Yes, the Sun is a planet by the older definition. But the new definition isn't much better*.
The classification of what is and is not a planet changed over time. Now it is tied to some metrics involving orbits and gravity that doesn't even apply well in the Solar System let alone a different Star System.
By the original meaning the Sun and Moon (of Earth) are also planets.
There are 7 objects that visible to the naked eye (say 5.5 magnitude or less at best) which move with respect to the fixed stars (everything above 5.5 magnitude.) Sol, Mercury, Venus, Luna, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The real problem is when you start using telescopes to see things moving in the "firmament" that you cannot see with the naked eye. Then you start seeing things like Vesta, Ceres, Neptune. With a powerful enough scope we can even see Uranus. All of these got called a planets at one time. Some of them are not called planets anymore. Uranus may be full of gas but still gets this top billing.
Planet was once the word for wanderer of the night sky. A nice, simple definition. Now it means something else. Somehow everyone decided once we found out there's a lot of stuff wandering out there, planet became a special status and not just a simple label. In Science and Fiction people travel to or hail from Planet X, not Oblate Spheroid Mass X in orbit around Mass Y where Mass X is much larger than anything else in a similar orbit. The most recent definitions for astronomers appears to just be trying to encode that bias giving a bad definition - complex and counter intuitive.
It's like the term spaceship. If you put a big enough engine on anything and it will fly wherever you want it. So the difference between a space station and a space ship is a question of temporary fitting.
But astronomy is full of definitions that are not well founded (asteroid belt?) Astronomy as a field needs to learn from biology. Cladistics is a big part of biological science. You're going to getting it wrong, even for 100s of years. Naming controversies come with the territory. The International Astronomer's Union is charged with naming things in space so we can all agree on what to call that thing over there. Some of names are going to be arbitrary. Turns out planet is one of those arbitrary names**.
Time is long past to just put up a list of 'these are planets' and everything else is not. Then get used to everyone else, particularly the amateurs, using different lists.
* Over long time scales even rocks are fluids. There is no such thing as a solid on the timescale of atomic stability. There are just temporary crystalline or amorphous structures seeking lower energy states. Humans (or stars) just don't live long enough (yet) to see perfect gravitational stratification of a cold bulk object by quantum tunneling.
** For fun, go look up Asimov's description of the Earth and compare with IAU's definition of a planet. Does Earth qualify?
So while the catalyst driver may be faster, in some cases doubling the frame rate, I highly doubt you'd actually notice the difference.
Above monitor performance FPS seems useless until you factor in multi-monitor, screen resolution and multi-boxing. Or that games are more than movies (looking at you Japanese RPGs) and have to actually take input and do processing in between frames. Being able to drop a few frames for better input might just mean that click that keeps you alive makes it into the game. And when the drive is no longer struggling to get a frame to the screen you can move the performance bottleneck elsewhere (like the network in MMOs).
Given a marginal setup like a lot of these F/OSS developers seem to have, just running multiple clients of an online graphical game can drop you from 120-150fps to the mid 30s-50s on your 60 Hz screen. Some games actively encourage this (Eve Online).
Then lets talk about wine. It's not an emulator, but if your game is already slowed by a thunk that thick the graphics stack better be awesome or your game is going to look like crud.
I'm sure there's something in there for 2D plain old apps, too. Maybe less detectible tearing and artifacts while you drag and drop around your office software.
Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.
Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Severalpublications have covered this problem.
People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery.
Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.
Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.
It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot with the command line.... Just offering a counter-argument for the sake of discussion.
Well, the UNIX camp would just point out this is an argument for using crusty typing instead of click-n-drag pictures.
The appropos quote from wikipedia is:
"Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." – Doug Gwyn
The original poster has more than two different problems conflated and it reads like 'I took a bad class and this is why.'
The study of computer training, as a part of the larger pedology, frequently brings up the user vs programmer paradigm. But the whole framing is captive and derogatory. It's parishioner verses priests and proletariat verses bourgeois. Some people use some tools differently. This is not culture, it is just label-ism, that first step on the road to racism, at its finest. We should call that black sheep what it is and move away from it.
One of the problems the article points out, graphics verses typing, nothing new to even to slashdot. It may be that he is encountering this for the first time but others have written better on it. I see whole books published by Sun Microsystems on Graphical User Interfaces(GUI) verses Command Line Interfaces(CLI) on my shelf without even standing up.
To teach people to program in the 21st century you have to be prepared to show them both graphical tools and the command line. But you do have to explain them and why and when to use them to new people. They each have their uses. Tower for the mac and good ol' git in the terminal for version control. Google docs or Microsoft Windows and RestructureText and LATEX. Sales and Marketing may claim training's purpose is to get free swag and charge an arseload for support. But that's the point of training: to explain stuff.
If you don't know enough to explain that, why are you trying? (nobody else? boss + deadline? free t-shirts? It's your "job?")
However, it looks like the preparation for the training class that the article is based on wasn't even up to a standard where such mechanisms could be addressed directly.
They reported people failing to get a Linux laptop to use $RANDOM_BRAND projector. Noob trainer mistake #1 - prepare to present by practicing with what you'll actually use.
The trainers presents follow-along training using stunt-configured terminals different from what the students saw. Noob trainer mistake #2 - eat the same dogfood your students do or you'll waste the student's time explaining and dealing with the differences.
If you are dealing with people who are starting out you will spend most your time on jargon and concepts. Diving into the command line would be fine, but you would be putting artificial constraints on your presentation. A good trainer needs to be aware of and explicitly mention that.
Adult education is a different form children's education. Usually the one that never gets the adequate funding. We expect different from and for adults. Kids are used to walls of new unrelated stuff. Adults usually are not or are good at ignoring it. You can convince a child that 'this is just how you do it' most the time where as an adult probably has some biases built in from previous experience.
That's the only good point I see in the article: people aren't blank slates. But one person's trivial obvious fact is another person's mind blowing revelation.
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet
Humans don't consume 'planets.' At best we make it inconvenient for other humans to live near us in the tiny rind on a huge orange. Not really even a rind, but the zest layer that we favor. This is what we get for being slobs, though. No matter how many cute cuddly pandas we kill off, if there is a niche for them something just as cute and cuddly will be back once humanity loses the Russian Roulette we play every time someone craps in public or throws trash in the streets.
But this is Planetary Chauvinism at its worst. Planets are inconvenient accumulations of resources down a deep gravity well. Heck, all the good minerals are locked deep down underground. Most the planet is useless to us. Sure, baring major collisions or inconvenient changes in stellar output they are neigh invulnerable (outside pure Science Fantasy.) But I'd much rather be out there in a comfortable station, craft or other human-friendly bubble with the rich resources of the Solar System than suck on a rock.
Too many people are mentally stuck on a rock. Literally and figuratively. Hawking is stuck in a chair and yet he gets this.
What the hell is the problem anyway? For fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of a flight you can't use your iWhatever or eWhatsis. Big deal.
Because if these tiny sources (cube law, hello?) of random RF noise really were a problem, they don't suddenly become less of a problem while flying in the air at over 10,000 ft. Or when flying through or even remotely near a thunderstorm that produces many times that RF. Heaven help the poor pilots that get painted by a military radar or even the radar from the airport.
It's not like an airplane needs reliable controls when say, hurtling through the air at a couple hundred miles an hour over populated areas, is it?
At the best we can blame the aircraft designers for not doing their due diligence in properly shielding the route between servos and controllers and cockpit. After all, shielding is precious weight in paying passengers you'd have to give up in fuel. And we obviously don't have lighter weight communication medium that isn't RF sensitive.
His researchers are also working on a system modeler tool, which will allow researchers to simulate complex devices with tens of thousands of components
One of the big criticisms of MS is that it did not start with how humans were going to interact with it's equipment.
One must be careful when using this definition of human. This wide net catches up the technophiles and the feature freaks with the technophobes and the Alzheimer's patients. The wider market is all that Google is courting here with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). That group is made up of very different people from the early adopters. It should be obvious that majority of users of computing devices today are not going to use these devices the same way someone who would come to slashdot or install GNOME 3 would.
It's not like a google search wouldn't uncover the massive industry dedicated to showing how foolish such generalizations are. Yet we continue to make bad UI choices and target the wrong crowds, often poorly like armchair quarterbacks at the human interface Superbowl. Your average human has more than the average number of legs, that still doesn't mean you make one legged pants. Why do developers continue to churn out the proverbial pocket, pant and half-a-fly?
I claim it's only partially this 'every human' culture but mainly lack of training. Outside of the craft industries the engineers, developers and other creators of our stuff start off learning how to solder circuits to breadboards and sling code at a compiler without even the idea they need to consider how people will use this stuff. Run tar --help verses git --help verses gpg -h and see for ask yourself which one was designed to be used by people and which one was slapped together to be run by a machine.
What Google is doing here is something salespeople, marketers, Apple and the military have known since the first rock got sold to the first caveman. You can sell to everyone on envy what you cannot sell to everyone on features. And Google is out to "sell" to everyone (i.e. put ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.)
I wish them the best of luck with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). The very existence of contacts and their popularity among the visually impaired strongly argues against their success in Western markets.
Read over the details analysis by a real lawyer of Bilbo's Contract with the Dwarves. That is an item sold as merchandise with the new Hobbit film. The lawyer brings up that in most court systems contracts are not valid if they ask one of the parties to engage in or are written to cover illegal acts. The huge contract is written carefully to avoid outright saying the Dwarves are hiring a Hobbit to steal for them just because of this.
IANAL, but this appears to me to be a problem for Microsoft. Is Microsoft is requiring these terms as part of support contracts for which they are receiving money? Is this first-sale-is-final-sale contract? Is this forced bundling contract? Are they doing this under or outside the terms of the court rulings about their prior monopoly activity? If this is in fact an illegal practice in the jurisdiction those contracts are written could Microsoft be writing contracts obligating someone to perform an illegal act?
It is probably a good bet that only a Judge in a civil court will settle any of those questions. Assuming he can get his Microsoft Office to install on his PC to open his docket files.
This is not legal advise. Consult your lawyer before applying. Do not pass Redmond. Do not collect 200 Debian CDs. Some itchiness and soreness is normal. Contact a doctor if it persists past four hours.
At what point do the particulates start to cause problems with Internal Combustion?
I can find plenty of information on what it does when humans breath that stuff in (hint: a coal miner is you!) but little on when the engines start to choke on their own output.
Diesel engines can operate on some pretty ridiculous fuel mixtures as long as there is enough oxygen. Considering how nasty oxides can be once mixed into water I'd expect something else in the power train (beyond the operator's lungs) would break down before the engine couldn't cycle on that mix of "air".
They started with getting it to work on one distribution (on of the more popular ones), they will get it to work on others.
The steam.deb package converts well with alien and installs on.rpm based systems (fedora and opensuse tested). Some of the games require libraries distributed by Ubuntu and nobody else, but that can be worked around as well with self-made packages or upstream tarballs. (libtiff4, really?)
In my opinion the Valve engineers have done a good job of integrating their application with the ecosystem of a Linux user's home. Adhering to XDG standards for configuration directories makes steam 'just work' on a desktop using those freedesktop.org standards.
Also, their team deserve props for using actual packages. This is unlike some ported-to-Linux games that are shipped as sharchives, binfiles or even tarbombs. On Microsoft's platforms, not having a quality installer could hurt your sales and look really terrible in the review press. On package-based Linux distributions not having a package (or even a repo) is just tacky looking but can also backfire when the installer will no longer work even when the game will.
Lasers could do the trick to harvest material from NASA's space asteroid. And not just because science fiction video games overuse this particular trope.
AVLIS (and the closely related MLIS) should work in a microgravity or free-fall scenario.
Once again, space technology can benefit from something created from the nuclear weapons research of those spunky monkeys from the dirtball orbiting a nondescript yellow dwarf out in the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
A professor once described to me an elevator system at his former place of employment that used machine learning to try and anticipate where the elevator should be when not in use.
I wonder how a machine learning program deals with the 10 year old who thinks it is funny to press every single floor button then get off on a random stop. Usually when at least half the building's population is running 5 minutes late for their flight.
The thing that's news is that the hot gas makes it possible to account for the baryons in the Milky Way halo, which were previously undetected.
The thought that we're just the 0.1% of the dirty precipitate at the bottom of the gravity well is a tad humbling. Not that much isn't when you look up from the T.V. to a clear night sky.
Galaxies are apparently quite dynamic things: a rain of in-falling gas to make new stars, pressure from new stars pushing back, dust build up from all this nucleosynthesis, blackhole cores that cycle on and off. One paper I read even claims this is the beginning of the 'green' period for the Milky Way. The conditions for life will be come more abundant: the number of long-burning dwarf stars like the sun continue to rise as a fraction of the stellar population while the dust percentage (you know, planets) rises at the same time a lot of the big super- and hyper- novae are over with.
However, longer term prospects seem bleak if the dynamic gas is all consumed or blown away. Eventually stellar production would grind to a halt. The green galaxy would give way to white and red dwarfs floating amid other stellar corpses and thinned gas.
I have to wonder if the temperature and environmental coupling of this gas is enough to become a future raw star material resource? I mean, we're talking about 99.9% of the matter here and it's already gravitationally bound. Could someone model long-term in-fall of this ionized matter? Could it cool fast enough or even at all to beat the predicted 'big rip' from dark energy and give the galaxy a 2nd, 3rd, etc. childhood?
So how can Google maintain any kind of abusive monopoly.
Easy: by being a $3.8 billion per year target for politicians.
The only obvious crime committed here is being popular and making a lot of money.
It is sleazy for a company to favor it's own wares on what a naive customer assumes is a fair market. But that is the nature of 'free' markets and naive customers. The only reason anybody assumes the vendor they are dealing with is free of bias is lack of truth, which is just part of the limited, imperfect knowledge players in any real market can obtain. (This excepts toy markets from ECON 101 as they are by definition more imaginary than Internet Spaceships as any player of Eve Online would tell you.)
Also, Google claims their moto is 'Do no Evil.' Fiddling search results without telling people is pretty much Evil in my book. But Google still has to make money in a world where the DMCA police, the nanny states and the religious nutcases de jour all hold guns to Google's wallet. These politicians are just the last highwaymen along for the ride to get at those purse strings.
Like Microsoft Research, this will be a patent farm where ideas that threaten Microsoft's platform go to die.
Maybe, just maybe, someone in marketing will decide they can make a product out of something from this new Microsoft lab. It may even be awesome. But you never know until after the research.
It seems that whenever someone in management lets marketing smoke enough weed to even think about visiting the engineers we get something like Bob or ME or Vista or Metro.
I wish them good luck. Changing corporate culture is very hard when 'those other guys in that other building' are easy to let go when the stock price tumbles for reasons known only to the Random Number God(s).
Joe average user doesn't know Linux exists, but let's pretend he's heard of it somewhere - maybe due to a huge marketing push by a vendor.
With virtualization, joe average user can try another operating system even in the world of UEFI's Secure boot model. Even today Linux distros become just another "app" joe can download to joe's Microsoft desktop and run.
There are some downsides to this. Any killer app for Linux becomes also a killer app for Windows. The experience of moving from Metro or Aero to something like GNOME 3 is likely to deter joe average user from trying that again.
Of course, as a Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft can report these Linuxes as viruses or trojans and refuse to run Linux virtual machines. Microsoft is also free to ban virtualized Linux distributions from the Windows Marketplace. Then joe is rather stuck. He's not going to some ugly website talking about Open-this and Free-that just to download something the size of a large movie that doesn't involve tits or explosions.
Booting Linux was once just the providence of the enthusiast. Today major Linux Distributions are as easy as if not easier to install on supported hardware than Microsoft Windows. But that window is quickly closing.
There is no telling how complicated or difficult disabling secure boot or installing a new vendor key will be in the future. I have a Sun Sparcstation 2 on which I have to program the boot PROM each time I power it on. Sure, it's just a couple dozen lines of Fourth. But there's a reason I never boot that space heater anymore. Even in the cold of winter.
Originally, all transactions were based are barter, before human beings discovered that the use of money was a much more efficient means of collecting taxes.
It is hard to come up with a system superior to barter for resisting taxes. Perhaps something might work involving offshore accounts, 'charitable organizations' and friends in politics. But that's not something the average joe can get in on.
Remember, it is the government and its police/military that backs up the concept of money as value. It is these quarterly taxes ensuing that vendor needs to take in a lot o' the current regime's dollars and the company needs to pay out in same. Otherwise the value of fiat money is whatever the vendor will take. Corporate script is worthless outside the company store.
Well, there is debt as a form of control through obligations, but that's a whole other topic.
Re:btrfs needed the work
on
Linux 3.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is known as featuritis, and is anathema to the Unix way, where each part should do just one thing, and do it extremely well.
All btrfs does is manage a B-tree filesystem. All grep does is apply a regular expression to a string.
However, the UNIX way is not always even a good thing.
It is also the UNIX way to duplicate a single thing a hundred times for each little feature variation (grep, egrep, fgrep, most of Perl.) That can also be unpleasant for the end user (xterm, gnome-terminal, kterm, gterm, LXterm, terminator, editing Perl.) Great for a system administrator who is expert at their particular tool and only that tool but horrible for everyone else.
That's without getting into the UNIX Way for (lack of) documentation. Or how that one thing is so often the wrong thing so it doesn't matter how well that one tool does it.
btrfs is famously called a rampant layering violation. The roll-up of filesystem-management features in one place actually lets the developers avoid duplicating code (which may actually be about as non-UNIXy as you can get in some ways.) Code that now knows about certain information normally hidden from it can do things differently. This is sometimes better (rapid mkfs) or worse (fsck tool was apparently hard to write.)
In my opinion, it's not interesting for enterprise because you get mediocre features, like RAID support that doesn't cover RAID5, no online file system check
In my opinion, if your enterprise system depends on fsck and not good backups then you don't have an enterprise system. Yes, xfs_repair can do amazing things to mostly trashed disks. But one day your data will take a good fscking where only surviving copy will be the backup copy.
RAID5 implementation from Intel is in the tree, but waiting until after the fsck is done. And btrfsck has been around since, oh, February? And the btrfs-progs you should be using with the 3.4 kernel have btrfsctl included?
I was hoping the RAID5 code was going to land in 3.4, actually. Reading the pull request says that RAID5/6 should be in 3.5. Oh, well.
Of course, if you have enough money to buy an "enterprise" solution, your SAN/NAS should do the thing doing RAID for you anyway.
My major criticism of btrfs is the horrid sync performance. Hosting virtual machines tends to require lots of small writes to disk that make btrfs incredibly non-performant.
btrfs has many sexy, sexy features for a world of enterprise SAN storage and virtual machine hosting. It has thin disks, balanced meta-data, flexible storage, SSD optimized modes, multiple snapshot layers, checksummed data on disk. All of this just because it does one thing and does it well: manage a B-Tree database.
Today it's is just not there in the I/O department, sadly. Probably good for inside the virtual machine guests, though. Only testing will tell.
My money is on NILFS, if nothing else because Oracle gives people a bad taste in their mouths, but ICBW.
Wow, speaking of niche file systems. Log file systems have quite a long history. Of horrible performance and fragmentation. But if we all end up on SSDs, that won't matter. Underlying any file system you put on it, an SSD implements storage as a circular log and performance is fast enough to not depend on huge uncommitted disk caches.
Removal of old and unused Slashboxes. If they're unused, no one will notice or care, so this is irrelevant to everyone. If, as I suspect, by 'unused' you mean 'some people use them, but I don't' then you're just trying to bill removing a feature that people use as an improvement. I suggest you quit Slashdot and get a job at Apple.
Well, to be fair most the webcomics linked in the Funnies slashbox stopped updating somewhere around the middle of Bush, Jr.'s second term in office.
Having been around to participate in the comic vs. news debate back in the day and seeing a lot of full-of-themselves trolls leave just over that, I would have liked to see some spiffing of it up. But not quite as sexy as a fresh coat of CPU chewing javascript, of course. Or ads in the whitespace on the left which run up under the top left logo in chrome and firefox creating a colorful 'slashdot' title where the white one was.
Just pay my friend over there. Then you can have the stuff.
Criminals have been using third party pay as long as money has existed. No way you can trace it to him. Just some random guy.
Nobody *pays* Fat Tony. They just do him favors. See, when he goes somewhere his money is no good. Love the kids and the place, hope nothing bad happens to them. But he'll have one on the house.
Traceable currency has only one use: collecting marketing statistics. For every other use there are trivial loopholes and, as you very clearly mention, unintended consequences for the poor. But marketing doesn't really care about the poor. Your target demographic is people who can afford to pay. Even if it would ruin them.
Today people who use paypal, debit and credit cards should be aware that they trade free marketing data for convenience. Tomorrow it may not be a choice. To riff off Ghostbusters: "there is no search, there is only Google."
$30USD 'crappy' inkjets or $70USD multi-function fax/printer/scanner are not what you or I would call a printer. Or a fax, scanner, et cetera.
These are Windows OS accessories.
This hardware may not be made by Microsoft or a Microsoft subsidiary, but they are for all intents and purposes just an add on to their existing software product(s). Using a standard does not enter into the design consideration, unless one means MSDN documents.
If Linux, and I do mean the kernel, wants to interact with this type of hardware it has to replicate the functions of the Windows OS the device requires. The observant will be making comments about user-space drivers talking to raw hardware connections at this point. The bitter will mumble about "it's Linux, not ReactOS."
The funny people will just make jokes about dialogs for root access being the distribution equivalent of an IE pwn-my-system pop-up. However, many traditional UNIX user-space processes that talk to hardware have had permissions problems like Linus is complaining about.
Getting lots of little bits of software, each running under their own users and groups, to talk together is annoying at best and horridly bad most the time. Add various users into the mix and the UNIX groups-are-how-you-share model just falls over. Bad permissions, for lp and printer software in particular, appear to be the norm. In one system you have SETUID executables and SETGUID directories spreading like kudzu in the filesystem. Others with equivalent-to-god accounts (oracle anyone?) plus the yellow-sticky with the password getting passed around the office. In another, everything pretty much just runs as root, bypassing any Discretionary Access Controls and screaming at users to put in their keys to the kingdom just to get a photo to spit out of the damn laserjet.
It almost makes one pine for an implementation of Capabilities.
But that still won't solve the winmodem hole. Fuse for printers, perhaps?
Bleeding-edge users who know what they are doing and don't care about data loss are being offered the chance to test a new and interesting filesystem
Amen.
fsck's only job is to make that junk that was a filesystem look something like a filesystem again. Nothing in there about making it look like the particular filesystem you used to have. fsck is not backups. fsck will not (necessarily) get your data back. fsck may eat kittens on a bad day. What fsck does hand back to you should not be trusted and should certainly be verified.
If you think that pulling most of what was/home,/var,/srv or/opt out of lost+found is fun, just remember that corrupted directory and filenames get named after their inodes. Nothing like trying to figure out of 1234567 or 1234568 was the start of the quarterly financials report.
If you are relying upon a fsck to get your data back after a power outage, you have more faith in your filesystem than you should. It's a nice validation tool, with the caveat that a False Negative means you go back to using a damaged filesystem for more fun later, rather than now.
BUT if you have backups, please do test. Having talked to the BTRFS team directly at LINUXCON, Mr. Chacon and folks are pretty cool about getting feedback. And you can do nifty things like snapshots for backups on RAID10 or thin disks on virtual machines which don't inflate during formatting.
For many filesystems, failing a fcsk means reaching for the format tools and the last (verified) backup. You are backing up everything, right?
Think of the science NASA could do with that cash being wasted to frisk old people for their pill bottles!
Or, if you're one of the NASA haters, think of all the children who won't get an adequate education/vacination/lunch/foodstamps for that money.
But damn tootin' if one of them grandmas thinks she can pass off a bottle of Midol, our Skies Are Safe(tm)*
* (For values of safe equal to We Covered Our Butts come election time. Deal not available in major markets, near large cities or in New York state. Remember: you only need to give up a little freedom or the terrorists win. Vote TSA again, next election.)
Bad security can actually be worse than no security.
These types of arguments tend to run on one of two lines: people trusting that which they shouldn't and examples of simple broken systems.
There is nothing you can do about people trusting systems they shouldn't. Houses have many ways in that are usually easier to open with tools than the doors. Windows are used for entry because you only need a fist to break most. Walls are just as easy with power tools. It's the social contract between people that prevents this type of security problem. Locks on your doors only keep out lazy opportunists checking doors for easy access. Sadly, the Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory implies that online the contract fails.
The less obvious one is that a faulty and flawed security mechanism actually offers another attack vector.
Add a lock and you not only offer a point where an attacker can actually put a hook,
The obvious is to just use a tool that can attach things to doors. Even a harmless looking sharpened thumbtack defeats the 'handle-less' door yet is stymied by the presence of a lock.
I think the equivalent in computer security is pop-up phishing. Such as putting up a webpage popup AD with a similar password requirement and appearance, hoping that some people will try their existing passwords from their existing systems. Or a fake screensaver overlay that kicks in after one minute of idle.
If the lock is now flawed and easy to pick, you actually lowered the security of the door by adding a lock.
It is a simple matter of application of non-obvious force: smack the door with your fist. One that is easier to do than even smashing windows. It not only leaves no trail, but makes it look like you know what you are doing so unaware bystanders will think you should be using that door. Unless it is badly fit to the frame and actually stuck to it, if pushed on such a door will bounce open. Materials are elastic to some degree and forces between joints will be partially reflected just due to the difference in material (the gap that comprises the joint between door material and frame.)
To translate into security speak, this is shoulder-surfing someone who uses the same password everywhere.
Fundamentally, security is about psychology and not technology. The lock should be the hardest part of the door to deal with so attackers focus on it and waste their time. This gives you time to discover and deal with them manually assuming the attacker just doesn't give up and go check other doors. Most people are dumb - well average or bellow - so this works well. You cannot keep the smart ones out - even if they ignore the window you left open they know how to use a battery-powered chain saw to make their own doors.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the Sun a planet?
Yes, the Sun is a planet by the older definition. But the new definition isn't much better*.
The classification of what is and is not a planet changed over time. Now it is tied to some metrics involving orbits and gravity that doesn't even apply well in the Solar System let alone a different Star System.
By the original meaning the Sun and Moon (of Earth) are also planets.
There are 7 objects that visible to the naked eye (say 5.5 magnitude or less at best) which move with respect to the fixed stars (everything above 5.5 magnitude.) Sol, Mercury, Venus, Luna, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The real problem is when you start using telescopes to see things moving in the "firmament" that you cannot see with the naked eye. Then you start seeing things like Vesta, Ceres, Neptune. With a powerful enough scope we can even see Uranus. All of these got called a planets at one time. Some of them are not called planets anymore. Uranus may be full of gas but still gets this top billing.
Planet was once the word for wanderer of the night sky. A nice, simple definition. Now it means something else. Somehow everyone decided once we found out there's a lot of stuff wandering out there, planet became a special status and not just a simple label. In Science and Fiction people travel to or hail from Planet X, not Oblate Spheroid Mass X in orbit around Mass Y where Mass X is much larger than anything else in a similar orbit. The most recent definitions for astronomers appears to just be trying to encode that bias giving a bad definition - complex and counter intuitive.
It's like the term spaceship. If you put a big enough engine on anything and it will fly wherever you want it. So the difference between a space station and a space ship is a question of temporary fitting.
But astronomy is full of definitions that are not well founded (asteroid belt?) Astronomy as a field needs to learn from biology. Cladistics is a big part of biological science. You're going to getting it wrong, even for 100s of years. Naming controversies come with the territory. The International Astronomer's Union is charged with naming things in space so we can all agree on what to call that thing over there. Some of names are going to be arbitrary. Turns out planet is one of those arbitrary names**.
Time is long past to just put up a list of 'these are planets' and everything else is not. Then get used to everyone else, particularly the amateurs, using different lists.
* Over long time scales even rocks are fluids. There is no such thing as a solid on the timescale of atomic stability. There are just temporary crystalline or amorphous structures seeking lower energy states. Humans (or stars) just don't live long enough (yet) to see perfect gravitational stratification of a cold bulk object by quantum tunneling.
** For fun, go look up Asimov's description of the Earth and compare with IAU's definition of a planet. Does Earth qualify?
Above monitor performance FPS seems useless until you factor in multi-monitor, screen resolution and multi-boxing. Or that games are more than movies (looking at you Japanese RPGs) and have to actually take input and do processing in between frames. Being able to drop a few frames for better input might just mean that click that keeps you alive makes it into the game. And when the drive is no longer struggling to get a frame to the screen you can move the performance bottleneck elsewhere (like the network in MMOs).
Given a marginal setup like a lot of these F/OSS developers seem to have, just running multiple clients of an online graphical game can drop you from 120-150fps to the mid 30s-50s on your 60 Hz screen. Some games actively encourage this (Eve Online).
Then lets talk about wine. It's not an emulator, but if your game is already slowed by a thunk that thick the graphics stack better be awesome or your game is going to look like crud.
I'm sure there's something in there for 2D plain old apps, too. Maybe less detectible tearing and artifacts while you drag and drop around your office software.
Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.
Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several publications have covered this problem.
People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery. Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.
Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.
Well, the UNIX camp would just point out this is an argument for using crusty typing instead of click-n-drag pictures. The appropos quote from wikipedia is:
The original poster has more than two different problems conflated and it reads like 'I took a bad class and this is why.'
The study of computer training, as a part of the larger pedology, frequently brings up the user vs programmer paradigm. But the whole framing is captive and derogatory. It's parishioner verses priests and proletariat verses bourgeois. Some people use some tools differently. This is not culture, it is just label-ism, that first step on the road to racism, at its finest. We should call that black sheep what it is and move away from it.
One of the problems the article points out, graphics verses typing, nothing new to even to slashdot. It may be that he is encountering this for the first time but others have written better on it. I see whole books published by Sun Microsystems on Graphical User Interfaces(GUI) verses Command Line Interfaces(CLI) on my shelf without even standing up.
To teach people to program in the 21st century you have to be prepared to show them both graphical tools and the command line. But you do have to explain them and why and when to use them to new people. They each have their uses. Tower for the mac and good ol' git in the terminal for version control. Google docs or Microsoft Windows and RestructureText and LATEX. Sales and Marketing may claim training's purpose is to get free swag and charge an arseload for support. But that's the point of training: to explain stuff.
If you don't know enough to explain that, why are you trying? (nobody else? boss + deadline? free t-shirts? It's your "job?")
However, it looks like the preparation for the training class that the article is based on wasn't even up to a standard where such mechanisms could be addressed directly.
If you are dealing with people who are starting out you will spend most your time on jargon and concepts. Diving into the command line would be fine, but you would be putting artificial constraints on your presentation. A good trainer needs to be aware of and explicitly mention that.
Adult education is a different form children's education. Usually the one that never gets the adequate funding. We expect different from and for adults. Kids are used to walls of new unrelated stuff. Adults usually are not or are good at ignoring it. You can convince a child that 'this is just how you do it' most the time where as an adult probably has some biases built in from previous experience.
That's the only good point I see in the article: people aren't blank slates. But one person's trivial obvious fact is another person's mind blowing revelation.
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet
Humans don't consume 'planets.' At best we make it inconvenient for other humans to live near us in the tiny rind on a huge orange. Not really even a rind, but the zest layer that we favor. This is what we get for being slobs, though. No matter how many cute cuddly pandas we kill off, if there is a niche for them something just as cute and cuddly will be back once humanity loses the Russian Roulette we play every time someone craps in public or throws trash in the streets.
But this is Planetary Chauvinism at its worst. Planets are inconvenient accumulations of resources down a deep gravity well. Heck, all the good minerals are locked deep down underground. Most the planet is useless to us. Sure, baring major collisions or inconvenient changes in stellar output they are neigh invulnerable (outside pure Science Fantasy.) But I'd much rather be out there in a comfortable station, craft or other human-friendly bubble with the rich resources of the Solar System than suck on a rock.
Too many people are mentally stuck on a rock. Literally and figuratively. Hawking is stuck in a chair and yet he gets this.
What the hell is the problem anyway? For fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of a flight you can't use your iWhatever or eWhatsis. Big deal.
Because if these tiny sources (cube law, hello?) of random RF noise really were a problem, they don't suddenly become less of a problem while flying in the air at over 10,000 ft. Or when flying through or even remotely near a thunderstorm that produces many times that RF. Heaven help the poor pilots that get painted by a military radar or even the radar from the airport.
It's not like an airplane needs reliable controls when say, hurtling through the air at a couple hundred miles an hour over populated areas, is it?
At the best we can blame the aircraft designers for not doing their due diligence in properly shielding the route between servos and controllers and cockpit. After all, shielding is precious weight in paying passengers you'd have to give up in fuel. And we obviously don't have lighter weight communication medium that isn't RF sensitive.
How many years until it catches up to Dwarf Fortress?
And can it get more than 4 frames per second modeling 200 dwarves down to the fingernail on a 3.5GHz machines with 16Gb of ram and SSD drives?
One must be careful when using this definition of human. This wide net catches up the technophiles and the feature freaks with the technophobes and the Alzheimer's patients. The wider market is all that Google is courting here with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). That group is made up of very different people from the early adopters. It should be obvious that majority of users of computing devices today are not going to use these devices the same way someone who would come to slashdot or install GNOME 3 would.
It's not like a google search wouldn't uncover the massive industry dedicated to showing how foolish such generalizations are. Yet we continue to make bad UI choices and target the wrong crowds, often poorly like armchair quarterbacks at the human interface Superbowl. Your average human has more than the average number of legs, that still doesn't mean you make one legged pants. Why do developers continue to churn out the proverbial pocket, pant and half-a-fly?
I claim it's only partially this 'every human' culture but mainly lack of training. Outside of the craft industries the engineers, developers and other creators of our stuff start off learning how to solder circuits to breadboards and sling code at a compiler without even the idea they need to consider how people will use this stuff. Run tar --help verses git --help verses gpg -h and see for ask yourself which one was designed to be used by people and which one was slapped together to be run by a machine.
What Google is doing here is something salespeople, marketers, Apple and the military have known since the first rock got sold to the first caveman. You can sell to everyone on envy what you cannot sell to everyone on features. And Google is out to "sell" to everyone (i.e. put ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.)
I wish them the best of luck with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). The very existence of contacts and their popularity among the visually impaired strongly argues against their success in Western markets.
While EULAs can be problematic, Microsoft's antics here are much more serious.
Read over the details analysis by a real lawyer of Bilbo's Contract with the Dwarves. That is an item sold as merchandise with the new Hobbit film. The lawyer brings up that in most court systems contracts are not valid if they ask one of the parties to engage in or are written to cover illegal acts. The huge contract is written carefully to avoid outright saying the Dwarves are hiring a Hobbit to steal for them just because of this.
IANAL, but this appears to me to be a problem for Microsoft. Is Microsoft is requiring these terms as part of support contracts for which they are receiving money? Is this first-sale-is-final-sale contract? Is this forced bundling contract? Are they doing this under or outside the terms of the court rulings about their prior monopoly activity? If this is in fact an illegal practice in the jurisdiction those contracts are written could Microsoft be writing contracts obligating someone to perform an illegal act?
It is probably a good bet that only a Judge in a civil court will settle any of those questions. Assuming he can get his Microsoft Office to install on his PC to open his docket files.
This is not legal advise. Consult your lawyer before applying. Do not pass Redmond. Do not collect 200 Debian CDs. Some itchiness and soreness is normal. Contact a doctor if it persists past four hours.
At what point do the particulates start to cause problems with Internal Combustion?
I can find plenty of information on what it does when humans breath that stuff in (hint: a coal miner is you!) but little on when the engines start to choke on their own output.
Diesel engines can operate on some pretty ridiculous fuel mixtures as long as there is enough oxygen. Considering how nasty oxides can be once mixed into water I'd expect something else in the power train (beyond the operator's lungs) would break down before the engine couldn't cycle on that mix of "air".
They started with getting it to work on one distribution (on of the more popular ones), they will get it to work on others.
The steam .deb package converts well with alien and installs on .rpm based systems (fedora and opensuse tested). Some of the games require libraries distributed by Ubuntu and nobody else, but that can be worked around as well with self-made packages or upstream tarballs. (libtiff4, really?)
In my opinion the Valve engineers have done a good job of integrating their application with the ecosystem of a Linux user's home. Adhering to XDG standards for configuration directories makes steam 'just work' on a desktop using those freedesktop.org standards.
Also, their team deserve props for using actual packages. This is unlike some ported-to-Linux games that are shipped as sharchives, binfiles or even tarbombs. On Microsoft's platforms, not having a quality installer could hurt your sales and look really terrible in the review press. On package-based Linux distributions not having a package (or even a repo) is just tacky looking but can also backfire when the installer will no longer work even when the game will.
AVLIS (and the closely related MLIS) should work in a microgravity or free-fall scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_vapor_laser_isotope_separation
Once again, space technology can benefit from something created from the nuclear weapons research of those spunky monkeys from the dirtball orbiting a nondescript yellow dwarf out in the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
A professor once described to me an elevator system at his former place of employment that used machine learning to try and anticipate where the elevator should be when not in use.
I wonder how a machine learning program deals with the 10 year old who thinks it is funny to press every single floor button then get off on a random stop. Usually when at least half the building's population is running 5 minutes late for their flight.
The thing that's news is that the hot gas makes it possible to account for the baryons in the Milky Way halo, which were previously undetected.
The thought that we're just the 0.1% of the dirty precipitate at the bottom of the gravity well is a tad humbling. Not that much isn't when you look up from the T.V. to a clear night sky.
Galaxies are apparently quite dynamic things: a rain of in-falling gas to make new stars, pressure from new stars pushing back, dust build up from all this nucleosynthesis, blackhole cores that cycle on and off. One paper I read even claims this is the beginning of the 'green' period for the Milky Way. The conditions for life will be come more abundant: the number of long-burning dwarf stars like the sun continue to rise as a fraction of the stellar population while the dust percentage (you know, planets) rises at the same time a lot of the big super- and hyper- novae are over with.
However, longer term prospects seem bleak if the dynamic gas is all consumed or blown away. Eventually stellar production would grind to a halt. The green galaxy would give way to white and red dwarfs floating amid other stellar corpses and thinned gas.
I have to wonder if the temperature and environmental coupling of this gas is enough to become a future raw star material resource? I mean, we're talking about 99.9% of the matter here and it's already gravitationally bound. Could someone model long-term in-fall of this ionized matter? Could it cool fast enough or even at all to beat the predicted 'big rip' from dark energy and give the galaxy a 2nd, 3rd, etc. childhood?
Easy: by being a $3.8 billion per year target for politicians.
The only obvious crime committed here is being popular and making a lot of money.
It is sleazy for a company to favor it's own wares on what a naive customer assumes is a fair market. But that is the nature of 'free' markets and naive customers. The only reason anybody assumes the vendor they are dealing with is free of bias is lack of truth, which is just part of the limited, imperfect knowledge players in any real market can obtain. (This excepts toy markets from ECON 101 as they are by definition more imaginary than Internet Spaceships as any player of Eve Online would tell you.)
Also, Google claims their moto is 'Do no Evil.' Fiddling search results without telling people is pretty much Evil in my book. But Google still has to make money in a world where the DMCA police, the nanny states and the religious nutcases de jour all hold guns to Google's wallet. These politicians are just the last highwaymen along for the ride to get at those purse strings.
Like Microsoft Research, this will be a patent farm where ideas that threaten Microsoft's platform go to die.
Maybe, just maybe, someone in marketing will decide they can make a product out of something from this new Microsoft lab. It may even be awesome. But you never know until after the research.
It seems that whenever someone in management lets marketing smoke enough weed to even think about visiting the engineers we get something like Bob or ME or Vista or Metro.
I wish them good luck. Changing corporate culture is very hard when 'those other guys in that other building' are easy to let go when the stock price tumbles for reasons known only to the Random Number God(s).
Joe average user doesn't know Linux exists, but let's pretend he's heard of it somewhere - maybe due to a huge marketing push by a vendor.
With virtualization, joe average user can try another operating system even in the world of UEFI's Secure boot model. Even today Linux distros become just another "app" joe can download to joe's Microsoft desktop and run.
There are some downsides to this. Any killer app for Linux becomes also a killer app for Windows. The experience of moving from Metro or Aero to something like GNOME 3 is likely to deter joe average user from trying that again.
Of course, as a Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft can report these Linuxes as viruses or trojans and refuse to run Linux virtual machines. Microsoft is also free to ban virtualized Linux distributions from the Windows Marketplace. Then joe is rather stuck. He's not going to some ugly website talking about Open-this and Free-that just to download something the size of a large movie that doesn't involve tits or explosions.
Booting Linux was once just the providence of the enthusiast. Today major Linux Distributions are as easy as if not easier to install on supported hardware than Microsoft Windows. But that window is quickly closing.
There is no telling how complicated or difficult disabling secure boot or installing a new vendor key will be in the future. I have a Sun Sparcstation 2 on which I have to program the boot PROM each time I power it on. Sure, it's just a couple dozen lines of Fourth. But there's a reason I never boot that space heater anymore. Even in the cold of winter.
Originally, all transactions were based are barter, before human beings discovered that the use of money was a much more efficient means of collecting taxes.
It is hard to come up with a system superior to barter for resisting taxes. Perhaps something might work involving offshore accounts, 'charitable organizations' and friends in politics. But that's not something the average joe can get in on.
Remember, it is the government and its police/military that backs up the concept of money as value. It is these quarterly taxes ensuing that vendor needs to take in a lot o' the current regime's dollars and the company needs to pay out in same. Otherwise the value of fiat money is whatever the vendor will take. Corporate script is worthless outside the company store.
Well, there is debt as a form of control through obligations, but that's a whole other topic.
This is known as featuritis, and is anathema to the Unix way, where each part should do just one thing, and do it extremely well.
All btrfs does is manage a B-tree filesystem. All grep does is apply a regular expression to a string.
However, the UNIX way is not always even a good thing.
It is also the UNIX way to duplicate a single thing a hundred times for each little feature variation (grep, egrep, fgrep, most of Perl.) That can also be unpleasant for the end user (xterm, gnome-terminal, kterm, gterm, LXterm, terminator, editing Perl.) Great for a system administrator who is expert at their particular tool and only that tool but horrible for everyone else.
That's without getting into the UNIX Way for (lack of) documentation. Or how that one thing is so often the wrong thing so it doesn't matter how well that one tool does it.
btrfs is famously called a rampant layering violation. The roll-up of filesystem-management features in one place actually lets the developers avoid duplicating code (which may actually be about as non-UNIXy as you can get in some ways.) Code that now knows about certain information normally hidden from it can do things differently. This is sometimes better (rapid mkfs) or worse (fsck tool was apparently hard to write.)
In my opinion, it's not interesting for enterprise because you get mediocre features, like RAID support that doesn't cover RAID5, no online file system check
In my opinion, if your enterprise system depends on fsck and not good backups then you don't have an enterprise system. Yes, xfs_repair can do amazing things to mostly trashed disks. But one day your data will take a good fscking where only surviving copy will be the backup copy.
RAID5 implementation from Intel is in the tree, but waiting until after the fsck is done. And btrfsck has been around since, oh, February? And the btrfs-progs you should be using with the 3.4 kernel have btrfsctl included?
I was hoping the RAID5 code was going to land in 3.4, actually. Reading the pull request says that RAID5/6 should be in 3.5. Oh, well.
Of course, if you have enough money to buy an "enterprise" solution, your SAN/NAS should do the thing doing RAID for you anyway.
My major criticism of btrfs is the horrid sync performance. Hosting virtual machines tends to require lots of small writes to disk that make btrfs incredibly non-performant.
btrfs has many sexy, sexy features for a world of enterprise SAN storage and virtual machine hosting. It has thin disks, balanced meta-data, flexible storage, SSD optimized modes, multiple snapshot layers, checksummed data on disk. All of this just because it does one thing and does it well: manage a B-Tree database.
Today it's is just not there in the I/O department, sadly. Probably good for inside the virtual machine guests, though. Only testing will tell.
My money is on NILFS, if nothing else because Oracle gives people a bad taste in their mouths, but ICBW.
Wow, speaking of niche file systems. Log file systems have quite a long history. Of horrible performance and fragmentation. But if we all end up on SSDs, that won't matter. Underlying any file system you put on it, an SSD implements storage as a circular log and performance is fast enough to not depend on huge uncommitted disk caches.
Removal of old and unused Slashboxes. If they're unused, no one will notice or care, so this is irrelevant to everyone. If, as I suspect, by 'unused' you mean 'some people use them, but I don't' then you're just trying to bill removing a feature that people use as an improvement. I suggest you quit Slashdot and get a job at Apple.
Well, to be fair most the webcomics linked in the Funnies slashbox stopped updating somewhere around the middle of Bush, Jr.'s second term in office.
Having been around to participate in the comic vs. news debate back in the day and seeing a lot of full-of-themselves trolls leave just over that, I would have liked to see some spiffing of it up. But not quite as sexy as a fresh coat of CPU chewing javascript, of course. Or ads in the whitespace on the left which run up under the top left logo in chrome and firefox creating a colorful 'slashdot' title where the white one was.
. Criminals will not use it.
Just pay my friend over there. Then you can have the stuff.
Criminals have been using third party pay as long as money has existed. No way you can trace it to him. Just some random guy.
Nobody *pays* Fat Tony. They just do him favors. See, when he goes somewhere his money is no good. Love the kids and the place, hope nothing bad happens to them. But he'll have one on the house.
Traceable currency has only one use: collecting marketing statistics. For every other use there are trivial loopholes and, as you very clearly mention, unintended consequences for the poor. But marketing doesn't really care about the poor. Your target demographic is people who can afford to pay. Even if it would ruin them.
Today people who use paypal, debit and credit cards should be aware that they trade free marketing data for convenience. Tomorrow it may not be a choice. To riff off Ghostbusters: "there is no search, there is only Google."
$30USD 'crappy' inkjets or $70USD multi-function fax/printer/scanner are not what you or I would call a printer. Or a fax, scanner, et cetera.
These are Windows OS accessories.
This hardware may not be made by Microsoft or a Microsoft subsidiary, but they are for all intents and purposes just an add on to their existing software product(s). Using a standard does not enter into the design consideration, unless one means MSDN documents.
If Linux, and I do mean the kernel, wants to interact with this type of hardware it has to replicate the functions of the Windows OS the device requires. The observant will be making comments about user-space drivers talking to raw hardware connections at this point. The bitter will mumble about "it's Linux, not ReactOS."
The funny people will just make jokes about dialogs for root access being the distribution equivalent of an IE pwn-my-system pop-up. However, many traditional UNIX user-space processes that talk to hardware have had permissions problems like Linus is complaining about.
Getting lots of little bits of software, each running under their own users and groups, to talk together is annoying at best and horridly bad most the time. Add various users into the mix and the UNIX groups-are-how-you-share model just falls over. Bad permissions, for lp and printer software in particular, appear to be the norm. In one system you have SETUID executables and SETGUID directories spreading like kudzu in the filesystem. Others with equivalent-to-god accounts (oracle anyone?) plus the yellow-sticky with the password getting passed around the office. In another, everything pretty much just runs as root, bypassing any Discretionary Access Controls and screaming at users to put in their keys to the kingdom just to get a photo to spit out of the damn laserjet.
It almost makes one pine for an implementation of Capabilities.
But that still won't solve the winmodem hole. Fuse for printers, perhaps?
Amen.
fsck's only job is to make that junk that was a filesystem look something like a filesystem again. Nothing in there about making it look like the particular filesystem you used to have. fsck is not backups. fsck will not (necessarily) get your data back. fsck may eat kittens on a bad day. What fsck does hand back to you should not be trusted and should certainly be verified.
If you think that pulling most of what was /home, /var, /srv or /opt out of lost+found is fun, just remember that corrupted directory and filenames get named after their inodes. Nothing like trying to figure out of 1234567 or 1234568 was the start of the quarterly financials report.
If you are relying upon a fsck to get your data back after a power outage, you have more faith in your filesystem than you should. It's a nice validation tool, with the caveat that a False Negative means you go back to using a damaged filesystem for more fun later, rather than now.
BUT if you have backups, please do test. Having talked to the BTRFS team directly at LINUXCON, Mr. Chacon and folks are pretty cool about getting feedback. And you can do nifty things like snapshots for backups on RAID10 or thin disks on virtual machines which don't inflate during formatting.
For many filesystems, failing a fcsk means reaching for the format tools and the last (verified) backup. You are backing up everything, right?
$7.8 billion
Think of the science NASA could do with that cash being wasted to frisk old people for their pill bottles!
Or, if you're one of the NASA haters, think of all the children who won't get an adequate education/vacination/lunch/foodstamps for that money.
But damn tootin' if one of them grandmas thinks she can pass off a bottle of Midol, our Skies Are Safe(tm)*
* (For values of safe equal to We Covered Our Butts come election time. Deal not available in major markets, near large cities or in New York state. Remember: you only need to give up a little freedom or the terrorists win. Vote TSA again, next election.)
Bad security can actually be worse than no security.
These types of arguments tend to run on one of two lines: people trusting that which they shouldn't and examples of simple broken systems.
There is nothing you can do about people trusting systems they shouldn't. Houses have many ways in that are usually easier to open with tools than the doors. Windows are used for entry because you only need a fist to break most. Walls are just as easy with power tools. It's the social contract between people that prevents this type of security problem. Locks on your doors only keep out lazy opportunists checking doors for easy access. Sadly, the Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory implies that online the contract fails.
The less obvious one is that a faulty and flawed security mechanism actually offers another attack vector.
All security mechanisms suffer from this. Reference: http://xkcd.com/538/
Add a lock and you not only offer a point where an attacker can actually put a hook,
The obvious is to just use a tool that can attach things to doors. Even a harmless looking sharpened thumbtack defeats the 'handle-less' door yet is stymied by the presence of a lock.
I think the equivalent in computer security is pop-up phishing. Such as putting up a webpage popup AD with a similar password requirement and appearance, hoping that some people will try their existing passwords from their existing systems. Or a fake screensaver overlay that kicks in after one minute of idle.
If the lock is now flawed and easy to pick, you actually lowered the security of the door by adding a lock.
It is a simple matter of application of non-obvious force: smack the door with your fist. One that is easier to do than even smashing windows. It not only leaves no trail, but makes it look like you know what you are doing so unaware bystanders will think you should be using that door. Unless it is badly fit to the frame and actually stuck to it, if pushed on such a door will bounce open. Materials are elastic to some degree and forces between joints will be partially reflected just due to the difference in material (the gap that comprises the joint between door material and frame.)
To translate into security speak, this is shoulder-surfing someone who uses the same password everywhere.
Fundamentally, security is about psychology and not technology. The lock should be the hardest part of the door to deal with so attackers focus on it and waste their time. This gives you time to discover and deal with them manually assuming the attacker just doesn't give up and go check other doors. Most people are dumb - well average or bellow - so this works well. You cannot keep the smart ones out - even if they ignore the window you left open they know how to use a battery-powered chain saw to make their own doors.