Just remember who voted for this when elections come up. Absolutely! I already put money into the Strange Bedfellows coalition budget. We already have $250k to go after the people behind this. Please donate!
I think the first order of business is just to make sure the people who elect these buffoons know that they were sold out by their elected reps. Put personally, I hope there's enough left to help fund primary-election opponents for these authoritarian yutzes.
Essentially, I asked if I could use the network, and, acting on your behalf since you set it up, it said I could when it gave me the information required to use the network. That's exactly it.
I have opened my wireless network on purpose. It's an invitation to neighbors and passers by to use my bandwidth. If I didn't want that, I'd put a password on it.
I take all open wireless networks to be similar invitations.
It is unfortunately common to knee-jerk a development problem by adding more management. You said it, brother.
The bottom line is...more management doesn't solve problems. The right amount of *competent* and *properly empowered* management does. And honestly, I think the right amount can be pretty small if you start with competent and properly empowered workers. I know a number of development teams that have no managers at all. But they have plenty of people who will take the lead on whatever needs doing.
[Intellectual honesty] has easily been the #1 reason I have personally witnessed for project failure. It's amazing, isn't it? If you want to be effective in the real world, you have to pay attention the real world. We should dress that up in a lot of bullet points and start a new management fad.
Of course, a lot of people don't really want to be effective in the real world, not as much as they want other things. They want to feel good. They want everybody to like them. They want a quiet life. They want to keep collecting their paycheck. So they stick their heads in the sand and hum the national anthem.
Not that those are bad things to want. But you can't get them just by always picking them in the short term. Easy years require hard moments.
There is no other institution that is as useless, corrupt and frankly dangerous as the government. Spoken like somebody who has lived all their life in a place with pretty good government. Having lived on four continents, I can tell you with some confidence that the ability to call for police, fire, or medical help is a pretty fucking miraculous luxury. Ditto for a reasonably reliable legal system.
But heck, don't believe me; check out The Economist's recent mention of this, or search for more by the economist Hernando de Soto, who makes it clear that one of the biggest advantages the first world has is good government.
Not that I don't have some big issues with my government, but American government is certainly not useless, is relatively uncorrupted, and generally suppresses a lot more danger than it creates.
Really? I thought it was just through the water or dissolved in other liquids that we drink. I've never heard of anyone getting lead poisoning from a cow. The process he's referring to is called biomagnification, and some quick searching suggests that lead is indeed not thought to be significantly biomagnified. And a little more rummaging suggests that you're right, the bigger sources of worry are groundwater and your plumbing, through lead pipes and lead plumbing solder.
Bush will probably have to stay within US boarders lest he get picked up.
If any Bush administration official is charged with war crimes, I will personally put up $1000 as part of a bounty for "extraordinary rendition" of said official to the Hague. Who's with me?
Time was that you could get away with selling crapware because all the alternatives cost money, so it was harder for people to check them out. FOSS alternatives can be checked out for free, so when people hit a speed bump with your product they're likely to just go check them out. And if they're at least as good as what you're selling, people are liable to stay with them. Amen to that. In low-information environments, marketroids can extract a lot of cash.
Personally, I still pay for good tools. In Java-land, I've upgraded IntelliJ Idea every new version since 2001. Because it's still much better than the open-source equivalents.
Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it?
This might be true if he were manufacturing widgets. Or if his bosses were idiots. But software development is both creative work and craftsmanship. The most productive teams I see are happy ones, well supplied with whatever they need to get their work done.
Smart bosses know that the cost of a little extra software or hardware is as nothing compared with the value of increased productivity. If your fully loaded cost per engineer is $100k (high for some areas, low for mine), then you obviously expect to make more than that on them. A minimum of 1.5x, and for Silicon Valley, the number's probably 5x-20x.
In a situation like that, if $200 lets you increase their productivity by 2% (one week a year), then you've made a minimum of 15x on your investment of $200. That's a massive win. There's a reason that companies like Google treat their engineers so well: it pays off.
You say all this and you knew that criminal activity was happening I found it out eventually in the newspapers. At which point, it was a little too late for me to go effectively expose it by working for anybody. Plenty of other people had more specific knowledge, and they had it sooner. You and your wife may have dodged legal responsibility, but not moral responsibility. Which is why you're squirming so much here.
I'm not even saying you had a particularly big share, but it was definitely larger than the average citizen.
you didn't quit your job and go work for a lender so you could turn them in Clearly, you are upset, and not thinking straight. That's an absurd statement.
I pay people to do this exact thing. I call them police. They are handy. Unlike me, they have guns and subpoenas.
you did gain financially, as a large part of the economy that you happily suckled from was running off of this fraud. Probably not. I turned down mortgage-related work and housing-bubble work the same way I turn down advertising work and anything else that I think is morally dubious.
Thanks to the housing bubble, I also couldn't buy in my area; idiots with idiot loans bid us out of the market. We've continued to rent long past when we normally would have bought. So the housing bubble ended up costing us money net. And that's not even counting what the recession will cost me.
Blaming others because you chose not to do anything about [blah blah blah] Only one of us had detailed advance knowledge that crime was being committed. Only one of us got a paycheck from it. But when I heard, I did choose to do things about it: I wrote my government reps, I warned friends, I wrote publicly on the topic. And believe me, I will vote based on this.
Maybe someday you will accept your responsibility All of us as citizens are responsible for this. I accept that, and will be paying plenty taxes because of it for years to come.
I'm just saying that everybody who had detailed advance knowledge of this bears a greater share of the moral responsibility, and in direct proportion to their involvement. Especially those, like yourselves, who continued to consciously take money from criminal enterprises.
Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the you and yours, either.
These people need to be made to answer why their ratings so completely fly in the face of naive intuition. They need to explain why they've done worse than small scale small real estate professionals and hobbyists. Oh, I'm sure they'll have explanations a-plenty. It's a financial industry mantra that past performance is no guarantee of future results. And these guys will say that they based all their ratings on historical data, so they did what they could. And that ratings are just opinions, and they never promised anything more than that.
They will blame somebody else. Everybody involved will blame somebody else. When really, I think there's enough blame here to go around.
Personally, I think the ratings agencies were fools for taking business like this. And that people buying the products were fools for trusting the opinions of somebody with a conflict of interest.
When Congress gave the ratings agencies a special place in the system, they should have mandated that they not be funded by people getting rated. And one reform I'd love to see is forcing the ratings companies to have some skin in the game. Perhaps guaranteeing their ratings in the aggregate, so that if more than a certain percentage of AAAs fail, it costs them.
So, are you going to take responsibility for turning a blind eye to these criminal enterprises I wasn't the one with evidence of criminal activity. I wasn't the one getting paid by people setting up a financial time bomb for somebody else to deal with.
When I learned what was going on, I wrote my elected officials. I have since written more, applauding the FBI investigations and discouraging mortgage relief for idiots. I certainly have spent a fair bit of time educating pals and people on the Internet about the topic, and hopefully dissuaded a few pals from getting caught up in the housing bubble.
You are truly stupid if you think that one or two funders complaining about a practice that was well known by the authorities, and common practice in the industry was going do anything other than get them fired. I don't think one or two is enough. But how many people quietly took their paychecks while fucking the rest of us? I am thinking it was more than one or two. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."
Regardless, claiming that it must have been ok for you and your wife because everybody else was ruining the country's financial system is a kind of moral logic that most people grow out of in their teens. Maybe you could work on that.
You are going to blame the people that refused commit the crimes? I will not blame them as much as the people who chose to commit the crimes. But yes, they share some of the blame. Forget blame, really; what I care about is that they understand that they are also morally culpable.
I guess you also report every jay walker, speeder, dog off the leash, and copied music CD you ever see right? Are you suggesting that the kind of fraud that was rampant in the mortgage industry is some sort of victimless non-crime like jaywalking? Get real. Had the fed not intervened, we would have been looking at something between the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s and the Great Depression.
When I see real crimes or dangerous behavior, I report it or stop it myself. In my life, that's generally limited to the occasional erratic driver or the sort of dolt who parks in front of a hydrant.
Even when it's not a crime, when it's pathologically anti-social, I'm happy to work against it. When some Herbalife sucker spams my neighborhood telephone poles, I take the flyers down. And I've been fighting email spam since before TBL invented the web.
So yeah, I try to walk the talk. But even if I didn't, that wouldn't excuse your moral lapses, would it?
None of these software practices will tell you that what you're rating AAA should really be BB. Nope. And they shouldn't. That's a requirements question.
The claim that it was a bug is a claim that the software failed to behave according to requirements due to a developer mistake. I'm just pointing out that them saying it was a bug is equivalent to a claim of professional incompetence on the part of pretty much everybody in their software organization.
Like many others, I think that's unlikely; I don't think they accidentally got the wrong answer. I expect the software did its job correctly. That job was to give happy answers to the people paying for happy answers.
raising a dog takes almost as much energy as raising a child, if you want to do it well. I'm trying to figure out which you've never raised: a dog or a child. If you really have raised both, than I'm very worried for one of them.
There were certainly some weasel words used that would probably get them out of any legal trouble for what they said, but that was the point they were trying to convey. And that's the part that enrages me.
Yes, everybody is legally responsible for their own actions, including signing contracts. But the sales techniques used to manipulate people can be proven in the lab to make a percentage of your audience do obviously retarded things. They are just as judgment-impairing as giving them two neat shots of tequila.
Why is that the mortgage-holders are solely responsible for the contracts, when it can be proven that most of them never would have signed without the high-pressure sales techniques? Why can the dirtbags leave a roomful of people with a materially false understanding of things and escape with a few weasel words?
If people had really of their own accord walked up to a mortgage broker and demanded to sign something obviously retarded, I'd say fine, they deserved it. But when they have been carefully manipulated into it by professional salesmen, I begin to have a different view.
I suggest you allocate you blame where it belongs: The banks & lending instituions. In a situation like this, I believe there is sufficient blame for everybody, from the people advertising the fraudulent mortgages to the people writing them to the people selling them to the people bundling them to the people buying them. There was idiocy and fraud and willful blindness at every level of this, which is the only way we could get a fuckup of global proportions.
Yeah, you didn't participate. But as Edmund Burke said, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." So you may not be legally culpable, but don't expect anybody to be sending you cookie platters, either.
They just let her crank out her work, and handed anything shady to someone who might be slower, but could prove their worth by handling such "problems". [...] The best part is that when we counted up the costs of daycare, gas, clothes, taxes, etc..., we only lost $400 a month when she wasn't working. It never made sense for her to go back to work. If that's the best part, it may yet get better.
Figure the feds spend $300 bn on bailouts and lose another $300 bn on "stimulus" and $300 bn on lost tax revenues due to the downturn. That's $3k per citizen, or $9k for your fam, assuming you're an average taxpayer and have just one kid.
Not counting interest costs (because we'll borrow it all), that's 22 months of your net gain, so depending on how long she worked there, her turning a blind eye and participating in a criminal enterprise may have actually cost you money.
IOW, they are blaming the coders for generating results that should have failed even the most basic sanity checking. Indeed. This isn't a coding error, it's a testing error. Or perhaps a process design error.
Any professional knows that coding has a certain error rate. So you add practices, like pair programming, unit testing, acceptance testing, external code reviews, parallel implementation, and black-box testing until you get below the error rate you need.
For some part-time e-tailer's web site, you can skip a fair bit of that; if you fuck up badly enough, you might cost them an entire $500. But in the financial world, they know that errors can cost a lot more, like a million times more, and so it's worth spending more on quality-oriented practices.
Blaming this on the coder who happened to make the key error (if indeed their was one) is like blaming the Titanic disaster on some guy who missed a rivet on that side. It's the purest bullshit, designed to deflect responsibility from the people in charge. If they set it up right, a single person would be unable to make a mistake of this magnitude.
Go with a specialist sci-fi bookstore. I use Borderlands Books. I just walk in and ask them what's good; after some discussion over my particular standards of good, they'll happily drag me to some favorite they have. They are awesome.
Even if you're not in the area, that's fine; they have a newsletter, and do mail order. And I'm sure that you could call them up, give them a credit card number, and just ask them to ship you a good book every month. Or if you can find a bookstore in your area like that, try them!
The greatest feature of modern software is "Undo." Yes and no.
That's a great feature for user-facing applications, no denying it. I love my undo. But filesystems aren't just for users. I would like my filesystems to focus on storing files.
If they provide hooks so that somebody can implement undo on user-focused systems, that's great. But that undo should be part of a carefully-considered common user interface to undo for system operations, and not something jammed into a single filesystem because people think that'd be cool.
Personally, I think the whole thing is a mess, and computer professionals should be working harder to enforce a consistent scheme. Unfortunately, only a minority of computer professionals seem interested in changing the status quo confusion. That's because it doesn't matter.
The only time I hear a real-world complaint that this would address is the way disk manufacturers measure in one number, but your OS measures in another, so noobs get confused, feeling rooked. But this is only a partial solution anyhow, in that the OS and filesystem will eat up all sorts of bytes for all sorts of things, so adding new units to the mix is not going to help the microcephalics who get their technical advice from a Best Buy salesdolt.
When I, as a technical person, am doing any kind of math with these numbers, it also doesn't matter. Either I'm doing back-of-envelope numbers, in which case the small gain in precision is lost in the handwaving. Or I'm doing math that matters, in which case I will use bytes all the way through, and fuck the prefixes.
So in sum, to me it's a lot of pedantry for very little practical gain.
If they really wanted to test SSD performance they would have taken Linux with jffs2 or newer logfs. Does anybody have a decent solution for using a flash drive to boost performance of a regular drive?
I just ordered a new laptop, and it has an ExpressCard slot into which I could drop 4 or 8 GB of solid-state disk at a reasonable price. That could serve as a giant cache, one that unlike RAM could be safely used as a write cache.
It seems like there would be a clever way to treat the SSD plus the regular hard drive as one unit so that the hard drive could be spun down for hours of normal working situations, giving a giant extension of battery life.
Anybody heard of a virtual block device or special filesystem that would take advantage of this in Linux?
That's an excellent summary of things. I was perfectly willing to trust the jury, but your post makes it clear how a reasonable person could vote to convict. Thanks!
You don't find the fact that his wife had dated a confessed serial killer at all odd? (Not Reiser but the other guy that confessed to several murders) Neither the police nor the judge found the other guy's claims of murder sprees credible. Why should we?
Yeah, it's odd. Lots of things about this case were odd. But that's why we pay people to spend months and months sifting through these things, rather than deciding them via Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the first order of business is just to make sure the people who elect these buffoons know that they were sold out by their elected reps. Put personally, I hope there's enough left to help fund primary-election opponents for these authoritarian yutzes.
I have opened my wireless network on purpose. It's an invitation to neighbors and passers by to use my bandwidth. If I didn't want that, I'd put a password on it.
I take all open wireless networks to be similar invitations.
Of course, a lot of people don't really want to be effective in the real world, not as much as they want other things. They want to feel good. They want everybody to like them. They want a quiet life. They want to keep collecting their paycheck. So they stick their heads in the sand and hum the national anthem.
Not that those are bad things to want. But you can't get them just by always picking them in the short term. Easy years require hard moments.
But heck, don't believe me; check out The Economist's recent mention of this, or search for more by the economist Hernando de Soto, who makes it clear that one of the biggest advantages the first world has is good government.
Not that I don't have some big issues with my government, but American government is certainly not useless, is relatively uncorrupted, and generally suppresses a lot more danger than it creates.
That's scary, but not entirely shocking: the very word "plumbing" comes from the Latin word for lead.
Bush will probably have to stay within US boarders lest he get picked up.
If any Bush administration official is charged with war crimes, I will personally put up $1000 as part of a bounty for "extraordinary rendition" of said official to the Hague. Who's with me?
Personally, I still pay for good tools. In Java-land, I've upgraded IntelliJ Idea every new version since 2001. Because it's still much better than the open-source equivalents.
Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it?
This might be true if he were manufacturing widgets. Or if his bosses were idiots. But software development is both creative work and craftsmanship. The most productive teams I see are happy ones, well supplied with whatever they need to get their work done.
Smart bosses know that the cost of a little extra software or hardware is as nothing compared with the value of increased productivity. If your fully loaded cost per engineer is $100k (high for some areas, low for mine), then you obviously expect to make more than that on them. A minimum of 1.5x, and for Silicon Valley, the number's probably 5x-20x.
In a situation like that, if $200 lets you increase their productivity by 2% (one week a year), then you've made a minimum of 15x on your investment of $200. That's a massive win. There's a reason that companies like Google treat their engineers so well: it pays off.
I'm not even saying you had a particularly big share, but it was definitely larger than the average citizen. you didn't quit your job and go work for a lender so you could turn them in Clearly, you are upset, and not thinking straight. That's an absurd statement.
I pay people to do this exact thing. I call them police. They are handy. Unlike me, they have guns and subpoenas. you did gain financially, as a large part of the economy that you happily suckled from was running off of this fraud. Probably not. I turned down mortgage-related work and housing-bubble work the same way I turn down advertising work and anything else that I think is morally dubious.
Thanks to the housing bubble, I also couldn't buy in my area; idiots with idiot loans bid us out of the market. We've continued to rent long past when we normally would have bought. So the housing bubble ended up costing us money net. And that's not even counting what the recession will cost me. Blaming others because you chose not to do anything about [blah blah blah] Only one of us had detailed advance knowledge that crime was being committed. Only one of us got a paycheck from it. But when I heard, I did choose to do things about it: I wrote my government reps, I warned friends, I wrote publicly on the topic. And believe me, I will vote based on this. Maybe someday you will accept your responsibility All of us as citizens are responsible for this. I accept that, and will be paying plenty taxes because of it for years to come.
I'm just saying that everybody who had detailed advance knowledge of this bears a greater share of the moral responsibility, and in direct proportion to their involvement. Especially those, like yourselves, who continued to consciously take money from criminal enterprises.
Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the you and yours, either.
of naive intuition. They need to explain why they've done worse than small scale
small real estate professionals and hobbyists. Oh, I'm sure they'll have explanations a-plenty. It's a financial industry mantra that past performance is no guarantee of future results. And these guys will say that they based all their ratings on historical data, so they did what they could. And that ratings are just opinions, and they never promised anything more than that.
They will blame somebody else. Everybody involved will blame somebody else. When really, I think there's enough blame here to go around.
Personally, I think the ratings agencies were fools for taking business like this. And that people buying the products were fools for trusting the opinions of somebody with a conflict of interest.
When Congress gave the ratings agencies a special place in the system, they should have mandated that they not be funded by people getting rated. And one reform I'd love to see is forcing the ratings companies to have some skin in the game. Perhaps guaranteeing their ratings in the aggregate, so that if more than a certain percentage of AAAs fail, it costs them.
When I learned what was going on, I wrote my elected officials. I have since written more, applauding the FBI investigations and discouraging mortgage relief for idiots. I certainly have spent a fair bit of time educating pals and people on the Internet about the topic, and hopefully dissuaded a few pals from getting caught up in the housing bubble. You are truly stupid if you think that one or two funders complaining about a practice that was well known by the authorities, and common practice in the industry was going do anything other than get them fired. I don't think one or two is enough. But how many people quietly took their paychecks while fucking the rest of us? I am thinking it was more than one or two. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."
Regardless, claiming that it must have been ok for you and your wife because everybody else was ruining the country's financial system is a kind of moral logic that most people grow out of in their teens. Maybe you could work on that. You are going to blame the people that refused commit the crimes? I will not blame them as much as the people who chose to commit the crimes. But yes, they share some of the blame. Forget blame, really; what I care about is that they understand that they are also morally culpable. I guess you also report every jay walker, speeder, dog off the leash, and copied music CD you ever see right? Are you suggesting that the kind of fraud that was rampant in the mortgage industry is some sort of victimless non-crime like jaywalking? Get real. Had the fed not intervened, we would have been looking at something between the Asian financial crisis of the late 90s and the Great Depression.
When I see real crimes or dangerous behavior, I report it or stop it myself. In my life, that's generally limited to the occasional erratic driver or the sort of dolt who parks in front of a hydrant.
Even when it's not a crime, when it's pathologically anti-social, I'm happy to work against it. When some Herbalife sucker spams my neighborhood telephone poles, I take the flyers down. And I've been fighting email spam since before TBL invented the web.
So yeah, I try to walk the talk. But even if I didn't, that wouldn't excuse your moral lapses, would it?
The claim that it was a bug is a claim that the software failed to behave according to requirements due to a developer mistake. I'm just pointing out that them saying it was a bug is equivalent to a claim of professional incompetence on the part of pretty much everybody in their software organization.
Like many others, I think that's unlikely; I don't think they accidentally got the wrong answer. I expect the software did its job correctly. That job was to give happy answers to the people paying for happy answers.
Yes, everybody is legally responsible for their own actions, including signing contracts. But the sales techniques used to manipulate people can be proven in the lab to make a percentage of your audience do obviously retarded things. They are just as judgment-impairing as giving them two neat shots of tequila.
Why is that the mortgage-holders are solely responsible for the contracts, when it can be proven that most of them never would have signed without the high-pressure sales techniques? Why can the dirtbags leave a roomful of people with a materially false understanding of things and escape with a few weasel words?
If people had really of their own accord walked up to a mortgage broker and demanded to sign something obviously retarded, I'd say fine, they deserved it. But when they have been carefully manipulated into it by professional salesmen, I begin to have a different view.
Yeah, you didn't participate. But as Edmund Burke said, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." So you may not be legally culpable, but don't expect anybody to be sending you cookie platters, either.
Figure the feds spend $300 bn on bailouts and lose another $300 bn on "stimulus" and $300 bn on lost tax revenues due to the downturn. That's $3k per citizen, or $9k for your fam, assuming you're an average taxpayer and have just one kid.
Not counting interest costs (because we'll borrow it all), that's 22 months of your net gain, so depending on how long she worked there, her turning a blind eye and participating in a criminal enterprise may have actually cost you money.
And people say there's no such thing as karma.
failed even the most basic sanity checking. Indeed. This isn't a coding error, it's a testing error. Or perhaps a process design error.
Any professional knows that coding has a certain error rate. So you add practices, like pair programming, unit testing, acceptance testing, external code reviews, parallel implementation, and black-box testing until you get below the error rate you need.
For some part-time e-tailer's web site, you can skip a fair bit of that; if you fuck up badly enough, you might cost them an entire $500. But in the financial world, they know that errors can cost a lot more, like a million times more, and so it's worth spending more on quality-oriented practices.
Blaming this on the coder who happened to make the key error (if indeed their was one) is like blaming the Titanic disaster on some guy who missed a rivet on that side. It's the purest bullshit, designed to deflect responsibility from the people in charge. If they set it up right, a single person would be unable to make a mistake of this magnitude.
Go with a specialist sci-fi bookstore. I use Borderlands Books. I just walk in and ask them what's good; after some discussion over my particular standards of good, they'll happily drag me to some favorite they have. They are awesome.
Even if you're not in the area, that's fine; they have a newsletter, and do mail order. And I'm sure that you could call them up, give them a credit card number, and just ask them to ship you a good book every month. Or if you can find a bookstore in your area like that, try them!
That's a great feature for user-facing applications, no denying it. I love my undo. But filesystems aren't just for users. I would like my filesystems to focus on storing files.
If they provide hooks so that somebody can implement undo on user-focused systems, that's great. But that undo should be part of a carefully-considered common user interface to undo for system operations, and not something jammed into a single filesystem because people think that'd be cool.
The only time I hear a real-world complaint that this would address is the way disk manufacturers measure in one number, but your OS measures in another, so noobs get confused, feeling rooked. But this is only a partial solution anyhow, in that the OS and filesystem will eat up all sorts of bytes for all sorts of things, so adding new units to the mix is not going to help the microcephalics who get their technical advice from a Best Buy salesdolt.
When I, as a technical person, am doing any kind of math with these numbers, it also doesn't matter. Either I'm doing back-of-envelope numbers, in which case the small gain in precision is lost in the handwaving. Or I'm doing math that matters, in which case I will use bytes all the way through, and fuck the prefixes.
So in sum, to me it's a lot of pedantry for very little practical gain.
I just ordered a new laptop, and it has an ExpressCard slot into which I could drop 4 or 8 GB of solid-state disk at a reasonable price. That could serve as a giant cache, one that unlike RAM could be safely used as a write cache.
It seems like there would be a clever way to treat the SSD plus the regular hard drive as one unit so that the hard drive could be spun down for hours of normal working situations, giving a giant extension of battery life.
Anybody heard of a virtual block device or special filesystem that would take advantage of this in Linux?
That's an excellent summary of things. I was perfectly willing to trust the jury, but your post makes it clear how a reasonable person could vote to convict. Thanks!
Yeah, it's odd. Lots of things about this case were odd. But that's why we pay people to spend months and months sifting through these things, rather than deciding them via Slashdot.