I said 150k, because that's what I've usually seen with smallblock Chevy's. It's not unusual to see one happily running at 200k miles. I've only seen one die at about 100 miles, but it was a race car that threw a rod at about 8,000 RPM.:)
150k miles/year?? That's a lot unless you're a truck driver.
I'm jealous. I want to get a supercharger for my car, I've just never been willing to lay out $4k for one. I already have the vacuum/boost gauge installed, but it never sees boost, even though I have ram air. It's fun to watch that and my air/fuel mix flip around when I hit the gas. I got the gauge mostly to fill a hole in my gauge cluster (I got it for NOS pressure), but it's a daily reminder "Hey asshole, you want a supercharger!":)
Been there, done that. I like driving a car that I don't notice wind in. In Florida, I could see cars swerving in heavy winds, where I'd be going perfectly straight, remembering what it was like to be tossed around by gusts of wind.:) There's something to be said for really good suspension and traction. My car isn't exactly heavy. It's only about 3500 pounds. Sure, 1000 pounds heavier, but I have 230hp more too.:)
I get my thrill out of the fact that I don't feel things like that, and I can corner as fast as I want to, without feeling like the car is going to slide. I have better tires on it than come with it though, which helps a lot. The stock tires sucked, but most do.
I drove that stretch of road, and didn't feel anything.:) (the I-75/I-10 interchange, all the way to Los Angeles, I couldn't have missed it)
Smallblock Chevy's last a *REALLY* long time. I wouldn't be surprised to see my car still running without any major mechanical problems, at 150k+ miles. Since it only has 40k now at 4 years old, it'll be a long while before I see that.
I do mine with the trip odometer. Every time I stop and fill up, I do the quick math (x miles, x gallons). It's not as accurate as measuring across several tanks, but it's close enough.
I did calculate across 8 stops once (driving from Florida to California), and it worked out very close to the same.
I had a '82 Firebird close to the same configuration as yours. It wasn't stock though. ('79 Chevy 350, 4 bolt, 750ci 4bbl, 4 speed) I had 2.32 gears in the back which made for good mileage. 4th was good for 80 to 130. That's when I redlined (6k RPM).
I love my '00 Firebird with a 6 speed now. I have no idea how fast it goes, I've never had enough road to try it on, or the urge to figure out how much a speeding ticket at over 150 would be.:) 130 is easy now. I can do that while passing on long empty roads.
Actually, that 305 can take virtually any intake from a smallblock chevy. You can get them at junk yards, but I'd recommend a nice aluminum one. Summit has the Edelbrock Performer intake for $114. I liked the Edelbrock carbs too, but lots of people like Holley's. You could always get a Quadrajet and a cast iron manifold for cheap from the junk yard. Generally smallblock parts fit all smallblocks. There was a change in the bolt pattern in '87 I believe, but if you get parts for the same year engine, you won't have a problem. (unless it's a smallblock 400, but that has it's own issues).
With a 4bbl, as long as the secondaries are closed (you'll hear it when they open, don't worry), it's effectively a 2bbl carb. When the secondaries open, you have more power.
I found that having a 4bbl, it can save gas, if you still drive gentle. The 4bbl gives you the power to move. With a 2bbl, you stand on the gas, begging for it to move, and it takes a lot longer to perform the same manuver (like passing, or accelerating from a stop). If you get greedy with the power (like most of us), of course you'll use more gas.
Back in the day when I was learning to work on cars, I firmly believed using carburators. But fuel injection does give much better fuel efficiency, and better power in stock configurations. Plenty of guys will say that they can make more power with a carburated car, but hey, if you're upgrading, you can upgrade fuel injection too. It just costs more.
I always get a giggle out of people with the little sports cars.:)
I have a '00 TransAm WS/6, that is suppose to get 18/27. In real life, it does 20 in normal city driving, and 26 on long highway trips. The only way I ever achieved it was to pull onto I-10, set the cruise to 80 in 6th gear, and not touch the gas til I made my next stop at gas station, 400 miles later. Cross country drives are fun like that, but after 400 miles of not touching the gas or brakes, and effectively driving with one finger, you kinda forget that you have to hit the clutch and brakes to stop. It's that "oh ya, gotta drive now" feeling.
On real highway driving (occasionally encountering traffic, and the like), I get about 24 to 25 mpg.
If I'm racing (on tracks, of course), I can ruin that 17mpg mininum.:)
I haven't driven a GTO yet, but a friend who had the same car as mine (same specs, different car) drove one and was anything but impressed.
For me, mileage isn't a killer. My drives are very short, if I opt to make them. I walk a lot because parking sucks here. I use about 1 tank of gas (~16 gal) per month.
I see this as almost being a good idea, but it's going to upset a lot of customers. When Grandma goes to browse to the bingo site to see if they're having a game tonight, and can't get online, she's not going to have any idea what it means that she's offline for spamming. Ok, so she clicked that nice attachement a couple days ago, but Grandma is effectively computer illiterate.. How do they tell her, "You have to remove the virus from your computer before you can get back online."?
But hey, providers have been terminating service for spamming for years. There's nothing new there. It's a good thing. If you know your account will be terminated quickly, it makes it harder for them to work, and easier on all of our mailboxes. If I were to spam, I'd expect my provider to yank our connections, which would be very bad for our other customers, but good in the general scheme of things. We're a large enough customer with our provider, that they contact us first, since we're a known legitimate company. It's worth it to them to find out what's going on before yanking the cable, because they know if they report something to us that has a legitimate source, we'll unplug the offending machine ourselves. I've had the pleasure of unplugging a customer machine before and calling them saying "Your machine is unplugged. Come get it, you're no longer a customer."
Hotmail has been terminating spammers accounts for years. I've known a few spammers, and if they use a Hotmail account as their "From" address, it's closed within hours of starting the spam. This isn't news. Why should Hotmail, or any other mail provider, deliver a million+ undeliverable bounced messages? The problem then comes if someone maliciously sends spam with an innocent victim's address as the "From:" line. If someone were to send out a spam as coming from abuse@hotmail.com, does abuse lose it's account?:)
His case is a bit weird. Did you see the video? I saw it just after the case was reported nationally.
The police had a report that there was something going on (possible domestic violence). He was beligerant from the start, which is understandable since he was in the middle of a fight. Too quickly into the conversation he started saying "just arrest me." He needs to work on his IPC skills.:) But, does a guy with no good IPC skills deserve to be harassed and arrested? No, that's not a crime. You can't arrest every ass because he's an ass, or our jails would be full.. Some days, even I'd make it there.
In this case, he had done an appropriate thing. They were having a verbal argument. Rather than continue it, and be distracted driving, he pulled over, got out of the truck, in an attempt to 'cool off'.
The police will try to use this case to prove that anyone must supply any requested information. They already expect it, so this will just give them a nice court ruling to quote.
I learned in law enforcement school that technically as soon as an officer stops you, and you don't have the option of walking away, that's an arrest. If you don't have the option of walking away, that's an arrest. It doesn't matter that you aren't in handcuffs or in the back of a patrol car. They just aren't suppose to start interrogating you. But anything you say is a spontanious confession.
I learned that the hard way once.
An example given was this:
Officer: Do you why I pulled you over?
Suspect: I was speeding.
That's enough to give you a speeding ticket in most states. You confessed to the crime. The simple answer is not to confess to anything. If you believe they're going to give you a ticket, or arrest you, don't confess to anything. I hold that to be true to even giving my name.
It's important to remember you're dealing with a human being (most of the time), so giving enough information will ease the process along. If it'll satisfy the officer to give some information to not piss him off.
I got out of a speeding ticket once exactly like this. I got pulled over, the officer asked me why he pulled me over, and I told him I didn't know. He got all pissed. He then told me I was driving at over 90mph. I told him that was impossible, and described the vehicles I was following and my estimated speed. "I was behind a white Chevy truck doing approximately 65mph for the last 3 miles."
Already knowing what information they'll get from me, by reading my tag number, I tell them everything they need to know and a bit more, but that's my choice. When they run my tags, they'll see my name, and most states will get the fact that I have a concealed weapons permit. When they ask for my license, I'll give my drivers license, concealed weapons permit, and tell the office, "I have no weapons in the vehicle". An officer will frequently be concerned for his safety, so if they want to check me for weapons, I let them. This is reasonable, as plenty of officers have been shot by seemingly unarmed suspects.
But, if I'm not a suspect, I consider it unreasonable.
Recently, I was outside a pool hall in a good neighborhood. The area I was in doesn't allow indoor smoking, so I was outside smoking, as were 1/2 dozen other customers. They picked me to harass. That was unreasonable. I was standing on private property, not causing a disturbance, doing absolutley nothing illegal or suspicious. The bouncer apologized to me after it happened. "The cops are assholes around here.", he said. I finished drinking and playing pool a couple hours later, and walked home. It was a violation of my rights. They had no suspicion that I had done anything wrong. I gave just enough information to make him go away, but it took 1/2 hour, and my girlfriend was very concerned. She was inside talking to friends when it started, and came outside to see me being searched by the police. She didn't quite understand how or why the police were searching me and asking me a bunch of questions, when I hadn't done anything wrong. I was literally standing there smoking a cigarette, minding my own business.
If they're going to arrest you for not giving your name, they're just looking for an excuse to do it anyways. This just makes it too easy.
I still believe in my 5th amendment rights, and the magic words of Miranda, "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you...."
You'd be amazed how fast I got mute, if I'm not doing anything in the least way wrong. If I'm just standing on a sidewalk, minding my own business, it's no one elses business who I am.
My PS2 is backward compatable?? Just kidding. I was a late buyer, so I never had an original playstation. I went straight from my Coleco to PS2. In renting or buying games, I've never seen any original PS games that got my attention enough to want them.
I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there that had a PS then bought a PS2, and wanted to continue playing their games. It's much like the PC gaming market. There were plenty of people playing their DOS based games, who wanted to continue playing them on their Win95 boxes. Eventually, that number becomes a minority, but eventually those games get abandon for the newer/better/faster/prettier games. Well, except for those hardcore users who still play Atari games on their Windows 2600 emulators.:)
Cam you play your original Nintendo games on a Game Cube? Nope. Newer consoles mean newer games. If you are really hell-bent on playing your older games, plug that old console back in.
It doesn't really matter to me, I wouldn't own a Xbox. When I went shopping for new game consoles, every time I tried out an Xbox in the stores, they were either crashed, or would crash while I was playing the game. That's anything but impressive. The Xbox was the only game consle in most stores that I went to, with a reset button that customers could press. For me, it was a decision between PS2 and Game Cube, and I got the PS2 because the rental section at my local Blockbuster had/has more PS2 games.
Honestly, you're right. The government will throw billions (trillions?) into stopping anything it sees as a military threat. The best thing for our space program was the cold war. Besides the political "we're cooler than you" aspect, most of the space program happened during that period.
If there should be a valid military threat against the United States from space, and we were on the losing side of it, you'd be sure the government would throw anything they needed to at it, to make sure we were the biggest and strongest.
It's a sad fact, but one we have to accept. I'd prefer to see funds being thrown at improving mankind, rather than at war. They money is available, as is obvious at the over $4 billion per month that the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars are costing. That kind of money could pay researchers to develop really interesting things instead.
I don't have access to the documentation about Bush's plan for putting man (i.e., America) on the Moon again, and on Mars, but I'd guarantee that somewhere in those plans is mention that if we don't get there first, another country will have the advantage in future military conflicts.
We have a lot of things to thank for war, either for development, or the extend to which they exist. Jet aircraft (WWII Germany), the Interstate Highway System (STRAHNET and the Eisenhower Interstate System), television/radio (remember next time you hear an EBS broadcast), GPS, etc, etc...
Ok, how about this. With just 500 Minuteman III's with MIRV warheads (multiple warheads, one rocket), lots of stuff would blow up in minutes. The survivers would die in the remaining years, due to radiation and other little problems such as a lack of food supply and infrastructure (no food, no power, no supply lines).
Immediately kill 10% of the population, and the damage caused would kill the rest. This isn't a long-term situation, it happens in minutes, 10% of the population dies, the rest die over a longer term.
But hey, if you like using the argument that we could or couldn't kill each other off quickly, as rationalization of why we should or shouldn't expand humanity, that's your own emotional problem.
I'd imagine a few problems with teraforming Mars..
First off is the point that you made. If we use some process to make the atmosphere more earth-like, we could encourage the growth of anything that may be lying dormant there, or we could kill it. We've only explored a very small part of the planet, and still don't have complete information about everything we've found. For example, what are those little balls that they found in the soil? Probably just rocks, I'd imagine, but maybe not. They have found traces of water (mostly mud-like). I'd imagine that we'd do something with the free-standing water, to get it to vaporize, making the atmosphere thicker, which would also likely start weather patterns and rain.
To make the atomsphere more earth like, we'd probably send some plants over, such as algae, and maybe grasses. As it grows, it may cover artifacts that could be interesting. I'll use my own back yard as an example. When I moved into this house, the yard was all dirt and rocks. We spent a week digging up rocks, but there are still some small rocks in the dirt. We then planted grass. The yard is now very lush and green, but it is hopeless to think you can see the little rocks that were there.
Imagine "teraforming" Giza (Egypt). Occasionally, archeologists find interesting rocks, like the Rosetta Stone, simply sticking out of the sand, because wind blew sand away from it. If someone encouraged grass to grow there, through aquaducts and irrigation, sand wouldn't blow away, and whatever is burried will remain burried until someone tries to build a strip mall on top of yet another unidentified tomb.
Personally, I'm all for teraforming Mars. For a long time, I've believed that for Humanity to survive, we *MUST* have colonies on more than just Earth. We have the technology to kill everything on this planet in minutes, and it takes a mistake by one person to start that chain of events. Maybe through our own greed and industrialization, we've already set the earth on a fatal spiral through pollution. There are also other events that can happen, which are on more of a sci-fi scale. What if the sun goes super nova? What if a giant asteroid crashes into the earth?
Sure, we don't have the technology now to colonize a planet light-years away. Just like a child, we need to learn to take baby steps, before we can run. Mars is becoming close enough for us to 'practice' on. It probably won't be perfect, but it will be an attempt. After several attempts, we'll do better at it.
If we never teraform Mars, if humanity debates it for the rest of eternity, we'll never learn to travel faster or further, and doom ourselves to eventually overpopulate the Earth and die.
Likewise, if we never populate Mars, our space travel technology will be very slow to grow. Necessity is the mother of invention. If we have a need to travel the distance between Earth and Mars faster, someone will invent something which can achieve this. It may not be a super-cool spacecraft. Our own science fiction has eluded to creative solutions, although technologically impossible at this time such as Wormholes, transporters, and 'Stargate' (good show).
Eventually, we will have the technology to go to distant galaxies, but we have to manage to at least get people to the next planet first. In the last 100 years, we've come a long way. The wright brothers flew their first powered airplane in 1903. Now we can fly all the way around the earth at several times the speed of sound. Wars do great things for technology. Jet and rocket powered craft were innovated during WWII. Slow progress has been made with other forms of aircraft. The cold war was great for pushing space technology, even if it was only for political reasons. America had to do better than the Russians, so we were each trying to out-do each other.
That thing weighs 205 pounds, according to Sun's site. It should be noticable when he's driving around. I guess if you don't mind the truck listing to the left all the time, and worrying about hitting speed bumps too hard, it's ok. I get all paranoid about hitting speed bumps with my car when I have servers in the back, and they aren't even turned on.:)
I'd think it would make more sense to have a cheap Pentium machine running Solaris x86 or Linux, than that beast.
But hey, it got him on Slashdot. If it had been a little box, it would have never made it up here.:)
Honestly, once we put a production machine up, it usually runs without taking it down. For a lot of our machines, the last time they were taken down for anything is when we physically moved them.
I forgot to mention that in my previous message. The internal RAID card absolutely SUCKS ASS.
I'm a huge fan of the external arrays. We've used several over the years, and I have nothing but glowing reviews of the external arrays.
The SX6000 is an internal card. The SX8000 is an external box.
We have one machine with an SX6000 card. It didn't work to start with. The intended machine (A dual AMD 2000+) simply wouldn't boot with it attached. After weeks of going back and forth with the Promise support line, who insisted that it worked on *THEIR* test platform, using the same motherboard and processors, we set it aside, to work on later. A week later, they released a BIOS update for the card, which fixed the problem. The problem was that their BIOS wouldn't allow *ANY* system with the particular chipset to boot. Nice. It wasn't an obscure chipset, so I'm sure there were plenty of people with the same problem.
A friend of mine was using the same card, and at the time he loved it, but at the first failure, his opinion became much like yours (absolutely sucks).
We've used other external arrays by other companies, but those companies seem to come and go too frequently. One company I worked for had an absolutely BEAUTIFUL external array, which came as layers, so you could pick and choose how many drives you wanted it to be capable of. Unfortunately, that company went out of business in the mid 90's.
I like any external array that lets the OS see it as a single SCSI drive, and doesn't take any special drivers, like the Promise SX8000. Hell, any OS sees a single SCSI drive, what more could I ask?:) If I'm putting 8 to 15 drives on a machine, I'd really rather not power them from the machine's power supply. You'll be going through hell with power splitters, and overloading the power supply, even if you don't think you are.
Off-site backups are always a very good choice. When your house burns down, or an ex-girlfriend goes to all your electronics with a baseball bat, your data is still safe.:)
No, that's two consecutive drives. If you have 6 drives, you could have elements #2, #4, and #6 fail, and still be operating (very slowly)
#1 and #3 have the parity for #2.
#3 and #5 have the parity for #4.
#5 and #1 have the parity for #6.
But, if you lost say #2 and #3, ya, you're screwed.
That's when it's a very bright idea to put in as many drives as you can.
If you have 15 drives, and two fail, the chances of them being consecutive are very low.
If you have only 3 drives, well, two failures is catastrophic.
Bigger drives take longer to rebuild, so if you have 100Gb drives, they'll go fairly quickly compared to 250Gb drives. If he doesn't need a lot of space, and fast rebuild times, a whole bunch of 80Gb drives would be a reasonable choice.
I use Western Digital drives in my machines. Their failure rate is low compared to others we've used.
Slashdot Mirror
I said 150k, because that's what I've usually seen with smallblock Chevy's. It's not unusual to see one happily running at 200k miles. I've only seen one die at about 100 miles, but it was a race car that threw a rod at about 8,000 RPM.
150k miles/year?? That's a lot unless you're a truck driver.
There's a lot to say for a well modified vehicle.
I'm jealous. I want to get a supercharger for my car, I've just never been willing to lay out $4k for one. I already have the vacuum/boost gauge installed, but it never sees boost, even though I have ram air. It's fun to watch that and my air/fuel mix flip around when I hit the gas. I got the gauge mostly to fill a hole in my gauge cluster (I got it for NOS pressure), but it's a daily reminder "Hey asshole, you want a supercharger!"
Been there, done that. I like driving a car that I don't notice wind in. In Florida, I could see cars swerving in heavy winds, where I'd be going perfectly straight, remembering what it was like to be tossed around by gusts of wind.
I get my thrill out of the fact that I don't feel things like that, and I can corner as fast as I want to, without feeling like the car is going to slide. I have better tires on it than come with it though, which helps a lot. The stock tires sucked, but most do.
I drove that stretch of road, and didn't feel anything.
Smallblock Chevy's last a *REALLY* long time. I wouldn't be surprised to see my car still running without any major mechanical problems, at 150k+ miles. Since it only has 40k now at 4 years old, it'll be a long while before I see that.
I do mine with the trip odometer. Every time I stop and fill up, I do the quick math (x miles, x gallons). It's not as accurate as measuring across several tanks, but it's close enough.
I did calculate across 8 stops once (driving from Florida to California), and it worked out very close to the same.
I had a '82 Firebird close to the same configuration as yours. It wasn't stock though. ('79 Chevy 350, 4 bolt, 750ci 4bbl, 4 speed) I had 2.32 gears in the back which made for good mileage. 4th was good for 80 to 130. That's when I redlined (6k RPM).
I love my '00 Firebird with a 6 speed now. I have no idea how fast it goes, I've never had enough road to try it on, or the urge to figure out how much a speeding ticket at over 150 would be.
Actually, that 305 can take virtually any intake from a smallblock chevy. You can get them at junk yards, but I'd recommend a nice aluminum one. Summit has the Edelbrock Performer intake for $114. I liked the Edelbrock carbs too, but lots of people like Holley's. You could always get a Quadrajet and a cast iron manifold for cheap from the junk yard. Generally smallblock parts fit all smallblocks. There was a change in the bolt pattern in '87 I believe, but if you get parts for the same year engine, you won't have a problem. (unless it's a smallblock 400, but that has it's own issues).
With a 4bbl, as long as the secondaries are closed (you'll hear it when they open, don't worry), it's effectively a 2bbl carb. When the secondaries open, you have more power.
I found that having a 4bbl, it can save gas, if you still drive gentle. The 4bbl gives you the power to move. With a 2bbl, you stand on the gas, begging for it to move, and it takes a lot longer to perform the same manuver (like passing, or accelerating from a stop). If you get greedy with the power (like most of us), of course you'll use more gas.
Back in the day when I was learning to work on cars, I firmly believed using carburators. But fuel injection does give much better fuel efficiency, and better power in stock configurations. Plenty of guys will say that they can make more power with a carburated car, but hey, if you're upgrading, you can upgrade fuel injection too. It just costs more.
I always get a giggle out of people with the little sports cars. :)
:)
I have a '00 TransAm WS/6, that is suppose to get 18/27. In real life, it does 20 in normal city driving, and 26 on long highway trips. The only way I ever achieved it was to pull onto I-10, set the cruise to 80 in 6th gear, and not touch the gas til I made my next stop at gas station, 400 miles later. Cross country drives are fun like that, but after 400 miles of not touching the gas or brakes, and effectively driving with one finger, you kinda forget that you have to hit the clutch and brakes to stop. It's that "oh ya, gotta drive now" feeling.
On real highway driving (occasionally encountering traffic, and the like), I get about 24 to 25 mpg.
If I'm racing (on tracks, of course), I can ruin that 17mpg mininum.
I haven't driven a GTO yet, but a friend who had the same car as mine (same specs, different car) drove one and was anything but impressed.
For me, mileage isn't a killer. My drives are very short, if I opt to make them. I walk a lot because parking sucks here. I use about 1 tank of gas (~16 gal) per month.
We have a mirror HERE, and mirrors of most other story links here
I see this as almost being a good idea, but it's going to upset a lot of customers. When Grandma goes to browse to the bingo site to see if they're having a game tonight, and can't get online, she's not going to have any idea what it means that she's offline for spamming. Ok, so she clicked that nice attachement a couple days ago, but Grandma is effectively computer illiterate.. How do they tell her, "You have to remove the virus from your computer before you can get back online."?
:)
But hey, providers have been terminating service for spamming for years. There's nothing new there. It's a good thing. If you know your account will be terminated quickly, it makes it harder for them to work, and easier on all of our mailboxes. If I were to spam, I'd expect my provider to yank our connections, which would be very bad for our other customers, but good in the general scheme of things. We're a large enough customer with our provider, that they contact us first, since we're a known legitimate company. It's worth it to them to find out what's going on before yanking the cable, because they know if they report something to us that has a legitimate source, we'll unplug the offending machine ourselves. I've had the pleasure of unplugging a customer machine before and calling them saying "Your machine is unplugged. Come get it, you're no longer a customer."
Hotmail has been terminating spammers accounts for years. I've known a few spammers, and if they use a Hotmail account as their "From" address, it's closed within hours of starting the spam. This isn't news. Why should Hotmail, or any other mail provider, deliver a million+ undeliverable bounced messages? The problem then comes if someone maliciously sends spam with an innocent victim's address as the "From:" line. If someone were to send out a spam as coming from abuse@hotmail.com, does abuse lose it's account?
His case is a bit weird. Did you see the video? I saw it just after the case was reported nationally.
The police had a report that there was something going on (possible domestic violence). He was beligerant from the start, which is understandable since he was in the middle of a fight. Too quickly into the conversation he started saying "just arrest me." He needs to work on his IPC skills.
In this case, he had done an appropriate thing. They were having a verbal argument. Rather than continue it, and be distracted driving, he pulled over, got out of the truck, in an attempt to 'cool off'.
The police will try to use this case to prove that anyone must supply any requested information. They already expect it, so this will just give them a nice court ruling to quote.
I learned in law enforcement school that technically as soon as an officer stops you, and you don't have the option of walking away, that's an arrest. If you don't have the option of walking away, that's an arrest. It doesn't matter that you aren't in handcuffs or in the back of a patrol car. They just aren't suppose to start interrogating you. But anything you say is a spontanious confession.
I learned that the hard way once.
An example given was this:
Officer: Do you why I pulled you over?
Suspect: I was speeding.
That's enough to give you a speeding ticket in most states. You confessed to the crime. The simple answer is not to confess to anything. If you believe they're going to give you a ticket, or arrest you, don't confess to anything. I hold that to be true to even giving my name.
It's important to remember you're dealing with a human being (most of the time), so giving enough information will ease the process along. If it'll satisfy the officer to give some information to not piss him off.
I got out of a speeding ticket once exactly like this. I got pulled over, the officer asked me why he pulled me over, and I told him I didn't know. He got all pissed. He then told me I was driving at over 90mph. I told him that was impossible, and described the vehicles I was following and my estimated speed. "I was behind a white Chevy truck doing approximately 65mph for the last 3 miles."
Already knowing what information they'll get from me, by reading my tag number, I tell them everything they need to know and a bit more, but that's my choice. When they run my tags, they'll see my name, and most states will get the fact that I have a concealed weapons permit. When they ask for my license, I'll give my drivers license, concealed weapons permit, and tell the office, "I have no weapons in the vehicle". An officer will frequently be concerned for his safety, so if they want to check me for weapons, I let them. This is reasonable, as plenty of officers have been shot by seemingly unarmed suspects.
But, if I'm not a suspect, I consider it unreasonable.
Recently, I was outside a pool hall in a good neighborhood. The area I was in doesn't allow indoor smoking, so I was outside smoking, as were 1/2 dozen other customers. They picked me to harass. That was unreasonable. I was standing on private property, not causing a disturbance, doing absolutley nothing illegal or suspicious. The bouncer apologized to me after it happened. "The cops are assholes around here.", he said. I finished drinking and playing pool a couple hours later, and walked home. It was a violation of my rights. They had no suspicion that I had done anything wrong. I gave just enough information to make him go away, but it took 1/2 hour, and my girlfriend was very concerned. She was inside talking to friends when it started, and came outside to see me being searched by the police. She didn't quite understand how or why the police were searching me and asking me a bunch of questions, when I hadn't done anything wrong. I was literally standing there smoking a cigarette, minding my own business.
Answer: No, sir.
If they're going to arrest you for not giving your name, they're just looking for an excuse to do it anyways. This just makes it too easy.
I still believe in my 5th amendment rights, and the magic words of Miranda, "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you
You'd be amazed how fast I got mute, if I'm not doing anything in the least way wrong. If I'm just standing on a sidewalk, minding my own business, it's no one elses business who I am.
My PS2 is backward compatable?? Just kidding. I was a late buyer, so I never had an original playstation. I went straight from my Coleco to PS2. In renting or buying games, I've never seen any original PS games that got my attention enough to want them.
:)
I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there that had a PS then bought a PS2, and wanted to continue playing their games. It's much like the PC gaming market. There were plenty of people playing their DOS based games, who wanted to continue playing them on their Win95 boxes. Eventually, that number becomes a minority, but eventually those games get abandon for the newer/better/faster/prettier games. Well, except for those hardcore users who still play Atari games on their Windows 2600 emulators.
Cam you play your original Nintendo games on a Game Cube? Nope. Newer consoles mean newer games. If you are really hell-bent on playing your older games, plug that old console back in.
It doesn't really matter to me, I wouldn't own a Xbox. When I went shopping for new game consoles, every time I tried out an Xbox in the stores, they were either crashed, or would crash while I was playing the game. That's anything but impressive. The Xbox was the only game consle in most stores that I went to, with a reset button that customers could press. For me, it was a decision between PS2 and Game Cube, and I got the PS2 because the rental section at my local Blockbuster had/has more PS2 games.
Honestly, you're right. The government will throw billions (trillions?) into stopping anything it sees as a military threat. The best thing for our space program was the cold war. Besides the political "we're cooler than you" aspect, most of the space program happened during that period.
If there should be a valid military threat against the United States from space, and we were on the losing side of it, you'd be sure the government would throw anything they needed to at it, to make sure we were the biggest and strongest.
It's a sad fact, but one we have to accept. I'd prefer to see funds being thrown at improving mankind, rather than at war. They money is available, as is obvious at the over $4 billion per month that the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars are costing. That kind of money could pay researchers to develop really interesting things instead.
I don't have access to the documentation about Bush's plan for putting man (i.e., America) on the Moon again, and on Mars, but I'd guarantee that somewhere in those plans is mention that if we don't get there first, another country will have the advantage in future military conflicts.
We have a lot of things to thank for war, either for development, or the extend to which they exist. Jet aircraft (WWII Germany), the Interstate Highway System (STRAHNET and the Eisenhower Interstate System), television/radio (remember next time you hear an EBS broadcast), GPS, etc, etc...
Ok, how about this. With just 500 Minuteman III's with MIRV warheads (multiple warheads, one rocket), lots of stuff would blow up in minutes. The survivers would die in the remaining years, due to radiation and other little problems such as a lack of food supply and infrastructure (no food, no power, no supply lines).
Immediately kill 10% of the population, and the damage caused would kill the rest. This isn't a long-term situation, it happens in minutes, 10% of the population dies, the rest die over a longer term.
But hey, if you like using the argument that we could or couldn't kill each other off quickly, as rationalization of why we should or shouldn't expand humanity, that's your own emotional problem.
Your english is fine.
I'd imagine a few problems with teraforming Mars..
First off is the point that you made. If we use some process to make the atmosphere more earth-like, we could encourage the growth of anything that may be lying dormant there, or we could kill it. We've only explored a very small part of the planet, and still don't have complete information about everything we've found. For example, what are those little balls that they found in the soil? Probably just rocks, I'd imagine, but maybe not. They have found traces of water (mostly mud-like). I'd imagine that we'd do something with the free-standing water, to get it to vaporize, making the atmosphere thicker, which would also likely start weather patterns and rain.
To make the atomsphere more earth like, we'd probably send some plants over, such as algae, and maybe grasses. As it grows, it may cover artifacts that could be interesting. I'll use my own back yard as an example. When I moved into this house, the yard was all dirt and rocks. We spent a week digging up rocks, but there are still some small rocks in the dirt. We then planted grass. The yard is now very lush and green, but it is hopeless to think you can see the little rocks that were there.
Imagine "teraforming" Giza (Egypt). Occasionally, archeologists find interesting rocks, like the Rosetta Stone, simply sticking out of the sand, because wind blew sand away from it. If someone encouraged grass to grow there, through aquaducts and irrigation, sand wouldn't blow away, and whatever is burried will remain burried until someone tries to build a strip mall on top of yet another unidentified tomb.
Personally, I'm all for teraforming Mars. For a long time, I've believed that for Humanity to survive, we *MUST* have colonies on more than just Earth. We have the technology to kill everything on this planet in minutes, and it takes a mistake by one person to start that chain of events. Maybe through our own greed and industrialization, we've already set the earth on a fatal spiral through pollution. There are also other events that can happen, which are on more of a sci-fi scale. What if the sun goes super nova? What if a giant asteroid crashes into the earth?
Sure, we don't have the technology now to colonize a planet light-years away. Just like a child, we need to learn to take baby steps, before we can run. Mars is becoming close enough for us to 'practice' on. It probably won't be perfect, but it will be an attempt. After several attempts, we'll do better at it.
If we never teraform Mars, if humanity debates it for the rest of eternity, we'll never learn to travel faster or further, and doom ourselves to eventually overpopulate the Earth and die.
Likewise, if we never populate Mars, our space travel technology will be very slow to grow. Necessity is the mother of invention. If we have a need to travel the distance between Earth and Mars faster, someone will invent something which can achieve this. It may not be a super-cool spacecraft. Our own science fiction has eluded to creative solutions, although technologically impossible at this time such as Wormholes, transporters, and 'Stargate' (good show).
Eventually, we will have the technology to go to distant galaxies, but we have to manage to at least get people to the next planet first. In the last 100 years, we've come a long way. The wright brothers flew their first powered airplane in 1903. Now we can fly all the way around the earth at several times the speed of sound. Wars do great things for technology. Jet and rocket powered craft were innovated during WWII. Slow progress has been made with other forms of aircraft. The cold war was great for pushing space technology, even if it was only for political reasons. America had to do better than the Russians, so we were each trying to out-do each other.
The first
People still use telnet to get to servers? Wow.
That thing weighs 205 pounds, according to Sun's site. It should be noticable when he's driving around. I guess if you don't mind the truck listing to the left all the time, and worrying about hitting speed bumps too hard, it's ok. I get all paranoid about hitting speed bumps with my car when I have servers in the back, and they aren't even turned on. :)
:)
I'd think it would make more sense to have a cheap Pentium machine running Solaris x86 or Linux, than that beast.
But hey, it got him on Slashdot. If it had been a little box, it would have never made it up here.
How often do you really hot swap memory or CPU's?
Honestly, once we put a production machine up, it usually runs without taking it down. For a lot of our machines, the last time they were taken down for anything is when we physically moved them.
Mirror Here
These mirrors are automatic, and still considered beta, so if something's missing, live with it.
I forgot to mention that in my previous message. The internal RAID card absolutely SUCKS ASS.
:) If I'm putting 8 to 15 drives on a machine, I'd really rather not power them from the machine's power supply. You'll be going through hell with power splitters, and overloading the power supply, even if you don't think you are.
I'm a huge fan of the external arrays. We've used several over the years, and I have nothing but glowing reviews of the external arrays.
The SX6000 is an internal card. The SX8000 is an external box.
We have one machine with an SX6000 card. It didn't work to start with. The intended machine (A dual AMD 2000+) simply wouldn't boot with it attached. After weeks of going back and forth with the Promise support line, who insisted that it worked on *THEIR* test platform, using the same motherboard and processors, we set it aside, to work on later. A week later, they released a BIOS update for the card, which fixed the problem. The problem was that their BIOS wouldn't allow *ANY* system with the particular chipset to boot. Nice. It wasn't an obscure chipset, so I'm sure there were plenty of people with the same problem.
A friend of mine was using the same card, and at the time he loved it, but at the first failure, his opinion became much like yours (absolutely sucks).
We've used other external arrays by other companies, but those companies seem to come and go too frequently. One company I worked for had an absolutely BEAUTIFUL external array, which came as layers, so you could pick and choose how many drives you wanted it to be capable of. Unfortunately, that company went out of business in the mid 90's.
I like any external array that lets the OS see it as a single SCSI drive, and doesn't take any special drivers, like the Promise SX8000. Hell, any OS sees a single SCSI drive, what more could I ask?
I'm afraid to count, but we have roughly 400 Western Digital drives currently in use.
Off-site backups are always a very good choice. When your house burns down, or an ex-girlfriend goes to all your electronics with a baseball bat, your data is still safe.
No, that's two consecutive drives. If you have 6 drives, you could have elements #2, #4, and #6 fail, and still be operating (very slowly)
#1 and #3 have the parity for #2.
#3 and #5 have the parity for #4.
#5 and #1 have the parity for #6.
But, if you lost say #2 and #3, ya, you're screwed.
That's when it's a very bright idea to put in as many drives as you can.
If you have 15 drives, and two fail, the chances of them being consecutive are very low.
If you have only 3 drives, well, two failures is catastrophic.
Bigger drives take longer to rebuild, so if you have 100Gb drives, they'll go fairly quickly compared to 250Gb drives. If he doesn't need a lot of space, and fast rebuild times, a whole bunch of 80Gb drives would be a reasonable choice.
I use Western Digital drives in my machines. Their failure rate is low compared to others we've used.