not work.
Sure, sometimes we defend some that maybe doesn't really deserve defending. But they're also the outermost defenses against the basic sharing of information that they so clearly have expressed a desire to stop. Even so far that the constitutional committee in France found the parliament's desired way to pursue file sharers unconstitutional. I think the US supreme court will have to take the Thomas case too. Basically, they want no tool so flexible that it allows people to share what they want. There must always be a site to police it, or it must be so crippled it's not effective at doing it, or it must be so harsh penalties for operating it that noone dares. The last was the death of the DC++ hubs, most weren't profiting from or promoting anything but they still got charged almost like mafia bosses.
There are literal translations of the words yen, dollar, renminbi, ringgit, peso, and several other currencies, but you don't translate those, do you?/quote
We're simply not very consistent in this area, but "krone" is translated in English. I think all of Scandinavia (Norwegian crowns, Swedish crowns, Danish crowns) agree on this. Just like we translate some city name, country names and whatever but not others.
About the XKCD... munitions yeah, but do you think it's the sort of munitions they'd let you have? The military already got a lot of neat stuff you don't get to play with.
And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over (not that I've ever practiced law but as a citizen it's the most I can find) despite my analysis being correct!
Because you quote academic guidelines, which have a million other rules not applicable to normal life and examples of takedowns that have absolutely no weight whatsoever? It's been shown many times you can get takedowns on anything, just by sending the letter. Only court cases matters to determine fair use, I'd be tempted to mod some of these troll myself.
Trying to clarify copyright law in the way you want is impossible, it's like trying to name all the ways you can be criminally negligent and not just gullible or sloppy. The exact border will depend on a million cricumstances even though some things are clearly accidents and others very clear disregard of duties.
For example, let's say that you formalized the portion limits, and made it clear that any use under x% is legal. How long do you think it'd last before you have bittorrent clients that'd only share x% of a file? Different people sharing different parts of the file for a complete seed of course. The other way is even more hopeless, you want to define how much you must parody something?
You will not be able to find any sane definition of fair use unless you include intent. There's nothing different about the copy if I am making a backup or making a copy to sell on eBay. Intent is always debatable, so even if they put into law you can do X with intent to do Y, you'd still end up in court to determine your intent.
It is really not that difficult to understand the intent of fair use. It's not meant to be a end run around copyright - if you bave found a "fair use" way to stop buying CDs, DVDs and watching ads it's probably not. It's also against fair use to take away your ability to do something that might be fair use, also known as DRM. We just don't find the balance because noone on either side seems to be looking for it.
Earth is a Single Point of Failure for the human race.
Even a dinosaur killer plus wouldn't take out the human race - more people would survive in deep bunkers here on Earth and with better chances of long-time survival than on an off-planet colony, same with a gamma ray burst. Which by the way would probably be wide enough to take out Mars too. And while humanity can be pretty destructive, I don't think we'd manage to kill off everyone. The only SPOF-threat is really a rock big enough to destroy earth, which is of course possible we could just as easily have spent another million years or so being primates. There's nothing to indicate we're threatened here, so why use that argument? The chance to explore, find new worlds, bring humanity new places, sure. But if you try to pose it as a risk, I really can't take it seriously.
RAID 1 has much less reliability than RAID 6. Assume a typical case: one disk totally fails. You then start to reconstruct - in a RAID 1 scheme a single sector error will result in the rebuild failing. Not great.
Obviously, it was about RAID6+1 vs adding a third parity set, so you'd still have RAID6 as a fallback for that. Of course I pulled it to an extreme since these disks would only last 10 reads compared to current disks which claim 1 in 10^15 bits on 2TB = 500 reads between errors but that number has kept going down. The disk I presented would clearly be unusable, on the other hand I made some very kind assumptions about the rotation cycle, the effect of massive activity over short time and predictable failures.
My point was that if you're starting to enter hit size/reliabtility ratios where rebuilds trigger more rebuilds, you can't take the naive "What's the odds of THREE disks going down at once?" Take a bunch of disks of approximately same generation, being suddenly asked to work very hard to rebuild terabytes of data. What's the odds of a third drive going bad but not a fourth? Pretty slim if they're all falling off the same cliff, and that's the only time another parity set would help.
People will get around this easily - just zip the executable in a passworded zip file, put that passworded zip file into another passworded zip. Or rename the passworded zip file as .bin or something.
A home/ISP virus scanner probably have to let those through, but not a corporate one. You can try sending me a passworded zip, it won't get through as the scanner will reject it. And yes, it peeks at the attachments and recognizes most file types, renaming a zip or exe will get you nowhere. It's a royal pain in the ass for the few legitimate cases but overall it's very effective at stopping spam.
And when RAID 6 has a high enough risk that it's worth expanding the scheme everyone will start switching from double parity schemes to triple parity schemes since their much less expensive in terms of spindle count than RAID 6+1.
I don't think you've quite understood the problem described. You can have an infinite number of parity disks, but it does you no good if recovering one data disk causes another data disk to fail.
Imagine a disk fails on every 100TB of reads (10^14). You have ten 1TB data disks. Imagine you keep them in perfect rotation so they've spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100% of their lifetime. The last disk dies and you replace it with a new drive (0%). To rebuild the drive you read 1TB from each data disk and use whatever parity you need. They've now spent 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91 and 1% (your new disk) of their lifetime and you can read another 9TB before you need a new disk.
Now we try doing the same with ten 10TB disks and the same reliability. The last disk dies and you replace it, only now you must read 10TB from each disk. Instead of adding 1% to the lifetime it adds 10% so that they've spent 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and 10% (your new disk) of their lifetime. But now another disk fails, you can recover that but then another will fail and another and another and another.
Basically, parity does not solve that issue. If you had a mirror, you would instead copy the mirrored disk with significantly less wear on the disks. RAID is very nice as a high-level check that the data isn't corrupted but it's a very inefficient way of rebuilding a whole disk.
b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?
Yes, for abject stupidity.
Why? It's a computer where apparently public internet access is accepted, being tricked into installing spyware is stupidity but hardly criminally negligent stupidity. To me it sounds like a major WTF in security design (one pc for both) and permissions (how did she manage to execute the spyware), but her actions are just simple gullability that millions of users fall for.
Surprisingly, many people tell the truth. I myself used to write crap like that, but I found I was really just being an asshat. These days I write something real for the demographics, I won't tell you my birth date but you'll get the age right. Not my address but the country. Basically close enough to be statistically useful, but not accurate enough to bother me.
The question is who sets the schedule. Some jobs like being a clerk or sales assistant require you to be present from X to Y, other jobs may be "code this in three days, if you do it 3PM or 3AM I don't care". Same with WoW, if you just show up and leave whenever you want then fine, if you have to be on raid schedule from X to Y it's pretty limiting. If you got two schedules already, I can understand there's little time for a family. At least for that family to feel important.