I have an 8GB USB flash stick working as L2ARC, but even without it I never notice the hard disks being slow. The main advantage is that the disks can spin down completely after filling up the ARC and L2ARC when I've got a nice predictable read-only workload (e.g. watching a movie). Given that the drives consume a total of 15W in normal operation, and about 3W when idle, I doubt that I'd save enough for it to be worthwhile with a better SSD...
Encryption is feasible now that would require the entire mass of the universe to be working on breaking it and still be infeasible in the lifetime of the universe. For most algorithms, adding one bit to the key length adds a small (fixed) amount of complexity to the process of encoding or decoding, but doubles the effort required for a brute force attack. You don't need to do this very many times before you end up with something that is completely secure against brute forcing on a classical computer (quantum computers change the rules somewhat). Encryption has not been broken by throwing more processing power at the problem for decades. It is now always cracked by flaws in the implementation or (very occasionally) by flaws in the algorithm.
Heck, I'd probably pay $200 for a 500GB SSD for my laptop
Laptops aren't the only place people use disks. I've bought two new machines this year. My laptop has a 256GB SSD and the difference that it makes to performance is amazing. I'd hate to go back to using a hard disk. The other machine is a NAS. It has three 2TB disks in a RAID-Z configuration. I am mostly going to be accessing it over WiFi, so as long as the disks can manage 2MB/s I really don't care about performance. I care a lot about capacity though, because it's having things like snapshotted backups of my laptop dumped on it. If I paid $200 extra per 500GB, then the machine would have been insanely expensive.
If SSDs had cost the same per GB as mechanical disks, I'd have gone with SSDs in both cases.
Not to mention Maxtor's 20GB and 40GB drives. Out of about 20 of those bought over a period of a year (so not just one bad batch), none lasted more than two years and most died in under one.
In that case, there is a debt, but it's in the other direction, so when you hand over the cash the only legal way for them to remedy this debt is to pay you back with cash and not with the goods that you want to purchase. This makes buying things difficult.
That is a loan not a grant. You have to pay back loans, not grants.
Well, usually. If the company goes bankrupt, then the loan is likely to be written off. There is a fairly common dodge that goes something like this:
Set up two companies.
Company A gets massive government loan and invests it in R&D.
Company A goes bankrupt.
Company B buys the IP and other assets cheaply from the receivers
Government and other investors get the small amount that company B paid and write off the rest of the loan.
This is one of the reasons why bank loans to startups are either at a very high interest rate or require the directors to take personal liability in the event that the company fails. The loans to Tesla were at a very low interest rate. They have received grant of several million dollars even if they do repay everything, just from the difference between the interest that they pay the government and the interest that they would have paid any other lender (a 1% difference in interest works out at over four million dollars per year at the amounts Tesla has borrowed).
There is direct and indirect return on investment. The economy as a whole benefits from the existence of well maintained infrastructure, but that infrastructure is often not profitable on its own. More importantly, trying to make a profit on the infrastructure can reduce the amount that people are willing to use it. This retards the growth of any industries that make use of the infrastructure.
And this is the view that keeps the word's power. Contrast with gay. The homosexual community embraced the various slurs that people used against them. It's now hard to find a word to describe a homosexual that is intrinsically insulting - only the attitude of the speaker matters, as it should be. In contrast, people get hyper-defensive about people saying 'nigger', giving it a taboo status.
Not always. Take the example from a couple of days ago of the Catholic priest whose bishop was prosecuted for not reporting his collection. Most of the images that he had were non-nude, just photographs of a (clothed) children with the crotch in the centre of the frame. I doubt that the children were even aware of this, they certainly wouldn't consider themselves to have been abused.
There were also some nude shots, so it's not like he was totally innocent, but there are several categories of image that are counted as child pornography but don't require any child abuse to create. Off the top of my head:
Cartoon images of children in sexual situations
Images taken between consenting teenagers. In the UK, for example, the age of consent is 16, so two 16 year olds can have sex legally, but if they take photographs of it then they can be charged with creating child pornography.
Photographs of children that are considered to be created for erotic purposes by a vague definition.
If child pornography meant pictures of children being sexually abused, then there would be a lot less of a problem. Unfortunately, the laws seem to keep expanding. Eventually, any picture that has someone who looks as if they look vaguely like they might be under 18 will probably be included...
Only half true. You vote for a party, but the party publishes its list of candidates before the election, so it's not like you suddenly get a surprise candidate (unless he's number six on the list and they somehow won all of the seats in a constituency).
Let me guess: after not paying attention to the candidates and either voting along random party lines or not voting, they then complain about the EU not representing them?
I doubt anyone would use nuclear weapons in a conflict in Europe - too much risk of fallout hitting their allies. That said, for most of the twentieth century, losing a war against the USA was a surefire way to fix any economic problems in your country. Maybe the thing for Italy to do now is invade China...
It said log, not censor. All it needs to do is record every IP address that you access, maybe every HTTP URL. It wouldn't take anything like a sun to power it, it's functionality that's already built in to a lot of Cisco switches and takes very little processing power. Presumably the idea is that law enforcement could then retrieve it if you are suspected of politically incorrect thought and see if you have been visiting any subversive web sites. Sorry, I mean check if you've been downloading kiddie porn.
I believe the "backing" of bitcoin (in the way you are using it) is the network of miners that validate each transaction.
That's not any kind of backing. Currency is backed by X if you believe that X has value independent of the currency and if there is a guarantee that the currency can be exchanged for X. X can be gold, the ability to pay taxes, oil, the promise of one second of CPU time, whatever. Without this, bitcoin has no value.
Even the tokens you get in an amusement park have more value. They are backed by the promise that you can use them in rides. You agree that going on rides has value (or you wouldn't be there in the first place) and the park guarantees that they will honour the exchange.
Not indefinitely. Gold is hard to synthesise - you need huge amounts of energy to do so - but in a society with abundant surplus energy it would have no value. In 10,000 years, I doubt that you'll be able to trade a van full of gold for one original idea...
No, the real problem is that bitcoin is not backed by anything. Old currencies were backed by a precious metal. If you had one Pound Sterling, then the Bank of England would give you one pound of sterling silver. Modern fiat currencies are backed by a promise from the government that they will accept them in payment of taxes. Bitcoin was backed by some pointless computation.
If a bitcoin had been a promise to do some computation work in the future, then it may have had some value, because people need computational work done. For example, something like Amazon's compute cloud could potentially back a currency, because the service of running a VM for some number of CPU seconds is fungible and - importantly - people actually want it. No one wants the work that is done to generate a bitcoin, so the coin itself is worthless. Its value is based entirely on the premise that other people will want it in the future, but that's just a pyramid scheme.
I didn't indent it as flamebait. I doubt that either the Scottish nor Welsh economy could really survive outside of both the UK or the EU, but either would do fine as an independent member of the EU, with strong economic links to England. You're right about Catalonia - I have a couple of catalan friends who would love to see the same sort of thing happen.
Living in Wales, I don't really see the London parliament having a clue. They seem to think that the UK equals London, judging by their economic policies. I'm much rather see a stronger Welsh Assembly and EU Parliament and a weaker Westminster.
That depends on the reinforcement they got in the first six months. If you paid attention to them when they cried and ignored them when they didn't, they're likely to be unmanageable by the time that they're two. If you gave them more attention when they were quiet then they're going to be a lot better behaved. But you have kids, so you probably knew that already...
It if were a profitable enterprise, then we wouldn't have to pump billions of Euros of taxpayer money into it.
He said a profit-making enterprise, not a profitable enterprise. Infrastructure is rarely profitable to operate, but it can generate a lot of profit by existing. The amount of profit that I make by being able to easily work for companies on the other side of the world, for example, is a lot greater than the profit that my ISP makes from me. Decent roads between industrial and residential areas make it easy for companies in those areas to recruit workers and increase profits, but the roads don't make a profit themselves. There are lots of activities that benefit from accurate positioning information.
I've not heard about Galileo for a long time - last I heard was at the Farnborough air show almost a decade ago - but one of the main selling points they had back then was the idea of having both Galileo and GPS receivers in the same device and using them to calibrate each other. This would mean that even if you jammed the Galileo frequencies, the device would switch back to using just GPS and would still be more accurate than a pure GPS device because of the initial calibration.
I pay lots more tax here than I would in the US; however, unlike the case in the US
That depends on where you live in the EU, but it's true for fewer than half of the members if you include everything (sales taxes, property taxes, and so on) and it's only true for a small handful of EU member states if you count the amount spent on healthcare in the 'tax' column.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an 8GB USB flash stick working as L2ARC, but even without it I never notice the hard disks being slow. The main advantage is that the disks can spin down completely after filling up the ARC and L2ARC when I've got a nice predictable read-only workload (e.g. watching a movie). Given that the drives consume a total of 15W in normal operation, and about 3W when idle, I doubt that I'd save enough for it to be worthwhile with a better SSD...
Encryption is feasible now that would require the entire mass of the universe to be working on breaking it and still be infeasible in the lifetime of the universe. For most algorithms, adding one bit to the key length adds a small (fixed) amount of complexity to the process of encoding or decoding, but doubles the effort required for a brute force attack. You don't need to do this very many times before you end up with something that is completely secure against brute forcing on a classical computer (quantum computers change the rules somewhat). Encryption has not been broken by throwing more processing power at the problem for decades. It is now always cracked by flaws in the implementation or (very occasionally) by flaws in the algorithm.
Heck, I'd probably pay $200 for a 500GB SSD for my laptop
Laptops aren't the only place people use disks. I've bought two new machines this year. My laptop has a 256GB SSD and the difference that it makes to performance is amazing. I'd hate to go back to using a hard disk. The other machine is a NAS. It has three 2TB disks in a RAID-Z configuration. I am mostly going to be accessing it over WiFi, so as long as the disks can manage 2MB/s I really don't care about performance. I care a lot about capacity though, because it's having things like snapshotted backups of my laptop dumped on it. If I paid $200 extra per 500GB, then the machine would have been insanely expensive.
If SSDs had cost the same per GB as mechanical disks, I'd have gone with SSDs in both cases.
Not to mention Maxtor's 20GB and 40GB drives. Out of about 20 of those bought over a period of a year (so not just one bad batch), none lasted more than two years and most died in under one.
In that case, there is a debt, but it's in the other direction, so when you hand over the cash the only legal way for them to remedy this debt is to pay you back with cash and not with the goods that you want to purchase. This makes buying things difficult.
That is a loan not a grant. You have to pay back loans, not grants.
Well, usually. If the company goes bankrupt, then the loan is likely to be written off. There is a fairly common dodge that goes something like this:
This is one of the reasons why bank loans to startups are either at a very high interest rate or require the directors to take personal liability in the event that the company fails. The loans to Tesla were at a very low interest rate. They have received grant of several million dollars even if they do repay everything, just from the difference between the interest that they pay the government and the interest that they would have paid any other lender (a 1% difference in interest works out at over four million dollars per year at the amounts Tesla has borrowed).
There is direct and indirect return on investment. The economy as a whole benefits from the existence of well maintained infrastructure, but that infrastructure is often not profitable on its own. More importantly, trying to make a profit on the infrastructure can reduce the amount that people are willing to use it. This retards the growth of any industries that make use of the infrastructure.
I don't know, competition can do wonders
And there's nothing like a geographical monopoly to encourage competition...
And this is the view that keeps the word's power. Contrast with gay. The homosexual community embraced the various slurs that people used against them. It's now hard to find a word to describe a homosexual that is intrinsically insulting - only the attitude of the speaker matters, as it should be. In contrast, people get hyper-defensive about people saying 'nigger', giving it a taboo status.
Not always. Take the example from a couple of days ago of the Catholic priest whose bishop was prosecuted for not reporting his collection. Most of the images that he had were non-nude, just photographs of a (clothed) children with the crotch in the centre of the frame. I doubt that the children were even aware of this, they certainly wouldn't consider themselves to have been abused.
There were also some nude shots, so it's not like he was totally innocent, but there are several categories of image that are counted as child pornography but don't require any child abuse to create. Off the top of my head:
If child pornography meant pictures of children being sexually abused, then there would be a lot less of a problem. Unfortunately, the laws seem to keep expanding. Eventually, any picture that has someone who looks as if they look vaguely like they might be under 18 will probably be included...
Only half true. You vote for a party, but the party publishes its list of candidates before the election, so it's not like you suddenly get a surprise candidate (unless he's number six on the list and they somehow won all of the seats in a constituency).
Let me guess: after not paying attention to the candidates and either voting along random party lines or not voting, they then complain about the EU not representing them?
I doubt anyone would use nuclear weapons in a conflict in Europe - too much risk of fallout hitting their allies. That said, for most of the twentieth century, losing a war against the USA was a surefire way to fix any economic problems in your country. Maybe the thing for Italy to do now is invade China...
This would have a lot more weight if you cited exactly which laws you think he has broken...
It said log, not censor. All it needs to do is record every IP address that you access, maybe every HTTP URL. It wouldn't take anything like a sun to power it, it's functionality that's already built in to a lot of Cisco switches and takes very little processing power. Presumably the idea is that law enforcement could then retrieve it if you are suspected of politically incorrect thought and see if you have been visiting any subversive web sites. Sorry, I mean check if you've been downloading kiddie porn.
The UI that iOS copied from PalmOS?
"App" just refers to an especially crappy application, usually running on a phone or set-top box, with minimal user configurability.
I'm pretty sure 'app' has just been short for 'application' for the last 20 years or so. It isn't specific to mobile apps.
I believe the "backing" of bitcoin (in the way you are using it) is the network of miners that validate each transaction.
That's not any kind of backing. Currency is backed by X if you believe that X has value independent of the currency and if there is a guarantee that the currency can be exchanged for X. X can be gold, the ability to pay taxes, oil, the promise of one second of CPU time, whatever. Without this, bitcoin has no value.
Even the tokens you get in an amusement park have more value. They are backed by the promise that you can use them in rides. You agree that going on rides has value (or you wouldn't be there in the first place) and the park guarantees that they will honour the exchange.
Not indefinitely. Gold is hard to synthesise - you need huge amounts of energy to do so - but in a society with abundant surplus energy it would have no value. In 10,000 years, I doubt that you'll be able to trade a van full of gold for one original idea...
No, the real problem is that bitcoin is not backed by anything. Old currencies were backed by a precious metal. If you had one Pound Sterling, then the Bank of England would give you one pound of sterling silver. Modern fiat currencies are backed by a promise from the government that they will accept them in payment of taxes. Bitcoin was backed by some pointless computation.
If a bitcoin had been a promise to do some computation work in the future, then it may have had some value, because people need computational work done. For example, something like Amazon's compute cloud could potentially back a currency, because the service of running a VM for some number of CPU seconds is fungible and - importantly - people actually want it. No one wants the work that is done to generate a bitcoin, so the coin itself is worthless. Its value is based entirely on the premise that other people will want it in the future, but that's just a pyramid scheme.
I didn't indent it as flamebait. I doubt that either the Scottish nor Welsh economy could really survive outside of both the UK or the EU, but either would do fine as an independent member of the EU, with strong economic links to England. You're right about Catalonia - I have a couple of catalan friends who would love to see the same sort of thing happen.
Living in Wales, I don't really see the London parliament having a clue. They seem to think that the UK equals London, judging by their economic policies. I'm much rather see a stronger Welsh Assembly and EU Parliament and a weaker Westminster.
That depends on the reinforcement they got in the first six months. If you paid attention to them when they cried and ignored them when they didn't, they're likely to be unmanageable by the time that they're two. If you gave them more attention when they were quiet then they're going to be a lot better behaved. But you have kids, so you probably knew that already...
It if were a profitable enterprise, then we wouldn't have to pump billions of Euros of taxpayer money into it.
He said a profit-making enterprise, not a profitable enterprise. Infrastructure is rarely profitable to operate, but it can generate a lot of profit by existing. The amount of profit that I make by being able to easily work for companies on the other side of the world, for example, is a lot greater than the profit that my ISP makes from me. Decent roads between industrial and residential areas make it easy for companies in those areas to recruit workers and increase profits, but the roads don't make a profit themselves. There are lots of activities that benefit from accurate positioning information.
I've not heard about Galileo for a long time - last I heard was at the Farnborough air show almost a decade ago - but one of the main selling points they had back then was the idea of having both Galileo and GPS receivers in the same device and using them to calibrate each other. This would mean that even if you jammed the Galileo frequencies, the device would switch back to using just GPS and would still be more accurate than a pure GPS device because of the initial calibration.
I pay lots more tax here than I would in the US; however, unlike the case in the US
That depends on where you live in the EU, but it's true for fewer than half of the members if you include everything (sales taxes, property taxes, and so on) and it's only true for a small handful of EU member states if you count the amount spent on healthcare in the 'tax' column.