the other half of this is to make it harder to sell your vote. You cannot buy someone's vote reliably unless they can somehow prove to you that they voted the way you told them to. No paper trail means you can accept money to vote one way, really vote another way, and the briber has no way to tell the difference.
the difference being faxes cost money to send (and receive) and email is basically free on both ends, making it both easier to do in bulk, and harder to prosecute.
check out bay technologies, they have some very useful stuff there for remote management. I've used their RPCs (think powerstrip with an ethernet port) for several years. Reboot anything that can power-on-after-power-fail, and you're set.
For this sort of reason I have a bundle of two d-cords and an ethernet jack at each location, tied together with a wire tie. Stops me from losing 3-5 d-cords and a stray ethernet every time. This does nothing for theft, but stops someone from attempting to pack a cord into their bag when it's tied to other things, at least one of which is usually still plugged into the wall.
from what I've seen so far, 100% of laws passed that could interfere with political campaigning exempt political calls. They probably realize the voters are noticing this duality, but universally consider it minor enough to get away with. (a minor enough corruption to be considered 'acceptable' I suppose?) Sort of like how a used car salesman doesn't mind getting caught in a lie or two here or there.
I didn't used to get any of these until what, three or four months ago. Now there's several of them on my machine every week when I get home from work. I found them humorous at first since I drive a 92 explorer. (orly?)
One of the times I let the recording play all the way to the end because I happened to be home, and at the end it said something like "press 1 to be removed from our list". I pressed 1, and was greeted with that familiar sound of a long distance line hanging up.
And there were two more recorded calls on my machine the next evening. So clearly this is not an honest attempt to implement list removal.
Besides not being effective, it's annoying to have a message on your machine every evening that ends with "press 1 to be removed from our list"... kinda hard for my answering machine to press "1" isn't it? Then on the one day I happen to BE home to press 1, they ignore me.
it copied "http://www.evil.com/ to my clipboard. Any app I pasted into pasted that url. I tried many apps to copy something to the clipboard but it remained evil.
The article says in one place you have to restart, and in another you have to close your browser window. I found that closing safari was not sufficient, and I had to quit safari to successfully copy different data into my clipboard with other apps.
Translation: Giving a defendant limited immunity in terms of forcing them to turn over the passphrase can lead to a conviction. That's because the fellow technically isn't being convicted based on his passphrase; he's being convicted for what it unlocks. Isn't the law grand?
So lets take this out of the what-is-this-pgp-thing arena and apply it to something the more average american can relate to.
OK Mr Roberts, we know you killed your wife, we have this picture of you in your car, driving past a speed camera, and we can clearly see a hand sticking out of the trunk. OK lets have it, where is your car?
Not tellin'. 5th Amendment and all. Go pound sand.
The 5th Amendment doesn't apply here. We aren't asking you where the body is, we just demand to know the location of your car.
Although he described it with way too much complexity, he just wants to do an "rsync -ac" using FTP as a transport and a source-encrypting input filter.
I was under the impression that he wanted the files, as stored on the host, to remain encrypted? I don't see an option on rsync to encrypt and send but not decrypt on the other end?
Also of note, even if you DO encrypt the files, the directory structure and filenames will probably remain intact. While directory structure isn't terribly worrysome, filenames may be. OP says they do not want to make a single giant tarball'ish file either. I can't think of anything off the shelf that meets these requirements that is multiplatform.
Though in that respect I think they were more interested in reliability than added capacity.
Googling for "solar power desert transmission loss" we find losses quoted anywhere from 10-40%, probably varying on distance.
One article quotes,
The way we do things now the transmission losses would be considerable â" from the middle of the Sahara to the United Kingdom might involve a transmission loss of 30% of the power generated although here are ways to considerably reduce this loss if the reduction is cost effective; it may not be, because, after all the source of the power â" sunlight â" is free.
And I think that's a good point... 30% loss doesn't sting so bad when the power is free. (though the start point infrastructure was not, but is a one time payment)
they don't tear out houses to put in solar farms. Typically use desert. The big problem there is transmission due to distance from the city, but they're working on using superconductive underground transmission lines for that. (see manhatton island)
my DSL was down for FIVE DAYS recently due to flooding. The brilliant bell decided to place ALL their DSL centers in the state within 2 blocks of wherever the local river was. D'oh. We got a "500 year flood" and it buried every single one of them.
If 3 hours is outrageous, what does three days classify as?
The irony? I used my gmail while they were down.
They have yet to restore my "backup dialup account", a month later. Sure, 56k isn't exactly a good backup, but they didn't even have THAT.
"free will" is just an expression of the impossibility of predicting the future with any degree of accuracy based on knowing initial conditions. In an ideal world, you could, and it would be clear there is no free will. But we can no easier predict a human's decision than we can figure out exactly where a given atom of oxygen will be in the room 5 seconds from now. So for all practical purposes, there is free will. But the reality will always be that there is none. So although there is no free will, there's no point in arguing about it.
a little OT I know but is anyone else having a bad time with gmail's captchas? I've tried signing up several of our customers for gmail recently and it's becoming really hard to get them right. The "audio" playback used to be the saving grace, but the last two I did it sounded like ten people were talking to me all at once with no discernible key voice. (and last I succeeded, the string to be entered was spoken in three groups, by three different voices)
I had to be clubbed on the head to realize this obvious universal truth:
The answer to your "secret question" doesn't have to have anything to do with the stated question.
I got upset at my bank because they only had four questions they'd let me use. Oldest sibling's name. (only child?) First pet. (which one?) Town you grew up in? (which one?) favorite color (don't have one). The really crazy part is these were ALL questions. The bank will randomly challenge me with one of those questions.
After yet another challenge lockout, the rep kindly informed me to just treat the secret questions just like another password field, and put in whatever else you'd like for another password. I could even use the same answer for all the questions.
d'oh. That's easier simpler it looks.
It gets better. The "random" nature of the challenges was bugging me. The rep then said do you want to just make it ALWAYS challenge you? do it! Much better. I need consistency more than the random chance things are simpler. It always sends me looking for my password list when a forum or something I normally visit daily I miss for a few days and it logs me out. Having to enter the password for something every time you use it, and having to use it frequently, is much better for memorizing these things.
I don't see why there has to be a difference between the game and the demo. Instead of making two versions, a real and a demo, just make the one. Make it be restricted in the same way the demo is. If you choose to buy it, it unlocks the full functionality of the game, and possibly gets you onboard to a monthly/yearly subscription model for online play like with warcraft.
We see unlockable demos in the shareware arena, but I don't think I've ever seen a big title go this route before, and I don't see why it hasn't happened yet. This model seems to be ideally suited to online games that require a coordinating server (like steam etc) where they can verify your purchase. This makes the idea of someone writing a crack for the demo limits a lot less useful since the primary thing you'd want to unlock (online multiplayer) cannot be defeated with a crack.
If they want a larger initial investment, then they could make the initial account creation expensive, on par with purchasing a game is now, and then then collect a small amount monthly for keeping your multiplayer online.
Since most of the online games now have a steep initial cost and are free network, this would mean they could cut the initial signup cost to maybe 1/3 - 1/4 the cost that the game normally would fetch if bought, and make up the difference in the online monthly subscriptions. This makes a more fair setup. If you buy the game and four months into it decide it's not for you, your total cash outlay would be less than you would have shelled out to buy the game and get free online for those four months. But if it's a game you really like and play a lot, you would end up paying over the average due to the monthly fees.
Seems like such a good idea. Why's nobody doing this? Depending on the nature of the game, little if any other features would need to be crippled for the demo, if the online play is that important. Maybe also prevent more than 2 people from locally networking a game together too unless they are registered. Cracks could be written to defeat that aspect though. Warcraft probably comes about as close to this as you can have now, it looks like they base their revenue mainly on the subscription. Now if they would just give away the game or lower the initial cost, you'd have it.
CDs store information in semiredundant form, so a single scratch can often be worked around. Radial scratches (from hub outward) are easier to correct than lateral or concentric scratches. Scratches caused by a physical problem in your drive that carves a ring in the disk are usually unrecoverable. Look through this thread for many options for software that is "persistent" - keeps trying to reread a bad block until it gets it right. Most OS's will dump out on the first or second failed attempt.
BEWARE this is not foolproof. I have had to do this on many occasions, and I often had to write the sw to do it. "keep reading it until you get it right" has one fatal flaw. If you shoot craps too badly, you can get a CRC match on a bad read. The last recovery I did had a single byte CRC (8 bit) and I let it work on it for about 20 minutes before it got the block, but it was corrupt anyway. (1 in 256 odds of random data passing an 8 bit CRC) Rereading really screwed up media produces random results, and eventually one of them is going to match the CRC. This is assuming the damage is inside the data block, and isn't the result of a trashed address block, in which case you are unlikely to ever get a good read since it can't FIND the sector to read it.
As for alternatives, if you have a label side scratch, (top) that's where the data is. So lost label = lost data. I've seen three people come to me with disks that had the labels partly (or completely!) peeled off, asking if I could recover it. "uh, no." The one had peeled off the label because it was coming up. So you can recover it right? Um, what did you do with the label? Threw it in the trash can. Oh, that's where your data is... did it ever occur to you that having a now completely transparent CD may not be a good thing? heh... people think the label is there for decoration only. I've also read military security manuals that say to take a sharp object and carve scratches in the silver (bottom) side of a CD if you are being overrun. duuuh. I do hope they've corrected that by now.
Anyway, if the scratches or scuffs are on the bottom, you can sometimes get by with either water or oil. It fills in the valleys made by the scratches, and sometimes allows you to read the disk, sometimes with trouble but doable. Use a disposable drive as you will be spreading cooking oil or whatever all over the inside of the drive. Don't slather it on, just a few drops wiped around with a paper towel can fill in the damage.
There are several commercial "disk buffer" handheld thingies you can use to buff out scratches. Some are battery/plug powered, some are hand crank. They can produce some of the most surreal spiral patterns on the disk, but to my surprise they can be effective. The bizarre marks they make on the disk the drive doesn't seem to mind so much as the scratch that the process removed. ymmv. You can get these where music is sold, online or brick-n-mortar. One friend of mine that has a good 1k CDs swears by his. I think part of the reason they work is they freak out the drive and force it to drop into its lowest speed read mode to read what it sees is a seriously screwed up disk, and the slower read process can make it more tolerant of errors. Yes the drive should already spin down a bit when it runs into trouble, but that makes it STAY in 'trouble' mode the whole read.
Or you can try a commercial place if it's data you really need back. I don't know if places like drivesavers or totalrecall do optical media but worth a call. If they don't, they should be able to point you to someone that does. That stuff's very expensive. (getting away under a grand would be a deal) We've dealt with both of them and more, and it's somewhat random who can recover what. Both have sent stuff back to us saying "totally unrecoverable", only to be sent to the other and gotten 100% back, so shop around, especially if they do "no recovery, no charge" work. Heck, I've recovered data off a smashed flash drive that experts said was hopeless.
I use rsync on a few dozen systems here, some of which are over 1TB in size. Rsync works very well for me. Keep in mind that if you are rsyncing an open file such as a database, the rsync'd copy may be in an inconsistent state if changes are not fully committed as rsync passes through the file. There are a few options here for your database. First one that comes to mind is to close or commit and suspend/lock it, make a copy of it, and then unsuspend it. Then just let it back up the whole thing, and if you need to restore, overwrite the DB with the copy that was made after restoring. The time the DB is offline for the local copy will be much less than the time it takes rsync to pass through the DB, and will always leave you with a coherent DB backup.
If your connection is slow, and if you are backing up large files, (both of which sound true for you?) be sure to use the keep-partial option.
One of my connections is particularly slow and unreliable. (it's a user desktop over a slow connection) For that one I have made special arrangements to cron once an hour instead of once a day. It attempts the backup, which is often interrupted by the user sleeping/shutting down the machine. So it keeps trying it every hour it's on, until a backup completes successfully. Then it resets the 24 hr counter and won't attempt again for another day. That way I am getting backups as close to every 24 hrs as possible, without more.
Another poster mentioned incrementals, which is not something I need here. In addition to using a version of rsync that does incrementals, you could also use something off-the-shelf/common like retrospect that does incremental but wouldn't normally work for your server, and instead of running that over the internet, run it on the local backup you are rsyncing to. If you need to go back in time a bit still can, but without figuring a way to jimmy in rsync through your network limits.
"The anomaly, according to Musk, was with the stage separation not occurring when it should.
That's a shame too. To have worked so hard on something that was a major part and totally unproven, only to have it work flawlessly and then something else that was a more proven technology to jump out from around the corner and mug you.
But at least it meant the merlin was a successful test, even if no additional results were gained. I suppose in that respect it could be considered a success.
A lot of space ventures work the other way for the good. They have a primary mission, and then if all goes well, they enter into the extended mission. WIth our martian twins this has gone farther than anyone could have speculated, but you don't often get that. They should say "the merlin engine test was a success" and move on. If anything I bet the cost of insuring the next round of satellites goes down, due to them reaching the next notch in development.
Probably overly ambitious to have topped it with some satellites and those ashes though. But I suppose funding is tight and with sat launches the customers are much more accepting of the risks due to the nature of the business.
I'm still going to pick on their choice of the word "anomaly" though. An "anomaly" is when my doctor finds an unexpected white spot on my x-ray. If he finds a bowling pin, that's not an "anomaly". You need to give that a more descriptive name that reflects the seriousness and deviation from the norm.
I can send a signed or encrypted email anytime I want from mail, with no extensions. I just have to have my public and private key loaded into it (which I do) and have to have a copy of your public key. Then I just click the padalock. Oh, thank you for the reminder, my key was expired last week, heh.. got another one just now for free. Anyway, now I can click the "sign" badge and sign my email to you even if you don't have any keys. If I have your public key and I receive an email from you, it will show it has been signed by you so I can verify you sent it. If you encrypted it using my public key, only I can decrypt it, and vice versa. You need to have sent me a signed email after getting yourself a key before I can send you anything encrypted.
Whenever someone sends me a signed email, their public key is automatically added to my keychain too. So it's all built-in, and mostly automatic. No plugins or anything else to hassel with. Just download your key, (which installs into your keychain automatically) and relaunch mail and you're done.
The biggest hassel is dealing with Thawte to get a key if I want to sign or encrypt anything. But its free and has come a long ways since I started using it.
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the other half of this is to make it harder to sell your vote. You cannot buy someone's vote reliably unless they can somehow prove to you that they voted the way you told them to. No paper trail means you can accept money to vote one way, really vote another way, and the briber has no way to tell the difference.
the difference being faxes cost money to send (and receive) and email is basically free on both ends, making it both easier to do in bulk, and harder to prosecute.
check out bay technologies, they have some very useful stuff there for remote management. I've used their RPCs (think powerstrip with an ethernet port) for several years. Reboot anything that can power-on-after-power-fail, and you're set.
For this sort of reason I have a bundle of two d-cords and an ethernet jack at each location, tied together with a wire tie. Stops me from losing 3-5 d-cords and a stray ethernet every time. This does nothing for theft, but stops someone from attempting to pack a cord into their bag when it's tied to other things, at least one of which is usually still plugged into the wall.
I thought we could just easily go by the length of the user name, but what would I know?
from what I've seen so far, 100% of laws passed that could interfere with political campaigning exempt political calls. They probably realize the voters are noticing this duality, but universally consider it minor enough to get away with. (a minor enough corruption to be considered 'acceptable' I suppose?) Sort of like how a used car salesman doesn't mind getting caught in a lie or two here or there.
I didn't used to get any of these until what, three or four months ago. Now there's several of them on my machine every week when I get home from work. I found them humorous at first since I drive a 92 explorer. (orly?)
One of the times I let the recording play all the way to the end because I happened to be home, and at the end it said something like "press 1 to be removed from our list". I pressed 1, and was greeted with that familiar sound of a long distance line hanging up.
And there were two more recorded calls on my machine the next evening. So clearly this is not an honest attempt to implement list removal.
Besides not being effective, it's annoying to have a message on your machine every evening that ends with "press 1 to be removed from our list"... kinda hard for my answering machine to press "1" isn't it? Then on the one day I happen to BE home to press 1, they ignore me.
it copied "http://www.evil.com/ to my clipboard. Any app I pasted into pasted that url. I tried many apps to copy something to the clipboard but it remained evil.
The article says in one place you have to restart, and in another you have to close your browser window. I found that closing safari was not sufficient, and I had to quit safari to successfully copy different data into my clipboard with other apps.
Translation: Giving a defendant limited immunity in terms of forcing them to turn over the passphrase can lead to a conviction. That's because the fellow technically isn't being convicted based on his passphrase; he's being convicted for what it unlocks. Isn't the law grand?
So lets take this out of the what-is-this-pgp-thing arena and apply it to something the more average american can relate to.
OK Mr Roberts, we know you killed your wife, we have this picture of you in your car, driving past a speed camera, and we can clearly see a hand sticking out of the trunk. OK lets have it, where is your car?
Not tellin'. 5th Amendment and all. Go pound sand.
The 5th Amendment doesn't apply here. We aren't asking you where the body is, we just demand to know the location of your car.
You may now continue to go pound sand.
No they'll just add the "badsummary" and "wrongsummary" tags to it and be done with it, same as every other time.
Although he described it with way too much complexity, he just wants to do an "rsync -ac" using FTP as a transport and a source-encrypting input filter.
I was under the impression that he wanted the files, as stored on the host, to remain encrypted? I don't see an option on rsync to encrypt and send but not decrypt on the other end?
Also of note, even if you DO encrypt the files, the directory structure and filenames will probably remain intact. While directory structure isn't terribly worrysome, filenames may be. OP says they do not want to make a single giant tarball'ish file either. I can't think of anything off the shelf that meets these requirements that is multiplatform.
or you just arrange to buy power from other places during peak periods or at any other time your generation is below demand.
The superconducting angle was a front page article recently on slashdot, here's a little summary if you missed it: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18790/
Though in that respect I think they were more interested in reliability than added capacity.
Googling for "solar power desert transmission loss" we find losses quoted anywhere from 10-40%, probably varying on distance.
One article quotes,
The way we do things now the transmission losses would be considerable â" from the middle of the Sahara to the United Kingdom might involve a transmission loss of 30% of the power generated although here are ways to considerably reduce this loss if the reduction is cost effective; it may not be, because, after all the source of the power â" sunlight â" is free.
And I think that's a good point... 30% loss doesn't sting so bad when the power is free. (though the start point infrastructure was not, but is a one time payment)
they don't tear out houses to put in solar farms. Typically use desert. The big problem there is transmission due to distance from the city, but they're working on using superconductive underground transmission lines for that. (see manhatton island)
is that counting all the space taken for the railways to bring in and store the coal? (or for the mine for the coal)
my DSL was down for FIVE DAYS recently due to flooding. The brilliant bell decided to place ALL their DSL centers in the state within 2 blocks of wherever the local river was. D'oh. We got a "500 year flood" and it buried every single one of them.
If 3 hours is outrageous, what does three days classify as?
The irony? I used my gmail while they were down.
They have yet to restore my "backup dialup account", a month later. Sure, 56k isn't exactly a good backup, but they didn't even have THAT.
Since a patent can only be filed BY an individual, on BEHALF of a company, what happens if they then fire you? Is it your patent? theirs? both?
"free will" is just an expression of the impossibility of predicting the future with any degree of accuracy based on knowing initial conditions. In an ideal world, you could, and it would be clear there is no free will. But we can no easier predict a human's decision than we can figure out exactly where a given atom of oxygen will be in the room 5 seconds from now. So for all practical purposes, there is free will. But the reality will always be that there is none. So although there is no free will, there's no point in arguing about it.
a little OT I know but is anyone else having a bad time with gmail's captchas? I've tried signing up several of our customers for gmail recently and it's becoming really hard to get them right. The "audio" playback used to be the saving grace, but the last two I did it sounded like ten people were talking to me all at once with no discernible key voice. (and last I succeeded, the string to be entered was spoken in three groups, by three different voices)
I had to be clubbed on the head to realize this obvious universal truth:
The answer to your "secret question" doesn't have to have anything to do with the stated question.
I got upset at my bank because they only had four questions they'd let me use. Oldest sibling's name. (only child?) First pet. (which one?) Town you grew up in? (which one?) favorite color (don't have one). The really crazy part is these were ALL questions. The bank will randomly challenge me with one of those questions.
After yet another challenge lockout, the rep kindly informed me to just treat the secret questions just like another password field, and put in whatever else you'd like for another password. I could even use the same answer for all the questions.
d'oh. That's easier simpler it looks.
It gets better. The "random" nature of the challenges was bugging me. The rep then said do you want to just make it ALWAYS challenge you? do it! Much better. I need consistency more than the random chance things are simpler. It always sends me looking for my password list when a forum or something I normally visit daily I miss for a few days and it logs me out. Having to enter the password for something every time you use it, and having to use it frequently, is much better for memorizing these things.
and the irony of that is that china, one of the most polluted countries on the planet, has the largest percentage of bicycling public in the world.
I don't see why there has to be a difference between the game and the demo. Instead of making two versions, a real and a demo, just make the one. Make it be restricted in the same way the demo is. If you choose to buy it, it unlocks the full functionality of the game, and possibly gets you onboard to a monthly/yearly subscription model for online play like with warcraft.
We see unlockable demos in the shareware arena, but I don't think I've ever seen a big title go this route before, and I don't see why it hasn't happened yet. This model seems to be ideally suited to online games that require a coordinating server (like steam etc) where they can verify your purchase. This makes the idea of someone writing a crack for the demo limits a lot less useful since the primary thing you'd want to unlock (online multiplayer) cannot be defeated with a crack.
If they want a larger initial investment, then they could make the initial account creation expensive, on par with purchasing a game is now, and then then collect a small amount monthly for keeping your multiplayer online.
Since most of the online games now have a steep initial cost and are free network, this would mean they could cut the initial signup cost to maybe 1/3 - 1/4 the cost that the game normally would fetch if bought, and make up the difference in the online monthly subscriptions. This makes a more fair setup. If you buy the game and four months into it decide it's not for you, your total cash outlay would be less than you would have shelled out to buy the game and get free online for those four months. But if it's a game you really like and play a lot, you would end up paying over the average due to the monthly fees.
Seems like such a good idea. Why's nobody doing this? Depending on the nature of the game, little if any other features would need to be crippled for the demo, if the online play is that important. Maybe also prevent more than 2 people from locally networking a game together too unless they are registered. Cracks could be written to defeat that aspect though. Warcraft probably comes about as close to this as you can have now, it looks like they base their revenue mainly on the subscription. Now if they would just give away the game or lower the initial cost, you'd have it.
CDs store information in semiredundant form, so a single scratch can often be worked around. Radial scratches (from hub outward) are easier to correct than lateral or concentric scratches. Scratches caused by a physical problem in your drive that carves a ring in the disk are usually unrecoverable. Look through this thread for many options for software that is "persistent" - keeps trying to reread a bad block until it gets it right. Most OS's will dump out on the first or second failed attempt.
BEWARE this is not foolproof. I have had to do this on many occasions, and I often had to write the sw to do it. "keep reading it until you get it right" has one fatal flaw. If you shoot craps too badly, you can get a CRC match on a bad read. The last recovery I did had a single byte CRC (8 bit) and I let it work on it for about 20 minutes before it got the block, but it was corrupt anyway. (1 in 256 odds of random data passing an 8 bit CRC) Rereading really screwed up media produces random results, and eventually one of them is going to match the CRC. This is assuming the damage is inside the data block, and isn't the result of a trashed address block, in which case you are unlikely to ever get a good read since it can't FIND the sector to read it.
As for alternatives, if you have a label side scratch, (top) that's where the data is. So lost label = lost data. I've seen three people come to me with disks that had the labels partly (or completely!) peeled off, asking if I could recover it. "uh, no." The one had peeled off the label because it was coming up. So you can recover it right? Um, what did you do with the label? Threw it in the trash can. Oh, that's where your data is... did it ever occur to you that having a now completely transparent CD may not be a good thing? heh... people think the label is there for decoration only. I've also read military security manuals that say to take a sharp object and carve scratches in the silver (bottom) side of a CD if you are being overrun. duuuh. I do hope they've corrected that by now.
Anyway, if the scratches or scuffs are on the bottom, you can sometimes get by with either water or oil. It fills in the valleys made by the scratches, and sometimes allows you to read the disk, sometimes with trouble but doable. Use a disposable drive as you will be spreading cooking oil or whatever all over the inside of the drive. Don't slather it on, just a few drops wiped around with a paper towel can fill in the damage.
There are several commercial "disk buffer" handheld thingies you can use to buff out scratches. Some are battery/plug powered, some are hand crank. They can produce some of the most surreal spiral patterns on the disk, but to my surprise they can be effective. The bizarre marks they make on the disk the drive doesn't seem to mind so much as the scratch that the process removed. ymmv. You can get these where music is sold, online or brick-n-mortar. One friend of mine that has a good 1k CDs swears by his. I think part of the reason they work is they freak out the drive and force it to drop into its lowest speed read mode to read what it sees is a seriously screwed up disk, and the slower read process can make it more tolerant of errors. Yes the drive should already spin down a bit when it runs into trouble, but that makes it STAY in 'trouble' mode the whole read.
Or you can try a commercial place if it's data you really need back. I don't know if places like drivesavers or totalrecall do optical media but worth a call. If they don't, they should be able to point you to someone that does. That stuff's very expensive. (getting away under a grand would be a deal) We've dealt with both of them and more, and it's somewhat random who can recover what. Both have sent stuff back to us saying "totally unrecoverable", only to be sent to the other and gotten 100% back, so shop around, especially if they do "no recovery, no charge" work. Heck, I've recovered data off a smashed flash drive that experts said was hopeless.
I use rsync on a few dozen systems here, some of which are over 1TB in size. Rsync works very well for me. Keep in mind that if you are rsyncing an open file such as a database, the rsync'd copy may be in an inconsistent state if changes are not fully committed as rsync passes through the file. There are a few options here for your database. First one that comes to mind is to close or commit and suspend/lock it, make a copy of it, and then unsuspend it. Then just let it back up the whole thing, and if you need to restore, overwrite the DB with the copy that was made after restoring. The time the DB is offline for the local copy will be much less than the time it takes rsync to pass through the DB, and will always leave you with a coherent DB backup.
If your connection is slow, and if you are backing up large files, (both of which sound true for you?) be sure to use the keep-partial option.
One of my connections is particularly slow and unreliable. (it's a user desktop over a slow connection) For that one I have made special arrangements to cron once an hour instead of once a day. It attempts the backup, which is often interrupted by the user sleeping/shutting down the machine. So it keeps trying it every hour it's on, until a backup completes successfully. Then it resets the 24 hr counter and won't attempt again for another day. That way I am getting backups as close to every 24 hrs as possible, without more.
Another poster mentioned incrementals, which is not something I need here. In addition to using a version of rsync that does incrementals, you could also use something off-the-shelf/common like retrospect that does incremental but wouldn't normally work for your server, and instead of running that over the internet, run it on the local backup you are rsyncing to. If you need to go back in time a bit still can, but without figuring a way to jimmy in rsync through your network limits.
"The anomaly, according to Musk, was with the stage separation not occurring when it should.
That's a shame too. To have worked so hard on something that was a major part and totally unproven, only to have it work flawlessly and then something else that was a more proven technology to jump out from around the corner and mug you.
But at least it meant the merlin was a successful test, even if no additional results were gained. I suppose in that respect it could be considered a success.
A lot of space ventures work the other way for the good. They have a primary mission, and then if all goes well, they enter into the extended mission. WIth our martian twins this has gone farther than anyone could have speculated, but you don't often get that. They should say "the merlin engine test was a success" and move on. If anything I bet the cost of insuring the next round of satellites goes down, due to them reaching the next notch in development.
Probably overly ambitious to have topped it with some satellites and those ashes though. But I suppose funding is tight and with sat launches the customers are much more accepting of the risks due to the nature of the business.
I'm still going to pick on their choice of the word "anomaly" though. An "anomaly" is when my doctor finds an unexpected white spot on my x-ray. If he finds a bowling pin, that's not an "anomaly". You need to give that a more descriptive name that reflects the seriousness and deviation from the norm.
I can send a signed or encrypted email anytime I want from mail, with no extensions. I just have to have my public and private key loaded into it (which I do) and have to have a copy of your public key. Then I just click the padalock. Oh, thank you for the reminder, my key was expired last week, heh.. got another one just now for free. Anyway, now I can click the "sign" badge and sign my email to you even if you don't have any keys. If I have your public key and I receive an email from you, it will show it has been signed by you so I can verify you sent it. If you encrypted it using my public key, only I can decrypt it, and vice versa. You need to have sent me a signed email after getting yourself a key before I can send you anything encrypted.
Whenever someone sends me a signed email, their public key is automatically added to my keychain too. So it's all built-in, and mostly automatic. No plugins or anything else to hassel with. Just download your key, (which installs into your keychain automatically) and relaunch mail and you're done.
The biggest hassel is dealing with Thawte to get a key if I want to sign or encrypt anything. But its free and has come a long ways since I started using it.