Isn't the SLC going to be much more expensive ? Look at the price between Intel's Extreme(tm) CPU's and then mainstream ones. They're gonna put the SLC's on the Extremem(tm) brand. Plus initially the Extreme's will only be available in a 32GB and 64GB format.
I'm talking about "bang-for-the-buck" and "fast-enough" which is where the Velociraptor is hitting a sweet point. Heck, the V'Raptor is a bit $$$ for some and I'd suggest a Samsung F1 for those people.
A velociraptor beating it on write speed is irrelevant
BTW, that's not true if you do lots of content creation (such as MP3/DVD ripping, recording multiple channels of streaming videos, etc) or write heavy operations (compiling large programs, cooking/batch-processing art,etc).
I went from a slow drive to a Velociraptor and my Vista experience went from painful to pleasantly useable:-) I totally understand your statement on the "feel" of a more responsive system. If an SSD makes as big a difference as the VRaptor did, it'd probably be worth it to power users.
Basically, the theoretical write combining will take 16 (SSD_blocksize/OS_blocksize) writes of 4K (OS_blocksize) each and make them into a single 64K (SSD_blocksize) write of the native SSD block size regardless of the virtual location of the OS FS writes, they will be physically adjancent in the memory on the SSD and within a single SSD native block.
The journaling will record this write combining and the drive will remap blocks dynamically.
High end enterprise SSD's with write combining and more sophisticated wear leveling did this already. Unfortunately, most consumer drives (including the ones you bought) do not do this. Intel is bringing this feature to consumer level drives and one of the side effects is they're able to get higher performance from the writes (especially for MLC flash) and to get a longer lifetime for the device by reducing the write amplification.
Yes. If the native block size is not similar to the OS cluster size you have significant "write amplification" on drives without write combining of subblocks. For example, with a 4K OS block and 64K SSD block, you can have a 16X write amplification in the worst case.
However, if you do write combining of subblocks with wear leveling as I described in my naive CS101 approach, you could have a 4K OS block with 64K native SSD blocks and the SSD will do writecombining with a 4K subblock size and separated journaling for the subblock. The result is write amplification that was very close to 1X (rather than 16X). This is how I think Intel is getting away with the claim of 1.04-1.10X write amplification.
Seek times are very important with virtual memory though and modern games are able to push the memory limits of current machines. Furthermore, the fast seek time helps with lots of other stuff like boot time. Plus RAID-0 ain't all it's cracked up to be. I had a Dell XPS600 with RAID 0 and one of the drives went kaput. Guess what happens to all the other drives then ? They're useless. 4X drives in RAID-0 means you have four times the chance of having a dead weight for a system.
FWIW, this article recommends the Velociraptor over SSDs for gamers. The Velociraptor either beats or is close to SSD's in many benchmarks and the price per GB is at least an order of magnitude less.
BTW, the Blitter analogy isn't so good because today's hardware often has scatter/gather technology for fetching reads where it can combine many smaller blocks into a what appears to be a larger single virtual block for the read.
Even tech without this will usually allow lists or queued fetching to hide the overhead of many little fetches.
The important thing is to have the subblock size to be at least large enough that the time penalty for switching native blocks is minimal compared to the actual time of reading the subblock.
You never want to defrag SSD's. It just wears out the disk.
A good SSD has wear-leveling and write-combining techniques that keep the SSD "defragmented" automatically.
And it doesn't matter if the FS clusters are far apart as long as they are close to the SSD's hardware cluster sizes or the SSD intelligently combines them (which is what I believe Intel is doing since they claim a write amplification of only 1.1).
It's possible that the Samsung SLC chip stores data for the wear-leveling and write-combining operations which would remap the MLC in a non-fragmented way.
BTW, let me give you a naive wear-leveling / write-combining algorithm. I'm sure Intel has a better one because they've invested millions of dollars of research and the one I'm about to present to you could be done by a CS101 student:
1) You have a bit more than 80GB free for an 80GB drive (extra memory to take care of bad sectors just like a normal hard drive plus a small amount of required for the wear-leveling / writecombining)
2) You treat most of the storage as a ring buffer that consists of blocks on two levels: the native block size and a subblock size. The remaining storage (or alternate storage which may be the Samsung SLC chip on the MLC drives) is used to journal your writes and wear-leveling.
3) You combine all writes aligned to the subblock size into a native block and write them out to the next free native block in the ring buffer and keep a counter for the write to the block. If you run into a used block, and increment a counter (for wear levelling) and if the counter is below a certain value, you skip it to the next free block, otherwise you move the used block (which has been stagnent) to a more frequently writtento free block (which will now take less of a burden since it's had a stagnant block moved into it).
4) Anytime you make a write, the new sectors are updated in the memory area used for journaling / wear-level / sector remapping.
Assuming your reads can be done fairly quickly at the subblock level, it never matters if you have to "seek" for the reads and the drive won't fragment on writes because they are combined into native block sizes.
Yup - which means the cost of a single SSD drive will be about 25-30% higher or $900-$1000.
I'm happy my WD Velociraptor for right now. The Velociraptor is $300 for 300GB which is still steep but it beat or matched the tested SSD's in quite a few tests.
The Velociraptor even beat the Intel SSD in several tests such as Windows Boot time (and it creamed it on anything that involved large amounts of writing / content creation since the Velociraptor gets 107MB/s write compared to 80MB/s).
Obama, paraphrased, "I can spend more money in a month on my campaign than her whole town can in a year."
Wasilla only has a $13M budget for 2008. BTW, the RNC has about $75M to spend on the presidential election and McCain is taking $84M in public funds. That means McCain & the RNC have 60 days to spend nearly $160M. That's the entire Wasilla budget every 5 days.
I think Obama will have to spend a little more than the Wasilla budget monthly to even begin to keep up with that.
FWIW, I actually agree with her that selling the plane was probably a good thing and probably did save the state of Alaska money and they may or may not have sold it at market cost.
My problem with the whole thing is she is telling the story in an intentionally misleading fashion (which I consider dishonest) and McCain is actually telling untrue statements when he repeats the story (i.e. that it sold on eBay for a profit).
I don't know about you but expecting Factually Correct and Honest Non-Misleading statements from the "Straight Talk Express" shouldn't be too much to ask.
No, the guy is a troll and probably a liar. He claims to be "lifelong liberal" but he's also vigilantly defending Palin on multiple threads. I was pointing out the flaws in his logic when he said it's ok for palin to mislead & mccain to lie but obama should be brought to task for selective statements about his past. That's not something a liberal would say.
I'm not sure what your interest in the truth is. You claim to be a liberal but you slam Obama for being selective about the truth without providing a concrete example while defending Republicans for the same behavior when a specific example of them making misleading statements (Palin) and outright untruths (McCain) has been presented to you.
As a lifelong liberal, even I am disgusted at this smear campaign. It's okay for Obama to be selective about stories from the past, but not for Palin?
Based on statements like that, I'd guess you're trolling.
OK, you were right about Heckmann. CBS News is wrong using the word 'brokered' to describe Harris's relationship to the deal. Harris was responsible for introducing Reynolds and Heckmann and smoothing the deal through at a lower than market price.
BTW, I like how the ktuu link you posted basically said that trying to sell the jet on EBay was a bad idea. It certainly brings Palin's executive judgement into question:
He has placed ads in corporate jet publications and on selected websites.
E-Bay isn't one of them.
"You don't market an airplane like this on E-Bay. The type of people who access E-Bay to buy something like... it's not there," Heckmann said.
I'm not sure about the Heckmann thing... I'll have to look it up. The CBS news site said explicitly that the deal was brokered by Harris and the Tribune certainly implied that he at least set up the deal if he didn't explicitly broker it.
As a lifelong liberal, even I am disgusted at this smear campaign. It's okay for Obama to be selective about stories from the past, but not for Palin?
You certainly don't sound like one.
BTW, I don't think it's right for any politician to be selective or misleading. If Obama is saying lies or misleading statements, then Shame on him. And yes, I'd hope the press would point out his inconsistencies or untruths. That should be the job of the forth estate.
I agree that Palin pledged to get rid of the plane and she did -- good for her for keeping a campaign promise. However, she is spinning the story in a misleading way and McCain has made outright untruths about the story. Shame on both of them.
I personally hope that all politicians should be expected to tell not only the truth, but the truth in a straightforward manner so it doesn't mean the exact opposite of what it sounds like it's supposed to mean. Isn't that the whole idea behind the "Straight Talk Expresss" ?!?
As far as FUD goes, can we at least agree that the way McCain is spinning the story is totally untrue (sold_on_ebay != true && made_profit != true).
Furthermore, while what Palin said was true (put_on_ebay == true), shall we also agree the statement is only partially the truth and very misleading as to the actual circumstances of the sale.
Sorry, I should quote my sources. The $300K below market came from the Chicago Tribune. I'm sure you will continue to say that number is just "spin" though because all the press is "liberal media" trying to smear Palin rather than an actual attempt to get news out about an unknown candidate who's suddenly a possible VP for our nation.
Instead, the 23-year-old 10-seat Westwind II was sold in August 2007 for $2.1 million to a Valdez, Alaska, entrepreneur; that's about $300,000 less than a broker's asking price, according to news accounts. -- Chicago Tribune
Sarah Palin did not need the jet because she could drive to work. However, there are areas of Alaska where there are only two forms of transportation: airplanes and boat. Any Alaskan can tell you that air transportation would be a necessity for a governor who lived in one of those areas since boat is too slow for state business. However, there is no reason such a governor could not use public air flights instead of a private jet.
BTW, there is one small mistake in my post, the entrepeneur is not named Valdez but from Valdez. His name is Larry Reynolds and he is a good friend of Republican speaker of the Alaska House, John L. Harris, who brokered the no-bid deal. Reynolds made campaign contributions to both Palin and Harris in 2006 and 2007.
If you were a data recovery company, you would gain an ENORMOUS reputation if you were to complete the challenge. And the cost? Shipping.
And if you take the challenge and fail and the challenge holders print that your company was unable to recover data from such a simple change to the drive, you could lose all your business and ruin your reputation.
Yup... data recovery fees are in the hundreds of $$$ per drive... not a measely $40. Typically data recovery places do one of two things.... 1) run software tools on the drive if the electronics work. 2) if the drive electronics are broken, substitute a board from a similar drive and run the same tools. #2 will cost you much more than #1.
Also, if you want to get data off a drive that is written to with zeros (i.e. if the US gov't had a drive with sensitive data from terrorists), they could do it if they had the appropriate millions of dollars of equipment including using a clean room lab, disassembling the drive, removing the platters, and scanning the platters with a microscopic tipped probe that could measure and map the magnetic fields at various depths on the drive.
Now do you think you're gonna get hundreds (or thousands) of dollars of recovery service from already busy firms using multi-million dollar equipment for a $40 prize -- probably not. If you offer a $1,000,000 X-Prize for data recovery, I bet you get some seriuous takers.
***
Sarah Palin remarked on her ability to reduce graft by putting a state-owned luxury jet worth $2.7 million dollars on EBay.
Technically, she told the truth -- her exact quote in her speech was "That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay."
The whole truth is that the jet never sold on EBay. Sure she "put it on EBay", but if failed to actually ** SELL **. The jet only received one bid and that fell through -- apparently the buyer wasn't "vetted"
thoroughly.
Instead, the plane was sold for $2.1M to Republican entrepeneur Valdez in a no-bid transaction that basically had no oversight at a $600K loss from the original purchase price.
The same plane sells on the open market through airplane brokers for about $2.4M. Still the $2.1M sale price was $300K below the price she should have expected on the open market if she went through a broker than doing it herself on EBay -- which contrary to Republican opinion, EBay is not the best marketplace to sell a luxury commercial quality jet.
But selling off a gov't resource to a rich friend of a fellow republican at $300K below market value in a no-bid transaction doesn't sound nearly as down to earth as, "she sold a luxury jet on E-Bay because she likes to drive to work".
Wanna know how McCain is telling this story now : "You know what i enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold* it on eBay â" made a profit*," McCain said, introducing Palin. (*Technically not true statements)
. . . Nope, it didn't *SELL* on EBay and it certainly didn't make a profit . . .
Physical access does mean you can basically do anything - especially if you can get access to the raw hd / ssd / cf mem / etc.
FTA: 'If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,'
I also see no reason why you can't replace the word "Windows" in the above sentece with "*NIX". I mean, if you're a competent *NIX admistrator/developer with physical access to the machine, chances are you could muck with it quite a bit as well.
The problem is that, like it or not, evolution touches on an area of belief where science and religion do intersect.
This may be true but Astronomy also touches on areas where science and religious belief (Astrology) intersects.
There are three important things to remember:
1) Where a subject touches both science and religion, teach the science in science classes (i.e. Evolution) and the religion (Creationism myths) in a social or historical context.
2) Just because a science "touches on" a religious belief (conflicts with it) doesn't make it any less of a science. If you feel that way, you should reject heliocentrism and go hang out with flat-earthers.
3) I.D. touches on religious beliefs. There is no real science at it's core. Evolution may touch on science and religious beliefs but it is based on a huge volume of sound science.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the SLC going to be much more expensive ? Look at the price between Intel's Extreme(tm) CPU's and then mainstream ones. They're gonna put the SLC's on the Extremem(tm) brand. Plus initially the Extreme's will only be available in a 32GB and 64GB format.
I'm talking about "bang-for-the-buck" and "fast-enough" which is where the Velociraptor is hitting a sweet point. Heck, the V'Raptor is a bit $$$ for some and I'd suggest a Samsung F1 for those people.
A velociraptor beating it on write speed is irrelevant
BTW, that's not true if you do lots of content creation (such as MP3/DVD ripping, recording multiple channels of streaming videos, etc) or write heavy operations (compiling large programs, cooking/batch-processing art,etc).
I went from a slow drive to a Velociraptor and my Vista experience went from painful to pleasantly useable :-) I totally understand your statement on the "feel" of a more responsive system. If an SSD makes as big a difference as the VRaptor did, it'd probably be worth it to power users.
Basically, the theoretical write combining will take 16 (SSD_blocksize/OS_blocksize) writes of 4K (OS_blocksize) each and make them into a single 64K (SSD_blocksize) write of the native SSD block size regardless of the virtual location of the OS FS writes, they will be physically adjancent in the memory on the SSD and within a single SSD native block.
The journaling will record this write combining and the drive will remap blocks dynamically.
High end enterprise SSD's with write combining and more sophisticated wear leveling did this already. Unfortunately, most consumer drives (including the ones you bought) do not do this. Intel is bringing this feature to consumer level drives and one of the side effects is they're able to get higher performance from the writes (especially for MLC flash) and to get a longer lifetime for the device by reducing the write amplification.
Yes. If the native block size is not similar to the OS cluster size you have significant "write amplification" on drives without write combining of subblocks. For example, with a 4K OS block and 64K SSD block, you can have a 16X write amplification in the worst case.
However, if you do write combining of subblocks with wear leveling as I described in my naive CS101 approach, you could have a 4K OS block with 64K native SSD blocks and the SSD will do writecombining with a 4K subblock size and separated journaling for the subblock. The result is write amplification that was very close to 1X (rather than 16X). This is how I think Intel is getting away with the claim of 1.04-1.10X write amplification.
Seek times are very important with virtual memory though and modern games are able to push the memory limits of current machines. Furthermore, the fast seek time helps with lots of other stuff like boot time. Plus RAID-0 ain't all it's cracked up to be. I had a Dell XPS600 with RAID 0 and one of the drives went kaput. Guess what happens to all the other drives then ? They're useless. 4X drives in RAID-0 means you have four times the chance of having a dead weight for a system.
FWIW, this article recommends the Velociraptor over SSDs for gamers. The Velociraptor either beats or is close to SSD's in many benchmarks and the price per GB is at least an order of magnitude less.
BTW, the Blitter analogy isn't so good because today's hardware often has scatter/gather technology for fetching reads where it can combine many smaller blocks into a what appears to be a larger single virtual block for the read.
Even tech without this will usually allow lists or queued fetching to hide the overhead of many little fetches.
The important thing is to have the subblock size to be at least large enough that the time penalty for switching native blocks is minimal compared to the actual time of reading the subblock.
You never want to defrag SSD's. It just wears out the disk.
A good SSD has wear-leveling and write-combining techniques that keep the SSD "defragmented" automatically.
And it doesn't matter if the FS clusters are far apart as long as they are close to the SSD's hardware cluster sizes or the SSD intelligently combines them (which is what I believe Intel is doing since they claim a write amplification of only 1.1).
It's possible that the Samsung SLC chip stores data for the wear-leveling and write-combining operations which would remap the MLC in a non-fragmented way.
BTW, let me give you a naive wear-leveling / write-combining algorithm. I'm sure Intel has a better one because they've invested millions of dollars of research and the one I'm about to present to you could be done by a CS101 student:
1) You have a bit more than 80GB free for an 80GB drive (extra memory to take care of bad sectors just like a normal hard drive plus a small amount of required for the wear-leveling / writecombining)
2) You treat most of the storage as a ring buffer that consists of blocks on two levels: the native block size and a subblock size. The remaining storage (or alternate storage which may be the Samsung SLC chip on the MLC drives) is used to journal your writes and wear-leveling.
3) You combine all writes aligned to the subblock size into a native block and write them out to the next free native block in the ring buffer and keep a counter for the write to the block. If you run into a used block, and increment a counter (for wear levelling) and if the counter is below a certain value, you skip it to the next free block, otherwise you move the used block (which has been stagnent) to a more frequently writtento free block (which will now take less of a burden since it's had a stagnant block moved into it).
4) Anytime you make a write, the new sectors are updated in the memory area used for journaling / wear-level / sector remapping.
Assuming your reads can be done fairly quickly at the subblock level, it never matters if you have to "seek" for the reads and the drive won't fragment on writes because they are combined into native block sizes.
Yup - which means the cost of a single SSD drive will be about 25-30% higher or $900-$1000.
I'm happy my WD Velociraptor for right now. The Velociraptor is $300 for 300GB which is still steep but it beat or matched the tested SSD's in quite a few tests.
The Velociraptor even beat the Intel SSD in several tests such as Windows Boot time (and it creamed it on anything that involved large amounts of writing / content creation since the Velociraptor gets 107MB/s write compared to 80MB/s).
Obama, paraphrased, "I can spend more money in a month on my campaign than her whole town can in a year."
Wasilla only has a $13M budget for 2008. BTW, the RNC has about $75M to spend on the presidential election and McCain is taking $84M in public funds. That means McCain & the RNC have 60 days to spend nearly $160M. That's the entire Wasilla budget every 5 days.
I think Obama will have to spend a little more than the Wasilla budget monthly to even begin to keep up with that.
FWIW, I actually agree with her that selling the plane was probably a good thing and probably did save the state of Alaska money and they may or may not have sold it at market cost.
My problem with the whole thing is she is telling the story in an intentionally misleading fashion (which I consider dishonest) and McCain is actually telling untrue statements when he repeats the story (i.e. that it sold on eBay for a profit).
I don't know about you but expecting Factually Correct and Honest Non-Misleading statements from the "Straight Talk Express" shouldn't be too much to ask.
No, the guy is a troll and probably a liar. He claims to be "lifelong liberal" but he's also vigilantly defending Palin on multiple threads. I was pointing out the flaws in his logic when he said it's ok for palin to mislead & mccain to lie but obama should be brought to task for selective statements about his past. That's not something a liberal would say.
Based on my interest in the truth?
I'm not sure what your interest in the truth is. You claim to be a liberal but you slam Obama for being selective about the truth without providing a concrete example while defending Republicans for the same behavior when a specific example of them making misleading statements (Palin) and outright untruths (McCain) has been presented to you.
As a lifelong liberal, even I am disgusted at this smear campaign. It's okay for Obama to be selective about stories from the past, but not for Palin?
Based on statements like that, I'd guess you're trolling.
OK, you were right about Heckmann. CBS News is wrong using the word 'brokered' to describe Harris's relationship to the deal. Harris was responsible for introducing Reynolds and Heckmann and smoothing the deal through at a lower than market price.
BTW, the market price was about 2.4 Million
Heckmann suggested the asking price of $2,450,000, based on the current jet market.
BTW, I like how the ktuu link you posted basically said that trying to sell the jet on EBay was a bad idea. It certainly brings Palin's executive judgement into question:
He has placed ads in corporate jet publications and on selected websites.
E-Bay isn't one of them.
"You don't market an airplane like this on E-Bay. The type of people who access E-Bay to buy something like... it's not there," Heckmann said.
I'm not sure about the Heckmann thing... I'll have to look it up. The CBS news site said explicitly that the deal was brokered by Harris and the Tribune certainly implied that he at least set up the deal if he didn't explicitly broker it.
As a lifelong liberal, even I am disgusted at this smear campaign. It's okay for Obama to be selective about stories from the past, but not for Palin?
You certainly don't sound like one.
BTW, I don't think it's right for any politician to be selective or misleading. If Obama is saying lies or misleading statements, then Shame on him. And yes, I'd hope the press would point out his inconsistencies or untruths. That should be the job of the forth estate.
I agree that Palin pledged to get rid of the plane and she did -- good for her for keeping a campaign promise. However, she is spinning the story in a misleading way and McCain has made outright untruths about the story. Shame on both of them.
I personally hope that all politicians should be expected to tell not only the truth, but the truth in a straightforward manner so it doesn't mean the exact opposite of what it sounds like it's supposed to mean. Isn't that the whole idea behind the "Straight Talk Expresss" ?!?
Well, FUD to you too.
As far as FUD goes, can we at least agree that the way McCain is spinning the story is totally untrue (sold_on_ebay != true && made_profit != true).
Furthermore, while what Palin said was true (put_on_ebay == true), shall we also agree the statement is only partially the truth and very misleading as to the actual circumstances of the sale.
Sorry, I should quote my sources. The $300K below market came from the Chicago Tribune. I'm sure you will continue to say that number is just "spin" though because all the press is "liberal media" trying to smear Palin rather than an actual attempt to get news out about an unknown candidate who's suddenly a possible VP for our nation.
Instead, the 23-year-old 10-seat Westwind II was sold in August 2007 for $2.1 million to a Valdez, Alaska, entrepreneur; that's about $300,000 less than a broker's asking price, according to news accounts. -- Chicago Tribune
Sarah Palin did not need the jet because she could drive to work. However, there are areas of Alaska where there are only two forms of transportation: airplanes and boat. Any Alaskan can tell you that air transportation would be a necessity for a governor who lived in one of those areas since boat is too slow for state business. However, there is no reason such a governor could not use public air flights instead of a private jet.
BTW, there is one small mistake in my post, the entrepeneur is not named Valdez but from Valdez. His name is Larry Reynolds and he is a good friend of Republican speaker of the Alaska House, John L. Harris, who brokered the no-bid deal. Reynolds made campaign contributions to both Palin and Harris in 2006 and 2007.
If you were a data recovery company, you would gain an ENORMOUS reputation if you were to complete the challenge. And the cost? Shipping.
And if you take the challenge and fail and the challenge holders print that your company was unable to recover data from such a simple change to the drive, you could lose all your business and ruin your reputation.
Yup... data recovery fees are in the hundreds of $$$ per drive... not a measely $40. Typically data recovery places do one of two things.... 1) run software tools on the drive if the electronics work. 2) if the drive electronics are broken, substitute a board from a similar drive and run the same tools. #2 will cost you much more than #1.
Also, if you want to get data off a drive that is written to with zeros (i.e. if the US gov't had a drive with sensitive data from terrorists), they could do it if they had the appropriate millions of dollars of equipment including using a clean room lab, disassembling the drive, removing the platters, and scanning the platters with a microscopic tipped probe that could measure and map the magnetic fields at various depths on the drive.
Now do you think you're gonna get hundreds (or thousands) of dollars of recovery service from already busy firms using multi-million dollar equipment for a $40 prize -- probably not. If you offer a $1,000,000 X-Prize for data recovery, I bet you get some seriuous takers.
They sure can do alot with tubes in Alaska
Hey... she knows how to use EBay***
*** Sarah Palin remarked on her ability to reduce graft by putting a state-owned luxury jet worth $2.7 million dollars on EBay.
Technically, she told the truth -- her exact quote in her speech was "That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay."
The whole truth is that the jet never sold on EBay. Sure she "put it on EBay", but if failed to actually ** SELL **. The jet only received one bid and that fell through -- apparently the buyer wasn't "vetted" thoroughly.
Instead, the plane was sold for $2.1M to Republican entrepeneur Valdez in a no-bid transaction that basically had no oversight at a $600K loss from the original purchase price.
The same plane sells on the open market through airplane brokers for about $2.4M. Still the $2.1M sale price was $300K below the price she should have expected on the open market if she went through a broker than doing it herself on EBay -- which contrary to Republican opinion, EBay is not the best marketplace to sell a luxury commercial quality jet.
But selling off a gov't resource to a rich friend of a fellow republican at $300K below market value in a no-bid transaction doesn't sound nearly as down to earth as, "she sold a luxury jet on E-Bay because she likes to drive to work".
Wanna know how McCain is telling this story now : "You know what i enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold* it on eBay â" made a profit*," McCain said, introducing Palin. (*Technically not true statements)
. . . Nope, it didn't *SELL* on EBay and it certainly didn't make a profit . . .
when so-called "sceptics"
I'm going to consider "sceptics" to be a snigglet of "sceptors" and "septic" systems, such that a "sceptic" would be a king upon his thrown.
Not that I'm sexist, there are female "sceptics" as well.
And you can be as skeptic as you want about that.
Physical access does mean you can basically do anything - especially if you can get access to the raw hd / ssd / cf mem / etc.
FTA: 'If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,'
I also see no reason why you can't replace the word "Windows" in the above sentece with "*NIX". I mean, if you're a competent *NIX admistrator/developer with physical access to the machine, chances are you could muck with it quite a bit as well.
The problem is that, like it or not, evolution touches on an area of belief where science and religion do intersect.
This may be true but Astronomy also touches on areas where science and religious belief (Astrology) intersects.
There are three important things to remember:
1) Where a subject touches both science and religion, teach the science in science classes (i.e. Evolution) and the religion (Creationism myths) in a social or historical context.
2) Just because a science "touches on" a religious belief (conflicts with it) doesn't make it any less of a science. If you feel that way, you should reject heliocentrism and go hang out with flat-earthers.
3) I.D. touches on religious beliefs. There is no real science at it's core. Evolution may touch on science and religious beliefs but it is based on a huge volume of sound science.