Well, that's true - but traditionally we don't ask society to change due to a person's mental illness. We make small changes for the physically handicapped, but not the mentally ill.
Religion. Enough said.
For instance, if you suffer from an anxiety disorder most people would not insist that your employer make your job easier.
"Discrimination may include, among other things,....... or not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of disabled employees,......"
You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another.
So, you're saying the mysterious wifi allergy disease is actually a religion?
I think that the biggest problem isn't intellectual property, but the people who administer it. I don't think that the demand is particularly great. As such, there isn't a great incentive to release it freely. There are costs to administering such a large DB. Furthermore, nobody wants their name on a database of all the fundamental properties because in that data there are bound to be mistakes.
You are looking at the liability issue for the creator/admin, the supply side. The bigger liability problem is on the engineer, demand side.
Something that is missing from this discussion, is some Chemical Engineer specific knowledge that I can attempt to provide. The whole point of a "steam table" and similar products like discussed here, is there is no accurate formula for vapor pressure at various temps. The simplistic linear equations taught in high school don't work at the extremes, or don't give accurate enough results to design a safe and profitable plant. So, more than a century ago, physicist / chemist / engineers started making lab measurements, and selling graphs and tables of data. The modern version of that product is the expensive computer models discussed in the article, which optimistically try to answer any input conditions with correct and continuous answers based on a mixture of theory, optimism, and some distinct individual laboratory measurements.
Because the data model is used to design multi-million dollar plants, and because the only way to verify the results is very expensive lab work, and is therefore often glossed over, a mistake in the data model could be a multi-million dollar mistake, assuming the losses are purely economic and no human victims. The creator/admin probably was intelligent enough to release under a license that removes all liability for data errors. The end user engineer will not be so lucky.
On one far extreme of the provability / testability spectrum, you've got yet another word processor, where if the screen doesn't match what you typed in, literally a trained gorilla could figure out the word processor is broken, and act accordingly (throw poo at programmer? The more things change, the more they stay the same) Or maybe a crypto hash where a hundred programmers can write it in a hundred languages and all the outputs better match for a given input.
At the other extreme of provability / testability, you've got a Chem-E basically having to take the program output on faith that it's correct. The program says the pressure of supercritical steam at 700 K is 230 atm, I know that is somewhat above critical temp and above critical pressure, so the best I can do is "sounds about right to me"? So specify plant components based on a 230 atm environment (adding appropriate safety factors, etc) Now steam pressure is old stuff, boring, and everyone knows about what to expect, but using really weird stuff under really weird conditions, who knows what crazy output from the data model might slip past, resulting in a disaster?
Despite the dangers, it would be great for education, and cheap experimental research/simulation, even if it would be too legally dangerous to use in formal design work.
working on a project that could rival what major automobile manufacturers are doing.
Writing a wishlist / daydream of specifications, for a car built by hand using the most expensive labor available, that cost more to make than it could possibly sell for?
All the need is a bankrupty and they'll be right up there with GM!
It's like saying "If you don't want a mechanic to overcharge you, learn to fix your own car", which is good advice, but to be realistic, I don't have the time to spend pouring over a 1999 Pontiac Grand Am manual when I need my car up and running in a day.
I think you misunderstand how this works. I have enough knowledge about car exhausts not to get ripped off. They are not going to sell me frequency grease or some BS, plus I have a vague idea of how much time and money it should take, and an excellent idea of exactly what is broken and what I need them to fix. Given my knowledge, I am extremely well qualified to outsource to a mechanic and manage their work.
Not surprisingly, my interactions with tradespeople in general are pretty positive.
Someone whom takes a more dilbertian approach toward management is going to be screwed over by their mechanic, sooner or later. Its not necessarily even "screwed over" so much as utterly clueless expectations. Consider people whom proudly declare how totally clueless they are about mechanical things, but suddenly become experts on the topic when its time to discuss prices, or start arguing when they hear something they don't want to hear.
But there are a handful of software I use every day, (Firefox, Filezilla, Pidgin, Deluge come to mind) that I want to always have the latest released version - and on Ubuntu that is a pain in the ass.
Sounds like you're way down the distribution food chain and want to move up. My advice is let the other folks in the food chain do all the debugging for you unless there is some desperate genuine need to have it now. But if you enjoy the pain:
1) Ubuntu is just a derivative repack of Debian. Move upstream to Debian.
2) Sounds like you're using the equivalent of Debian stable or Debian testing. Move upstream to testing, or unstable.
But first consider the difference between "i want" and "i need". Somebody else was doing the debugging, that you will now be stuck doing.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of debate, but the only thing that I think is unfair is using the word "obsolete".
How could it be anything other than a good thing, since the only difference between Debian stable, Debian testing, and Debian unstable, is how long they have been tested and "seasoned", and everyone in the past whom ever selected stable, selected it because it is the most seasoned and tested distribution around? The stable users would rightly be mighty annoyed if we started randomly uploading stuff directly into stable without any testing and seasoning, rather than unstable.
Its like complaining bud-lite is better than my 12 year old whiskey, because my bud-lite has a younger born on date, when the whole point was when I went shopping I intentionally wanted 12 year old whiskey as opposed to last weeks beer. Last weeks beer is fine and all that, but not if I intentionally selected 12 year old whiskey.
Yet, somehow, the "average lag" for Debian Lenny is a mere 40 weeks, when it should approach 51 weeks as of today... I do not believe there have been THAT many security related patches, have there?
Also obsolete is the wrong word. By the definition, "No longer in use" it obviously fails by the definition of being included in the distros. By the definition "Outmoded in design, style, or construction" it obviously fails because a trivial bug fix or trivial feature add does not change the entire design, style or construction of the whole thing. Linux 0.99pl7 now that is obsolete.
Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government.
And that differentiates 3rd world governments from Detroit, DC, New Orleans, Chicago, NYC, the entire state of CA, how exactly? So that is not much of an explanation.
Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
Tada, there is the problem. Most ethnic minorities are poor because their government likes it that way... Some foreigner trying to make life better for a hated minority group, is never going to accomplish anything, ever.
I feel it would be more effective to write this guide on geek places at normal-people destinations, as some of us cannot gather interest at home to visit a museum about computers. On the other hand, if said museum were in the Carribean, most of us would have little problem convincing a signficant other.
(I have no connection to them, other than wanting to go...)
Re:I go on geek vacations
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
How could anyone not find Socorro pleasant and relaxing? What is tense and stressful about a way cool machine run by way cool people in the way cool desert?
On the other hand, trinity, now that is a PITA, as I recall they want to do all kinds of crazy security screening, annoying scheduling, etc. If it were not for knowing the history of what happened, it would be right up there in excitement with visiting an IRS office.
However, its geology geeks that really have all the fun... White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns... Ft Union Monument is not really geologic buts its old and has alot of rocks... And that is just one states worth of fun.
Now what I'd like to know is where (anywhere at any site) can I find tours that don't talk down to me as if I'm a totally unprepared and slightly retarded public school educated 5th grader... That is the tiring part, like when I visit a cave and have to listen to "uh... like... rocks are like, hard, you know? Now all you little kids (and that old geek guy, too) please line up and we'll walk to the next interpretive station, where we'll dazzle you with our superiority."
Taking photos isn't bio-engineering and their is a lot of competition.
Yes, there's a lot. But my experience was that most were members of the same professional associations, and wouldn't consider licensing under any terms other than the standard form t&cs supplied by those associations.
Is this a new area to work in, for "those whom do the jobs americans wont do"? H1B a photographer from India? This post is funny, but I'm serious.
I think photographers tend to be touchy about surrendering their rights because their position is tenuous. When the last several years worth of your work can all fit on a DVD-R, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish it from the work of amateurs, anyone would feel a little defensive.
Musicians, journalists, authors, and programmers are not treated with kid gloves like photographers are. Tell them to toughen up and join the club.
- Knowledge in words flows unhindered, images can only come to stay in our heads from RL, TV, Magazines,...
We can not reproduce images and forward it to other peoples brains. We only can with words.
- Photos can not be improved incrementally
- (tongue-in-cheek) You have to go outside for photos
- With words you can just make stuff up that sounds authoritative and get away with it. Not so much with pictures.
- With words its easy to have childish edit wars about what should be included because it is "encyclopedic enough" or "important enough", but with pictures the best you can hope for is a "picture cropping battle" or just include or exclude, no real edit war possibilities.
- Its easy to edit words to fit some totally irrational opinion, harder to edit pictures. Not impossible, but much harder.
You say that a photographer retains their copyright, but if the picture is out there under the CC who needs to license it from the photographer under anything more restrictive?
Wikipedia might be content with a vaguely 320x240 pixel image of some celebrity. A typical "womens magazine" front cover at a reasonably non-blurry DPI would need, maybe, 4000x3000 resolution, probably at a totally difference aspect ratio than the image provided to wikipedia, and probably as a PNG/raw/GIF rather than a lossy jpeg file.
I can't think of a downside if a photographer makes a small low res sample image, perhaps with a little banner at the bottom "john q hacker, professional photographer, http://www.johnqhacker.com/" and distributes it as widely as possible.
If some teenage girl wants to print it out and tape it to her school locker, she was never going to pay any money for a license permitting that, so no loss. If a magazine editor wants a front cover picture, the editor will gladly pay a nice big fee to license an ultra high res image in the format and aspect ratio of their choice, so no loss.
Maybe instead of an ultra low res color image for free, try a medium res black and white for free? Assuming you are not "into" black and white for artistic reasons?
I'm really struggling to see how a freely available low res image has any downside, and it has a microscopic upside of providing free advertising for the lazy people who don't remove the "banner ad" at the bottom.
Furthermore, is the product of fuel cells not pure water, meaning completely free of any kinds of minerals? Drinking that as it is isn't particularly healthy either.
Pure urban legend that distilled water is bad for you. It required the assumption that all tap water is the same, however each tap water source is wildly different.
Also, not all tap water is safe to drink, even in the "first world". I live very near a subcontinental divide, and on the east side which drains into the great lakes, I can drink slightly filtered lake water, you know, the lake that we dump untreated sewage into each time it rains and med waste washes ashore every time the wind blows in from the lake, and which very recently killed hundreds due to a cryptosporidium outbreak, or on the west side of the divide which drains into the mighty mississip, ultra-deep wells which are actually pretty healthy except for the off the charts radium level. Or there are the shallow wells in rural areas with off the charts fertilizer and insecticide levels. But somehow, those three options are supposed to be safer than purified distilled H2O.
Seems like a blindingly obvious discovery, DNA alterations to the blood producing cells don't always immediately and inevitably result in diagnosed Leukemia?
Historically backup estimates were always too low. Not sure its relevant anymore. So, when you budgeted for 1 terra and you now need two terra, here's the plan:
Incremental expansion of tape backups = secretary asks purchasing to order more tape.
Incremental expansion of a rsync system = dozens of hours of hours of sysadmin time, possibly at multiple sites, etc.
On the positive side, having to replace all backup server drives is a good way to rotate new fresh drives in. If you budget that every year you'll buy and install a $250 drive, regardless of how much more capacity that provides or if you need it or not, you'll probably have better drive reliability.
But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means.
Since drives are expanding faster than my critical data, all my computers and external drives have the same directory unison synced to a master copy on my mail fileserver.
Machine specific files live in a subdirectory of the shared backup directory. For example ~/backup/server or ~/backup/mythtv
Task specific files live in a subdirectory of the shared backup directory. For example ~/backup/genealogy
Sensitive files are mcrypt'd to a.nc file. For example, financial spreadsheets, scans of important documents.
Portable devices generally spend most of their time far away from the computers or are clipped to my keychain.
I also occasionally manually run a handy backup script on my computers to copy/etc/network/interfaces to ~/backup/$machine-name/etc/network/interfaces which is later synced. I backup about 10 config files on all my computers, and more on special purpose machines.
I have no idea if unison and mcrypt are available on non-linux machines... I don't use windows or mac to do anything important, only to play games.
So, pretty much every mass storage device I own has a complete and full backup of all my important, partially encrypted, data. As of this morning, all my important stuff is about six hundred megs.
I do pretty much the same thing with bulk media such as music collection, etc.
People whom are digital packrats might have trouble with this lifestyle.
No one had the time to mention Kari or Grant from the Mythbusters, but they had time for a 200 post off topic flamewar about religion and science? Yes not exactly post graduate education there, but the question was about "excited" and "heros". Whats not to like about Kari and Grant?
9. Software raid is much easier to remotely admin online while using SSH and linux command line. Hardware raid often requires downtime and reboots.
10. Your hardware RAID card manufacturer may go out of business, replacements may be unavailable, etc. Linux software raid is available until approximately the end of time, much lower risk.
11. The more drives you have, the more you'll appreciate installing them all in drive caddy/shelf things. With internal drives you'll have to disconnect all the cables, haul the box out, unscrew it, open it, then unscrew all the drives, downtime measured in hours. With some spare drive caddies, you can hit the power, pull the old caddy, slide in the new caddy with the new drive, hit the power, downtime measured in seconds to minutes. Also I prefer installing new drives into caddies at my comfy workbench rather than crawling around the server case on the floor.
Which would be fine except that, as defendants, they are denying their own (plaintiff's) claims. That's the idiocy part.
They promised the guys they sold the CDO to that they would defend their investment. It's probably going to get wiped out (tough luck suckers!). They have a minimum legal obligation to try to fight for the invested money.
Its probably much cheaper to treat them(selves) like any other plaintiff and fight back, rather than get the 3rd party CDO guys tee-d off and have the CDO guys sue the "defendant WF" for not trying to protect their investment (from themselves).
WF is in an excellent position to do all kinds of corrupt things by being on both sides of the 80/20. This is an in your face way of forcing the judge to get involved to prove they are not doing anything bad. Much cheaper to do it all above board w/ the judge's oversight today, than fight a lawsuit with the CDO holders next month whom claim WF was doing sneaky stuff since they owned both sides of the 80/20.
Its easy for one corporation to do something corrupt if they buy into both sides of the deal. But if they involve a neutral third party judge, they are less likely to do something corrupt. Thats not "idiocy", thats "good law".
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Well, that's true - but traditionally we don't ask society to change due to a person's mental illness. We make small changes for the physically handicapped, but not the mentally ill.
Religion. Enough said.
For instance, if you suffer from an anxiety disorder most people would not insist that your employer make your job easier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990
"Discrimination may include, among other things, ....... or not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of disabled employees, ......"
You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another.
So, you're saying the mysterious wifi allergy disease is actually a religion?
I think that the biggest problem isn't intellectual property, but the people who administer it. I don't think that the demand is particularly great. As such, there isn't a great incentive to release it freely. There are costs to administering such a large DB. Furthermore, nobody wants their name on a database of all the fundamental properties because in that data there are bound to be mistakes.
You are looking at the liability issue for the creator/admin, the supply side. The bigger liability problem is on the engineer, demand side.
Something that is missing from this discussion, is some Chemical Engineer specific knowledge that I can attempt to provide. The whole point of a "steam table" and similar products like discussed here, is there is no accurate formula for vapor pressure at various temps. The simplistic linear equations taught in high school don't work at the extremes, or don't give accurate enough results to design a safe and profitable plant. So, more than a century ago, physicist / chemist / engineers started making lab measurements, and selling graphs and tables of data. The modern version of that product is the expensive computer models discussed in the article, which optimistically try to answer any input conditions with correct and continuous answers based on a mixture of theory, optimism, and some distinct individual laboratory measurements.
Because the data model is used to design multi-million dollar plants, and because the only way to verify the results is very expensive lab work, and is therefore often glossed over, a mistake in the data model could be a multi-million dollar mistake, assuming the losses are purely economic and no human victims. The creator/admin probably was intelligent enough to release under a license that removes all liability for data errors. The end user engineer will not be so lucky.
On one far extreme of the provability / testability spectrum, you've got yet another word processor, where if the screen doesn't match what you typed in, literally a trained gorilla could figure out the word processor is broken, and act accordingly (throw poo at programmer? The more things change, the more they stay the same) Or maybe a crypto hash where a hundred programmers can write it in a hundred languages and all the outputs better match for a given input.
At the other extreme of provability / testability, you've got a Chem-E basically having to take the program output on faith that it's correct. The program says the pressure of supercritical steam at 700 K is 230 atm, I know that is somewhat above critical temp and above critical pressure, so the best I can do is "sounds about right to me"? So specify plant components based on a 230 atm environment (adding appropriate safety factors, etc) Now steam pressure is old stuff, boring, and everyone knows about what to expect, but using really weird stuff under really weird conditions, who knows what crazy output from the data model might slip past, resulting in a disaster?
Despite the dangers, it would be great for education, and cheap experimental research/simulation, even if it would be too legally dangerous to use in formal design work.
working on a project that could rival what major automobile manufacturers are doing.
Writing a wishlist / daydream of specifications, for a car built by hand using the most expensive labor available, that cost more to make than it could possibly sell for?
All the need is a bankrupty and they'll be right up there with GM!
It's like saying "If you don't want a mechanic to overcharge you, learn to fix your own car", which is good advice, but to be realistic, I don't have the time to spend pouring over a 1999 Pontiac Grand Am manual when I need my car up and running in a day.
I think you misunderstand how this works. I have enough knowledge about car exhausts not to get ripped off. They are not going to sell me frequency grease or some BS, plus I have a vague idea of how much time and money it should take, and an excellent idea of exactly what is broken and what I need them to fix. Given my knowledge, I am extremely well qualified to outsource to a mechanic and manage their work.
Not surprisingly, my interactions with tradespeople in general are pretty positive.
Someone whom takes a more dilbertian approach toward management is going to be screwed over by their mechanic, sooner or later. Its not necessarily even "screwed over" so much as utterly clueless expectations. Consider people whom proudly declare how totally clueless they are about mechanical things, but suddenly become experts on the topic when its time to discuss prices, or start arguing when they hear something they don't want to hear.
But there are a handful of software I use every day, (Firefox, Filezilla, Pidgin, Deluge come to mind) that I want to always have the latest released version - and on Ubuntu that is a pain in the ass.
Sounds like you're way down the distribution food chain and want to move up. My advice is let the other folks in the food chain do all the debugging for you unless there is some desperate genuine need to have it now. But if you enjoy the pain:
1) Ubuntu is just a derivative repack of Debian. Move upstream to Debian.
2) Sounds like you're using the equivalent of Debian stable or Debian testing. Move upstream to testing, or unstable.
But first consider the difference between "i want" and "i need". Somebody else was doing the debugging, that you will now be stuck doing.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of debate, but the only thing that I think is unfair is using the word "obsolete".
How could it be anything other than a good thing, since the only difference between Debian stable, Debian testing, and Debian unstable, is how long they have been tested and "seasoned", and everyone in the past whom ever selected stable, selected it because it is the most seasoned and tested distribution around? The stable users would rightly be mighty annoyed if we started randomly uploading stuff directly into stable without any testing and seasoning, rather than unstable.
Its like complaining bud-lite is better than my 12 year old whiskey, because my bud-lite has a younger born on date, when the whole point was when I went shopping I intentionally wanted 12 year old whiskey as opposed to last weeks beer. Last weeks beer is fine and all that, but not if I intentionally selected 12 year old whiskey.
The mystifying part of his calculation is that Debian Lenny was frozen exactly 51 weeks ago on Jul 27th 2008.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00007.html
Yet, somehow, the "average lag" for Debian Lenny is a mere 40 weeks, when it should approach 51 weeks as of today... I do not believe there have been THAT many security related patches, have there?
Also obsolete is the wrong word. By the definition, "No longer in use" it obviously fails by the definition of being included in the distros. By the definition "Outmoded in design, style, or construction" it obviously fails because a trivial bug fix or trivial feature add does not change the entire design, style or construction of the whole thing. Linux 0.99pl7 now that is obsolete.
Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government.
And that differentiates 3rd world governments from Detroit, DC, New Orleans, Chicago, NYC, the entire state of CA, how exactly? So that is not much of an explanation.
Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
Tada, there is the problem. Most ethnic minorities are poor because their government likes it that way... Some foreigner trying to make life better for a hated minority group, is never going to accomplish anything, ever.
I feel it would be more effective to write this guide on geek places at normal-people destinations, as some of us cannot gather interest at home to visit a museum about computers. On the other hand, if said museum were in the Carribean, most of us would have little problem convincing a signficant other.
Sounds like you want
http://www.insightcruises.com/
(I have no connection to them, other than wanting to go...)
Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
How could anyone not find Socorro pleasant and relaxing? What is tense and stressful about a way cool machine run by way cool people in the way cool desert?
On the other hand, trinity, now that is a PITA, as I recall they want to do all kinds of crazy security screening, annoying scheduling, etc. If it were not for knowing the history of what happened, it would be right up there in excitement with visiting an IRS office.
However, its geology geeks that really have all the fun... White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns... Ft Union Monument is not really geologic buts its old and has alot of rocks... And that is just one states worth of fun.
Now what I'd like to know is where (anywhere at any site) can I find tours that don't talk down to me as if I'm a totally unprepared and slightly retarded public school educated 5th grader... That is the tiring part, like when I visit a cave and have to listen to "uh... like... rocks are like, hard, you know? Now all you little kids (and that old geek guy, too) please line up and we'll walk to the next interpretive station, where we'll dazzle you with our superiority."
Taking photos isn't bio-engineering and their is a lot of competition.
Yes, there's a lot. But my experience was that most were members of the same professional associations, and wouldn't consider licensing under any terms other than the standard form t&cs supplied by those associations.
Is this a new area to work in, for "those whom do the jobs americans wont do"? H1B a photographer from India? This post is funny, but I'm serious.
I think photographers tend to be touchy about surrendering their rights because their position is tenuous. When the last several years worth of your work can all fit on a DVD-R, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish it from the work of amateurs, anyone would feel a little defensive.
Musicians, journalists, authors, and programmers are not treated with kid gloves like photographers are. Tell them to toughen up and join the club.
I have other theories:
- Knowledge in words flows unhindered, images can only come to stay in our heads from RL, TV, Magazines, ...
We can not reproduce images and forward it to other peoples brains. We only can with words.
- Photos can not be improved incrementally
- (tongue-in-cheek) You have to go outside for photos
- With words you can just make stuff up that sounds authoritative and get away with it. Not so much with pictures.
- With words its easy to have childish edit wars about what should be included because it is "encyclopedic enough" or "important enough", but with pictures the best you can hope for is a "picture cropping battle" or just include or exclude, no real edit war possibilities.
- Its easy to edit words to fit some totally irrational opinion, harder to edit pictures. Not impossible, but much harder.
You say that a photographer retains their copyright, but if the picture is out there under the CC who needs to license it from the photographer under anything more restrictive?
Wikipedia might be content with a vaguely 320x240 pixel image of some celebrity. A typical "womens magazine" front cover at a reasonably non-blurry DPI would need, maybe, 4000x3000 resolution, probably at a totally difference aspect ratio than the image provided to wikipedia, and probably as a PNG/raw/GIF rather than a lossy jpeg file.
I can't think of a downside if a photographer makes a small low res sample image, perhaps with a little banner at the bottom "john q hacker, professional photographer, http://www.johnqhacker.com/" and distributes it as widely as possible.
If some teenage girl wants to print it out and tape it to her school locker, she was never going to pay any money for a license permitting that, so no loss. If a magazine editor wants a front cover picture, the editor will gladly pay a nice big fee to license an ultra high res image in the format and aspect ratio of their choice, so no loss.
Maybe instead of an ultra low res color image for free, try a medium res black and white for free? Assuming you are not "into" black and white for artistic reasons?
I'm really struggling to see how a freely available low res image has any downside, and it has a microscopic upside of providing free advertising for the lazy people who don't remove the "banner ad" at the bottom.
Furthermore, is the product of fuel cells not pure water, meaning completely free of any kinds of minerals? Drinking that as it is isn't particularly healthy either.
Pure urban legend that distilled water is bad for you. It required the assumption that all tap water is the same, however each tap water source is wildly different.
Also, not all tap water is safe to drink, even in the "first world". I live very near a subcontinental divide, and on the east side which drains into the great lakes, I can drink slightly filtered lake water, you know, the lake that we dump untreated sewage into each time it rains and med waste washes ashore every time the wind blows in from the lake, and which very recently killed hundreds due to a cryptosporidium outbreak, or on the west side of the divide which drains into the mighty mississip, ultra-deep wells which are actually pretty healthy except for the off the charts radium level. Or there are the shallow wells in rural areas with off the charts fertilizer and insecticide levels. But somehow, those three options are supposed to be safer than purified distilled H2O.
I was going to comment but this kind of stupidity really inflames me and I honestly don't have the time to explain all the ways I see this as wrong.
No kidding, we (as in USA consumers) bail out GM, so the dealer gives away a commie AK-47. What a rip.
What's next, an american made AR-15 with every Toyota Prius?
Seems like a blindingly obvious discovery, DNA alterations to the blood producing cells don't always immediately and inevitably result in diagnosed Leukemia?
To me, tapes have ALWAYS been a reliable tangible fashion to back ....... server/OS content and get it back, reliably.
I don't backup binaries.
What good is a backup of /bin/ls from my current AMD64 server, if I need to restore to non AMD64, perhaps intel ia64 or i386 hardware?
Of if my powerpc desktop running debian croaks and I find an i386 as a cheap replacement?
I also have an ARM arch debian machine in the basement somewhere.
Can my backup plan for /bin/ls really do a better job than Debian's four hundred and nineteen world wide binary mirrors?
http://www.debian.org/mirror/list
I honestly don't understand the appeal of tapes.
Historically backup estimates were always too low. Not sure its relevant anymore. So, when you budgeted for 1 terra and you now need two terra, here's the plan:
Incremental expansion of tape backups = secretary asks purchasing to order more tape.
Incremental expansion of a rsync system = dozens of hours of hours of sysadmin time, possibly at multiple sites, etc.
On the positive side, having to replace all backup server drives is a good way to rotate new fresh drives in. If you budget that every year you'll buy and install a $250 drive, regardless of how much more capacity that provides or if you need it or not, you'll probably have better drive reliability.
But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means.
Since drives are expanding faster than my critical data, all my computers and external drives have the same directory unison synced to a master copy on my mail fileserver.
Machine specific files live in a subdirectory of the shared backup directory. For example ~/backup/server or ~/backup/mythtv
Task specific files live in a subdirectory of the shared backup directory. For example ~/backup/genealogy
Sensitive files are mcrypt'd to a .nc file. For example, financial spreadsheets, scans of important documents.
Portable devices generally spend most of their time far away from the computers or are clipped to my keychain.
I also occasionally manually run a handy backup script on my computers to copy /etc/network/interfaces to ~/backup/$machine-name/etc/network/interfaces which is later synced. I backup about 10 config files on all my computers, and more on special purpose machines.
I have no idea if unison and mcrypt are available on non-linux machines... I don't use windows or mac to do anything important, only to play games.
So, pretty much every mass storage device I own has a complete and full backup of all my important, partially encrypted, data. As of this morning, all my important stuff is about six hundred megs.
I do pretty much the same thing with bulk media such as music collection, etc.
People whom are digital packrats might have trouble with this lifestyle.
Perhaps only sexually active couples should be sent on these trips?
Well, that rules out the married folks.
No one had the time to mention Kari or Grant from the Mythbusters, but they had time for a 200 post off topic flamewar about religion and science? Yes not exactly post graduate education there, but the question was about "excited" and "heros". Whats not to like about Kari and Grant?
No one mentioned Shawn Carlson and the SAS?
http://www.sas.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Amateur_Scientists
At least Forrest Mims got like one comment, even if people shun him for his peculiar church beliefs (not exactly a very enlightened attitude).
Lessons learned:
9. Software raid is much easier to remotely admin online while using SSH and linux command line. Hardware raid often requires downtime and reboots.
10. Your hardware RAID card manufacturer may go out of business, replacements may be unavailable, etc. Linux software raid is available until approximately the end of time, much lower risk.
11. The more drives you have, the more you'll appreciate installing them all in drive caddy/shelf things. With internal drives you'll have to disconnect all the cables, haul the box out, unscrew it, open it, then unscrew all the drives, downtime measured in hours. With some spare drive caddies, you can hit the power, pull the old caddy, slide in the new caddy with the new drive, hit the power, downtime measured in seconds to minutes. Also I prefer installing new drives into caddies at my comfy workbench rather than crawling around the server case on the floor.
Which would be fine except that, as defendants, they are denying their own (plaintiff's) claims. That's the idiocy part.
They promised the guys they sold the CDO to that they would defend their investment. It's probably going to get wiped out (tough luck suckers!). They have a minimum legal obligation to try to fight for the invested money.
Its probably much cheaper to treat them(selves) like any other plaintiff and fight back, rather than get the 3rd party CDO guys tee-d off and have the CDO guys sue the "defendant WF" for not trying to protect their investment (from themselves).
WF is in an excellent position to do all kinds of corrupt things by being on both sides of the 80/20. This is an in your face way of forcing the judge to get involved to prove they are not doing anything bad. Much cheaper to do it all above board w/ the judge's oversight today, than fight a lawsuit with the CDO holders next month whom claim WF was doing sneaky stuff since they owned both sides of the 80/20.
Its easy for one corporation to do something corrupt if they buy into both sides of the deal. But if they involve a neutral third party judge, they are less likely to do something corrupt. Thats not "idiocy", thats "good law".