The two studies do indeed contradict each other. They use different methodologies. The Journal of Glaciology "Antarctica has been gaining mass" presser linked there (here's the paper, I believe) appears to use altimeter measurements alone, while the Nature paper uses a combination of altimeter data, gravimetry, and the "input-output" method which appears to estimate glacier melt and snow accumulation more directly. (You may have paywalls, I'm at a university.) Which paper to trust? I'm not a glaciologist, I can't answer that.
And yeah, the confidence intervals in the Nature paper are kind of wide. Measuring the mass of ice on a sparsely-populated continent is actually pretty hard, I suspect. But an estimate at either end of the CI still means you're losing a bunch of ice. With your engineer... I'd hope your response would depend on what question you were asking. Are 0 and 100 both numbers you can deal with? Is your acceptable range 40 – 60, or -1000 – 1000? Raw numbers are meaningless without context.
The main takeaway from the two papers are kind of similar, though. There's a LOT of ice in Antarctica. Sea levels are, right now, measurably rising — I mean, "FLOODING" is happening in coastal communities now. Dealing with it is really expensive. If Antarctica's ice melts faster, we'll see more flooding, sooner. If your argument is "increased global temperatures will increase Antarctic snowfall enough to more than offset faster melting," sure, make that argument, but the scientist in the NASA press release you linked to says the exact opposite:
If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.
That's just wrong. Some of us prefer the highest law in the nation to be upheld as it's written. There are plenty of other rights enumerated in there that I don't want to see trampled on. Giving the government ability to ignore any part of it is a dangerous precedent and must be fought against at every step of the way.
We accept limitations on enumerated rights all the goddamn time, and have done so for ages. For example:
First amendment (free speech, religious establishment): Trademark, copyright, libel, slander, state secrets, trade secrets, dangerous speech ("Fire" in a crowded theater), hate speech, incitement to lawlessness. Religious charter schools.
Second amendment (arms): The state does try pretty hard to keep a lot of "arms" out of the hands of civilians, even those that might be useful in resisting a tyrannical state.
Third amendment (housing soldiers): You know, I don't think this one has ever come up.
Fourth amendment (search and seizure): Asset forfeiture, the amount police can "encourage" you to allow a search
Fifth amendment (self-incrimination): The amount and tactics the police can use to "encourage" you to incriminate yourself are pretty obscene. Miranda is very weak protection. Pleading the fifth in court is quite limited.
Sixth amendment (fair and speedy trial): Aaron Schwartz? Gitmo?
Seventh amendment (right to jury trial): I'm not familiar with this one.
Eighth amendment (cruel and unusual punishment): Deliciously uses the word "excessive," leaving this important right to be subjectively interpreted.
Ninth amendment (non-denial of other rights): Dunno
Tenth amendment (non-delegated powers reside with the states): Seems to be basically completely ignored in practice.
I'm not saying whether these restrictions are good or bad — there are some I agree with, some I don't. But the common theme here is that where the constitution, as written, has conflicted with how we want to conduct ourselves as a nation, we have accepted that these rights have limitations rather than rewrite them.
Yeah, I know: filesystems take a long time to mature and not lose data. You want your FS tested — widely — before you rely on it to not eat data.
Here's the thing: iOS 10.3 included an upgrade to APFS. Since March, every updated iPhone and iPad has been running this in production. Most of them have no idea, because it's basically invisible. I haven't heard of any problems stemming from this change.
So, while OS X has different (more variable, probably) use cases from the sealed systems in iOS, it's very likely that in "normal" usage, APFS is going to be reliable for folks.
If you (like me) bought glasses and then got a warning email from Amazon, the American Astronomical Society has a guide to checking your glasses
How can you tell if your solar viewer is not safe? You shouldn't be able to see anything through a safe solar filter except the Sun itself or something comparably bright, such as the Sun reflected in a mirror, a sunglint off shiny metal, the hot filament of an unfrosted incandescent light bulb, a bright halogen light bulb, a bright-white LED flashlight (including the one on your smartphone), or an arc-welder's torch. All such sources should appear quite dim through a solar viewer. If you can see lights of more ordinary brightness through your eclipse glasses or handheld viewer, and you're not sure the product came from a reputable vendor, it's no good. Safe solar filters produce a view of the Sun that is comfortably bright (like the full Moon), in focus, and surrounded by dark sky. If you glance at the Sun through your solar filter and find it uncomfortably bright, out of focus, and/or surrounded by a bright haze, it's no good. You should contact the seller and demand a refund or credit for return of the product, then obtain a replacement from one of the sources listed on the AAS’s reputable-vendors page.
The glasses are so dark that for a moment, I thought I'd gotten scammed into buying opaque glasses. The sun shows up as a moderately bright disk. It's very weird to look at the sun.
Also, the active cooling for condensation is not needed, according to the article (it makes the process a faster) so you can skip electrical generation altogether by putting your condenser in the shade with a heat sink. So your solar panel can literally be a matte-black sheet of aluminum.
Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.
Well, here's the instructions to synthesize MOF-801-P and it doesn't look super complicated. The solar input is used both for heat (to desorb the water in the MOF) and electricity (to condense the vapor), so it probably doesn't need to be a super-high-efficiency panel. The MOF contains zirconium, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, so it's not like we're dealing with platinum or rare earth elements... so, I dunno. I suspect the system wouldn't be outrageously expensive when produced at volume.
Yeah, we now have BDDs and DSLs and BPELs, we have SPARQLs and RDDs, we have ORMs and NoSQLs and microservices, but somehow we can't get enterprise software that work better than decades-old programs punch-carded by people who looked like Marty Mcfly's father. What's up with that.
Today, most software is crap. Back in the day, most software was crap, too; it's Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." That old, crappy software got phased out a long time ago, replaced and changed and eventually abandoned or made non-crappy. And the old software that *wasn't* crappy? That survived (and often survives) to this day. The only old software you see operating today is *good* old software — software that actually helps people and serves some real business need.
The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.
Reading a bit between the lines... he said desktops are important and then fails to mention the Mini or Pro. Don't think that bodes super well for those product lines — at least, they're definitely not Top Priority. Hoping I'm reading too much into this; real professional workstations in the product lineup seems like a pretty important strategic spot for them if they're trying to appeal to the "media and development professionals" market.
You can build a fast breeder reactor which will convert the U-238 to Pu-239, which is fissile. The problem there is that plutonium is easy (relatively speaking; you're chemically processing obscenely radioactive material) to chemically separate from the other material in the fuel, so it's attractive for weapon production.
So we can not enrich the fuel; we just think that in the big picture, it's better to do the enrichment. I can't clam which is really the right choice, just that it's a choice we've consciously made.
In the US? No, because the costs of healthcare here aren't driven by the costs of stethoscopes. They cost a couple hundred dollars and last for a very long time; high healthcare costs are much more likely to come from "Oh, my exam showed a possible irregularity; to be safe, we should send you in for an echocardiogram (or cardiac MRI if the system has one)." And in the vast majority of cases, you get an expensive procedure to learn things are basically OK.
It's really easy to prescribe that, because hey, we have the machine and it seems a lot better to run a test when it's not needed than skip one that could have caught something serious. And since insurance covers most of it, it's not that expensive for an individual patient...
What this could help with is availability of basic healthcare where a $200 stethoscope is a really big deal -- especially if you're in an environment where equipment is likely to get damaged or stolen.
A private company paid a bunch of money to another private company and users got the same video streaming performance they used to have before private company B starting throttling private company A's ability to deliver content that was already paid for by the users to both companies involved.
FTFY
Not that I'm sad about Title II or anything, but I do think a racketeering indictment would have been another appropriate response.
Ah, I missed the "day" and "year" parts (should have made those ALL CAPS too, I guess), so we'll need closer to 500,000 trees, assuming "several" really is 50. Still, I think the numbers have enough orders of magnitude (trees are cheap) that we're still looking fairly competitive.
Want to absorb 50 POUNDS of carbon a year? Plant a tree. Want to absorb several TONS of carbon per day? Then build a single carbon sequestration plant on the edge of town.
Assuming your numbers are correct... how many is several? Let's say 50. That's a pretty generous "several." So, you're looking at 100,000 pounds of carbon a day. That's a lot! To match that with trees, it would take... 2000 trees.
I'm willing to bet that I can obtain and plant 2,000 trees cheaper than you can build a carbon sequestration plant. (I'm willing to bet this is true for 20,000 trees, too. Maybe 200,000.) Your plant is made of concrete and steel, both of which produce carbon emissions. This page suggests that I'll need somewhere in the neighborhood of 11-12 acres of land for my 2k trees (for reference, Central Park is somewhere north of 800 acres), so that's pretty manageable. In addition, I'm willing to bet I can operate my trees for less money than you can operate your sequestration plant. Then, in X years, I can if I choose harvest these trees and turn them into lumber -- this, of course, does not release (all of) their carbon into the atmosphere. And I know this is subjective, but I tend to think trees (even tree farms) are more pleasant than industrial plants.
I'm not saying carbon sequestration plants are horrible ideas, but that trees probably win economically if the numbers you cite are in the right orders of magnitude.
Although the existing nuclear ice breakers are all in the Arctic and allegedly cannot cross the tropics under their own steam due to insufficient cooling.
You know they call them killer whales
But you seem surprised
When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank
Where you can't turn around
It took half your leg and both your lungs
And I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it
I'm a man man man man, man man man eater
But still you're surprised, 'prised, 'prised, when I eat ya
For what it's worth, I was tangentially part of an effort in the University of Wisconsin Libraries to publish the open-access Journal of Insect Science. After perhaps a year of doing that, we looked at the actual costs and found that, IIRC, $30-$100/page are not actually unreasonable costs. Yes, there's a large variance.
"How," you ask, "could it possibly cost so much to produce an open-access journal? The author is working for free! The reviewers are working for free!" Well:
The reviewers are generally not particularly excited to spend their time reviewing papers. They often say "sure" and then just never do the work. So you need to keep on them, and swap them out for other editors when they flake out. You need to do this without giving them a sad.
Different reviewers have different areas of expertise. So you need to match the content of the article to suitable reviewers. Your editor should do this, but probably isn't getting paid for that effort, and so you may need to keep on him/her to get that to actually happen.
Your authors don't know how to use word processing tools or graphic design tools. You'll get horribly-formatted documents, figures as 36-DPI.GIFs, strange-looking Powerpoint god-knows-whats, and gigantic tables that will never look good anywhere. Your job is to either guess at what the authors meant to do, reformat materials, and send them back for approval, or get your authors to re-do their stuff.
Authors also routinely ignore things like word count limits and organization guidelines.
While you're primarily targeting the Web, a good-looking print copy is still widely-valued. So you probably need to handle your layout nightmares twice.
Sometimes, people want to do Something Innovative with regard to data vis. After all, you're online, so you should be able to make this interactive, right? So, you need to decide if you want to try and implement this innovative thing (and what does that look like in print, anyhow?) or say "no, sorry, we can't make your research look super neat."
Online repositories work best with specially-marked-up XML. There are tools and services that will do this for you, but they all cost time, money, or both. XSLT to turn your XML into HTML or PDF can be made to automatically give you a product that is not quite nice enough to present to the outside world -- there are usually some special cases that want hand-massaging.
Both faculty and grad students can, at times, act like complete jerks and require a bunch of time in damage-control.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The bottom line was that we found PLOSOne's costs to be broadly reasonable (also: did you know you can essentially say "I don't want to pay" and... not pay?). Maybe it would be possible to undercut them by a factor of two with real work in process management, but generally: there's a bunch of grunt work turning researchers' paper submissions into a good quality journal. And you could get really fast at formatting, but time for catherding and massaging egos (so you don't lose your reviewers) scales linearly with the number of articles you publish.
So worries about "cooling off the Earth" are a tad ridiculous.
The big problem isn't cooling off the whole earth (which does have a truly staggering amount of heat stored in its crust and mantle). The problem is cooling off the area in the immediate vicinity of your borehole so that it's no longer hot enough to do useful work for you; since rock doesn't have particularly good thermal conductivity, this sadly happens a lot faster than you'd like. The power plant at The Geysers produces about half the electrical power that it did when it opened, as it depleted the geothermal energy on a local scale.
You can keep installing new power plants, but power plants are kind of expensive so that approach is problematic.
I thought of that too. Does anyone have any numbers on how many million years we can suck heat out of the ground before it becomes a problem?
Actually, a physics prof at UCSD did a pretty thorough analysis of geothermal energy. The verdict: there are places in the country where it's great, but in the majority of the USA, it just isn't a particularly dense resource, so the energy return on investment (you need to dig a whole lot of really deep holes and stick a whole lot of pipe in the ground) is pretty meh.
It probably will (and should) be developed more, but will remain a niche source of energy county and world-wide.
In case you're thinking "yeah, cancer, big deal. People die every day" I welcome you to watch Anthony Griffith on The Moth describe his personal experience with leukemia.
WARNING: NSFW -- both for (IIRC) some rather strong language and the uncontrollable weeping that will consume you for the rest of the day.
Yes, get some decent hardware that won't give you too much trouble -- but equally important: Set up procedures to ensure that when your database is down, you can still get work done. Test those procedures periodically; make sure your staff can run the restaurant when the system is down.
Hardware fails. Software fails. Unless you're willing to spend lots (and you've said you aren't), you're not going to build and test something ultra-reliable. You don't want your entire business on hold (with a restaurant full of customers) because some part of your POS has decided to crap itself.
Do you really think the solution to "rich people want to leave for somewhere more friendly" is "lets go after these guys"?
Yes.
Our citizens have paid a lot of money for a substantial infrastructure, because that allows us to live and grow businesses safely. Would you have become rich without the roads and rails that let you get to your place of business, and your products to customers? If the police didn't maintain order? If the military wasn't around to keep safe, predictable boundaries? If you hadn't gotten that grant that got you started, or that University education?
If you use our expensive shit in order to get rich, and then leave the country to avoid paying the taxes that finance our expensive shit, that's freeloading. Our society should set up policies that discourage freeloading; otherwise, what's to prevent every rich person from doing the same?
Slashdot Mirror
Marks being fools doesn't make fraud any more legal.
Okay, I'll bite.
The two studies do indeed contradict each other. They use different methodologies. The Journal of Glaciology "Antarctica has been gaining mass" presser linked there (here's the paper, I believe) appears to use altimeter measurements alone, while the Nature paper uses a combination of altimeter data, gravimetry, and the "input-output" method which appears to estimate glacier melt and snow accumulation more directly. (You may have paywalls, I'm at a university.) Which paper to trust? I'm not a glaciologist, I can't answer that.
And yeah, the confidence intervals in the Nature paper are kind of wide. Measuring the mass of ice on a sparsely-populated continent is actually pretty hard, I suspect. But an estimate at either end of the CI still means you're losing a bunch of ice. With your engineer... I'd hope your response would depend on what question you were asking. Are 0 and 100 both numbers you can deal with? Is your acceptable range 40 – 60, or -1000 – 1000? Raw numbers are meaningless without context.
The main takeaway from the two papers are kind of similar, though. There's a LOT of ice in Antarctica. Sea levels are, right now, measurably rising — I mean, "FLOODING" is happening in coastal communities now. Dealing with it is really expensive. If Antarctica's ice melts faster, we'll see more flooding, sooner. If your argument is "increased global temperatures will increase Antarctic snowfall enough to more than offset faster melting," sure, make that argument, but the scientist in the NASA press release you linked to says the exact opposite:
That's just wrong. Some of us prefer the highest law in the nation to be upheld as it's written. There are plenty of other rights enumerated in there that I don't want to see trampled on. Giving the government ability to ignore any part of it is a dangerous precedent and must be fought against at every step of the way.
We accept limitations on enumerated rights all the goddamn time, and have done so for ages. For example:
I'm not saying whether these restrictions are good or bad — there are some I agree with, some I don't. But the common theme here is that where the constitution, as written, has conflicted with how we want to conduct ourselves as a nation, we have accepted that these rights have limitations rather than rewrite them.
Yeah, I know: filesystems take a long time to mature and not lose data. You want your FS tested — widely — before you rely on it to not eat data.
Here's the thing: iOS 10.3 included an upgrade to APFS. Since March, every updated iPhone and iPad has been running this in production. Most of them have no idea, because it's basically invisible. I haven't heard of any problems stemming from this change.
So, while OS X has different (more variable, probably) use cases from the sealed systems in iOS, it's very likely that in "normal" usage, APFS is going to be reliable for folks.
If you (like me) bought glasses and then got a warning email from Amazon, the American Astronomical Society has a guide to checking your glasses
The glasses are so dark that for a moment, I thought I'd gotten scammed into buying opaque glasses. The sun shows up as a moderately bright disk. It's very weird to look at the sun.
Also, the active cooling for condensation is not needed, according to the article (it makes the process a faster) so you can skip electrical generation altogether by putting your condenser in the shade with a heat sink. So your solar panel can literally be a matte-black sheet of aluminum.
Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.
Well, here's the instructions to synthesize MOF-801-P and it doesn't look super complicated. The solar input is used both for heat (to desorb the water in the MOF) and electricity (to condense the vapor), so it probably doesn't need to be a super-high-efficiency panel. The MOF contains zirconium, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, so it's not like we're dealing with platinum or rare earth elements... so, I dunno. I suspect the system wouldn't be outrageously expensive when produced at volume.
Yeah, we now have BDDs and DSLs and BPELs, we have SPARQLs and RDDs, we have ORMs and NoSQLs and microservices, but somehow we can't get enterprise software that work better than decades-old programs punch-carded by people who looked like Marty Mcfly's father. What's up with that.
Survivorship bias.
Today, most software is crap. Back in the day, most software was crap, too; it's Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." That old, crappy software got phased out a long time ago, replaced and changed and eventually abandoned or made non-crappy. And the old software that *wasn't* crappy? That survived (and often survives) to this day. The only old software you see operating today is *good* old software — software that actually helps people and serves some real business need.
Here's what Cook says:
Reading a bit between the lines... he said desktops are important and then fails to mention the Mini or Pro. Don't think that bodes super well for those product lines — at least, they're definitely not Top Priority. Hoping I'm reading too much into this; real professional workstations in the product lineup seems like a pretty important strategic spot for them if they're trying to appeal to the "media and development professionals" market.
You can build a fast breeder reactor which will convert the U-238 to Pu-239, which is fissile. The problem there is that plutonium is easy (relatively speaking; you're chemically processing obscenely radioactive material) to chemically separate from the other material in the fuel, so it's attractive for weapon production.
So we can not enrich the fuel; we just think that in the big picture, it's better to do the enrichment. I can't clam which is really the right choice, just that it's a choice we've consciously made.
In the US? No, because the costs of healthcare here aren't driven by the costs of stethoscopes. They cost a couple hundred dollars and last for a very long time; high healthcare costs are much more likely to come from "Oh, my exam showed a possible irregularity; to be safe, we should send you in for an echocardiogram (or cardiac MRI if the system has one)." And in the vast majority of cases, you get an expensive procedure to learn things are basically OK.
It's really easy to prescribe that, because hey, we have the machine and it seems a lot better to run a test when it's not needed than skip one that could have caught something serious. And since insurance covers most of it, it's not that expensive for an individual patient...
What this could help with is availability of basic healthcare where a $200 stethoscope is a really big deal -- especially if you're in an environment where equipment is likely to get damaged or stolen.
A private company paid a bunch of money to another private company and users got the same video streaming performance they used to have before private company B starting throttling private company A's ability to deliver content that was already paid for by the users to both companies involved.
FTFY
Not that I'm sad about Title II or anything, but I do think a racketeering indictment would have been another appropriate response.
For what it's worth, I've been co-owner of a small software-as-a-service business focused on libraries for the last five years. A week or so ago, I wrote a blog post on our experience and financial situation.
Basic summary: by keeping costs low and our expectations reasonable, we're thriving even without a huge revenue stream.
Ah, I missed the "day" and "year" parts (should have made those ALL CAPS too, I guess), so we'll need closer to 500,000 trees, assuming "several" really is 50. Still, I think the numbers have enough orders of magnitude (trees are cheap) that we're still looking fairly competitive.
Want to absorb 50 POUNDS of carbon a year? Plant a tree. Want to absorb several TONS of carbon per day? Then build a single carbon sequestration plant on the edge of town.
Assuming your numbers are correct... how many is several? Let's say 50. That's a pretty generous "several." So, you're looking at 100,000 pounds of carbon a day. That's a lot! To match that with trees, it would take... 2000 trees.
I'm willing to bet that I can obtain and plant 2,000 trees cheaper than you can build a carbon sequestration plant. (I'm willing to bet this is true for 20,000 trees, too. Maybe 200,000.) Your plant is made of concrete and steel, both of which produce carbon emissions. This page suggests that I'll need somewhere in the neighborhood of 11-12 acres of land for my 2k trees (for reference, Central Park is somewhere north of 800 acres), so that's pretty manageable. In addition, I'm willing to bet I can operate my trees for less money than you can operate your sequestration plant. Then, in X years, I can if I choose harvest these trees and turn them into lumber -- this, of course, does not release (all of) their carbon into the atmosphere. And I know this is subjective, but I tend to think trees (even tree farms) are more pleasant than industrial plants.
I'm not saying carbon sequestration plants are horrible ideas, but that trees probably win economically if the numbers you cite are in the right orders of magnitude.
I am not an Apple fan, but despite his rants, Apple has done a lot for LLVM/Clang
I hate to break it to you, but Apple is not actually a person.
Although the existing nuclear ice breakers are all in the Arctic and allegedly cannot cross the tropics under their own steam due to insufficient cooling.
Then why don't they go the other way?
Now I can start my Robot Def Leppard!
You know they call them killer whales
But you seem surprised
When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank
Where you can't turn around
It took half your leg and both your lungs
And I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it
I'm a man man man man, man man man eater
But still you're surprised, 'prised, 'prised, when I eat ya
-Neko Case, People Gotta Lotta Nerve
For what it's worth, I was tangentially part of an effort in the University of Wisconsin Libraries to publish the open-access Journal of Insect Science. After perhaps a year of doing that, we looked at the actual costs and found that, IIRC, $30-$100/page are not actually unreasonable costs. Yes, there's a large variance.
"How," you ask, "could it possibly cost so much to produce an open-access journal? The author is working for free! The reviewers are working for free!" Well:
I could go on, but you get the idea. The bottom line was that we found PLOSOne's costs to be broadly reasonable (also: did you know you can essentially say "I don't want to pay" and... not pay?). Maybe it would be possible to undercut them by a factor of two with real work in process management, but generally: there's a bunch of grunt work turning researchers' paper submissions into a good quality journal. And you could get really fast at formatting, but time for catherding and massaging egos (so you don't lose your reviewers) scales linearly with the number of articles you publish.
So worries about "cooling off the Earth" are a tad ridiculous.
The big problem isn't cooling off the whole earth (which does have a truly staggering amount of heat stored in its crust and mantle). The problem is cooling off the area in the immediate vicinity of your borehole so that it's no longer hot enough to do useful work for you; since rock doesn't have particularly good thermal conductivity, this sadly happens a lot faster than you'd like. The power plant at The Geysers produces about half the electrical power that it did when it opened, as it depleted the geothermal energy on a local scale.
You can keep installing new power plants, but power plants are kind of expensive so that approach is problematic.
I thought of that too. Does anyone have any numbers on how many million years we can suck heat out of the ground before it becomes a problem?
Actually, a physics prof at UCSD did a pretty thorough analysis of geothermal energy. The verdict: there are places in the country where it's great, but in the majority of the USA, it just isn't a particularly dense resource, so the energy return on investment (you need to dig a whole lot of really deep holes and stick a whole lot of pipe in the ground) is pretty meh.
It probably will (and should) be developed more, but will remain a niche source of energy county and world-wide.
In case you're thinking "yeah, cancer, big deal. People die every day" I welcome you to watch Anthony Griffith on The Moth describe his personal experience with leukemia.
WARNING: NSFW -- both for (IIRC) some rather strong language and the uncontrollable weeping that will consume you for the rest of the day.
Yes, get some decent hardware that won't give you too much trouble -- but equally important: Set up procedures to ensure that when your database is down, you can still get work done. Test those procedures periodically; make sure your staff can run the restaurant when the system is down.
Hardware fails. Software fails. Unless you're willing to spend lots (and you've said you aren't), you're not going to build and test something ultra-reliable. You don't want your entire business on hold (with a restaurant full of customers) because some part of your POS has decided to crap itself.
Do you really think the solution to "rich people want to leave for somewhere more friendly" is "lets go after these guys"?
Yes.
Our citizens have paid a lot of money for a substantial infrastructure, because that allows us to live and grow businesses safely. Would you have become rich without the roads and rails that let you get to your place of business, and your products to customers? If the police didn't maintain order? If the military wasn't around to keep safe, predictable boundaries? If you hadn't gotten that grant that got you started, or that University education?
If you use our expensive shit in order to get rich, and then leave the country to avoid paying the taxes that finance our expensive shit, that's freeloading. Our society should set up policies that discourage freeloading; otherwise, what's to prevent every rich person from doing the same?