The point of raid is that if you lose a hard drive you don't have to have half a day of downtime as you restore backups and then possibly deal with the data loss due to non real time backups. This is MORE important on a small server where you likely lack the staff and backups systems for a fast restore of some sort. I've had two hard drives die in an old server but thanks to Raid 5 I simply plugged in a spare with no real downtime or headaches.
Raid 1 on a desktop is sure better than spending half the day reinstalling an os, restoring data from backups and all the related headaches. It's also rather hard to fuck up a raid 1 array as each hard drive can at worst be run on its own.
I'd be tempted to say that the problem may be partially on your end either due to having improper conditions (heat, etc.) or bad power/power supplies. Likewise if you get hard drives with a 1 or 3 year warranty then don't expect too much from them (I mean if they're dead in a year then you're not out much as the warranty should cover them... well unless you buy some dirt cheap refurbished 90-day warranty pos).
Personally I backup all my data to a server running raid 1 (hard drives are relatively cheap and raid 1 is simpler to deal with in case of failure imho) daily and plan to back up important stuff onto DVDs. If you really need the space then raid 5 is better and I'd assume that with a good controller the performance hit isn't large at all.
I'd like to add that I'm not really paranoid as so far the fact that I do have such options is due to purely luck and favorable circumstances (inheritance leading to property/money outside US, unfavorable conversion rates so money is left outside US, immigrant leading to dual citizenship, etc.). Granted I plan to at least somewhat expand that on purpose but likely it'd just more side effects of other things than something I pursue of its own right.
Nope, no kids but it doesn't matter. My point was that in many ways I don't care if the US or EU implode or become insane dictatorships as long as one of their member states remains relatively sane (I'm starting to question if that is a good assumption but thats a different point).
People are inherently and irrationally afraid of change and taking chances, which doesn't mean that either of those is inherently a bad decision. My whole extended family is filled with recent immigrants, including my own parents, and between them they have moved with kids of every age and number. Is it difficult? Somewhat. Is it horribly bad for the family? Not really. They I should note didn't have anything planned when they came over and yet they all did relatively well. Like I said before, I hope to at least have some exit plan that would give me solid odds of finding employment and housing in whatever country I'd run away to.
Really, the biggest problem I see would be convincing my wife, if I have one, to move. Not that it matters when I talk about this I'm not talking about the "OMG Patriot Act" style problems but the "OMG Peaceful protesters are getting tortured daily" scenario. I wouldn't want to raise a family in such a location period, it'd be insanity to do so if I could at all avoid it (and extra $50k a year is worthless if my kids are turned into pro-government zombies in school).
The point of my statement was that I have virtually no nationalism, available options to move (dual US and EU citizen, money and property in both), the ability to succeed in a new locale and a goal of ensuring I have such options always open to me. Its a sort of implied paranoia but it means I don't have to personally care as much if my or any country goes down the shitter.
Newegg does and signing up is rather trivial actually, the bitch is remembering the password (assuming I'm thinking of the right system). It takes me a lot longer to add an alternative (shipping) address to the CC and many websites require that (including some whose incompetence at being able to check it leaves me shocked).
Interest rates? Likely there are a lot of cc debts which are simply never paid off. Furthermore its not like anyone has to pay interest rates, its not that hard to realize that CC are not free money and that the balance should be paid off each month. There are some exceptions to that (school, emergencies, etc.) but I doubt most CC interest charges are from them.
It's not "greedy" to want to be able to clothe your children AND keep your home.
They could rent or move. For a grain of security we will make ourselves slaves. Of course in this case they value their economic security over a, by most people's views, minimal loss of freedom. They're human, nothing more and nothing less. I'd likely do the same as I am human after all as well and its not like I see much choice. Then again I do accept that I'm somewhat of a heartless bastard.
I can only look at this with quasi-objectivity because it doesn't concern me and I'm just noting how I see it all ending. And I'm sleep deprived which makes my thought processes odd and at times incomprehensible even to me.
Personally I care only marginally, as of now I have hedged my bets across to continents. If I brush up on Spanish and learn some Chinese that may grow to three or four. I am intelligent enough (if I'm anything close to my father then it'll be more than enough) to be capable of, well in a few years at least, starting anew in most countries. If I make some contacts in the future then I'll be able to start anew with only a small loss of position (well accounting for the general world economic depression that'd result in anything major enough to cause me to move that far).
Welcome to modern western reality, no one remembers suffering or servitude or living under a real dictatorship. Liberals and conservatives both wish to rape our freedom for their own causes and while taking different roads the end results are essentially equivalent. All hail big brother, just hope your propaganda poster doesn't have a fly on it or its off to prison for you (cookie if anyone gets what book I'm referring to loosely).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." If its not people forget about it, they ignore it and the threat is no longer real to them. People have always been more than willing to give up freedom for security, imaginary or temporary or even false. Most either don't see or don't care about the threat of doing so, the inevitable loss of security that they will suffer in the long term.
We are a blind, greedy and irrational species. Maybe after another dozen centuries of dictatorships, monarchies, torture and servitude we will again fight for true freedom.
Then you make no sense, to do that would require lowering what constitutes cutting edge (ie: performances at the cost of everything). If you do that then you may as well just buy a less than cutting edge system and in the end you come out mostly the same. That statement would only make sense if there were no lower power options yet there are, and power consumption is a major problem for chip makers (when its not you get things like the cray).
Neither do the millions of others like it.
Yet again you make no sense, your statement would only be non-idiotic if no such power supplies existed and yet most systems do in fact have such power supplies. So now, you want portability and something else? See above for why that is stupid.
How about something a little more constructive next time?
Well, mostly I'm wondering wtf you're talking about as much of it makes little logical sense. Now if any of it did make some sense I could add constructive comments but as to me it doesn't I can simply point out what is wrong.
They don't have to be efficient. The wasted heat is used in the building so there is effectively no waste. Any electricity generated is just an added bonus.
That may work in some place, some of the time. In most places that extra heat will have to be vented out somewhere as you don't want your house to be a furnace. Back in NY we shut off the heaters as the small amount of heat coming from the pipes passing by the walls, good insulation, sunlight and our own heat production more than sufficed (I had to open the windows at night in December when I visited). Then you have problems with reliability (thus costs and need for backup heating systems), safety and noise (need to keep that puppy quite).
Note how the countries where such systems exist are the ones that are actually in need of them most of the year, heats not something you want when you're running the AC over half the year.
I'm sure some solar heating would more than suffice for water heating and even house heating in most places. Honestly, if you're going to add something that will do everything you want it to with good reliability then I'd just go add some solar panels and solar water heating then call it a day.
Ah but what is your solution then? Since private ownership of things like water and air isn't exactly feasible what do you propose? All these problems we talk about are those impacting areas whose ownership cannot be restricted by their very nature (air and water flows around).
So yes his comparison is perfectly justified, for the problems in question you yourself seem to admit no capitalistic solution by your failure to actually challenge his point.
I remember that when this was first posted on slashdot a very pathetic energy savings was listed, to the effect that the costs needed to implement the change would likely be much more expensive than any savings. I'm starting to dislike democracy I think, society run by idiots for idiots.
And if I remember (read this a while back) the expected energy saving were downright pathetic, the costs of dealing with the time zone change likely being more expensive than any "savings" (dollar wise). If that low number is true then in all honesty DST it doesn't matter anymore in modern society, the bill is political padding and worse than worthless.
Let me repeat: Good documentation, granted it seems better now than a year ago. I mean the Session Store docs by Mozilla are incomplete and I think wrong in some places to boot, granted its nice to have something.
As it stands now 80+% of the time when I'm looking for how to do something non-trivial I need find an extension that does it or try to find it in the FF source code. Sure I look through the Mozilla documentation, search a few forums and search the xul docs (and google which does about the same thing as the previous three) but usually it'd be faster to just find an extension that already does it and copy the code. This includes things that should be trivial as well, sadly.
As someone told me before regarding this problem: "I wish they had docs like the PHP ones" (which include user comments on every page/function that usually contain specific example code). There needs to be a central places that explains: -In detail the high and low level design of FF, xul and so on. -Lists all the interesting ways to do things, and what can be done and how -In detail describe any important methods/files/etc. that one is likely to access. Any relevant code or example should be included as well, either as comments or on the page itself.
I am right now working on an extension (to group tabs) that has been requested by many people, in many places for the last 9+ months. In that time no one has done work on the idea (a half dozen design proposals, some detailed, have been made), the idea has only been touched partially by one extension and that extension is a non FF2 compatible mess. A working implementation took me a day or two to get done and it would have been less time but I was rusty at coding and extension dev. Someone should have made this extension months ago, it isn't overtly complex even and something is damn wrong imho that no has touched the idea till now.
The thing however is that I don't blame them, developing extensions casually (ie: not wanting to know every detail of how FF works) imho involves spending half your time bashing your head against a wall (metaphorically and at times literately).
Only thing I wish was if they made a good set of centralized documentation for extension development. There are many people who simply give up on extensions because the whole process is such a giant PITA. Hell, some of the fucking documentation is plain wrong unless I'm reading it wrong (like session store and when it does certain things) which is even worse. Other parts are incomprehensible on their own. Finding out how to do something non-trivial should not involve searching five+ different locations (forums, 2+ websites, googling for good measure, other extension's source code, firefox source code).
I mean given the extensions are pretty much Firefox's only strength (Opera is leaner, faster and has more built in features) you'd think they'd put a lot more effort into making it as easy as possible for people to make them.
I'm a Stats major and professors enjoy once in a while talking about the bad stats they've seen in published papers. One such paper, in a journal that was a described as "if it publishes your paper you're nearly guaranteed tenure in the field," used statistical methods that were inherently flawed (it downright failed on simple examples).
Another one published in a prestigious journal and with a few million in government backing found 100+ genes that were significantly linked to cancer. The statistics was the type that anyone who has taken even a couple courses could find flaws in. So someone redid the analysis and found ~8 such genes at best and possibly fewer. Due to the profile of this one the proper analysis is being done as a follow-up with the original researchers help (otherwise the flaws would have been much harder to identify).
So yeah, published papers can and do have flaws but they usually they get caught after a while, the point of publishing in some ways. At the same time more researchers should release their data so it can be verified more accurately (this has its own problems as if too many people run too many methods on the same data there will be spurious results of one sort or another).
Yeah and they'd argue that it is impossible for someone to have used your phone, despite it being quite possible to copy a fingerprint. I believe insurance companies did that regarding some "unbreakable" security systems/locks in cars (ie: we're not paying because despite you claiming your car was stolen we claim such an act is impossible so go stfu).
Given how damn thin the Martian atmosphere is you're likely to get a lot more power per mass (you need proteins, proper coating to keep them from degrading, power pickup systems, methods to replace them when they fail, etc.) by just taking an extra RTG with you. If the expedition is sane they'd have dragged a full nuclear power plant with them anyway so power would likely be the last of their worries. I mean they'd need some sort of massive generator as getting the molecules from Martian soil as is I think planned probably will take quite a bit of energy. And hell, this is Mars where you'd likely need to bury yourself under the soil to keep the radiation away.
the only reason they even mention this is because they're trying to suck grant money out of the government due to Bush's vision of Mars or whatever.
Happened at work once, security system was accidentally disabled (its phone line was unplugged and plugged back in, the thing didn't reconnect or something). I think it took them a few days to call back or it may have been us who called them first, not sure. Either way, if someone had done this on purpose the system would have done us jack shit worth of good.
Honestly I'm amazed that security systems don't assume a disconnect of over x minutes should result in some sort of immediate response. I mean, if cutting the phone line renders the system worthless then what sort of protection is that given many phone lines can be cut from outside the house.
While setting policies on what patrons can and can't do with these resources will undoubtedly result in some arbitrary and inconsistent policy
Compared to arbitrary and inconsistent fines levied against libraries by local police? Or do you mean broad handed banning of anything remotely "social networking" like say wikipedia because some DA is an attention whore and idiot?
Go find some fascists paradise to live in and leave those of us who don't want big brother watching us crap alone. God knows that 99.9% percent of people who complain about such things would never go talk to the head of the library about, write them a letter or propose to them how they could go about fixing the problem. Oh wait I forgot, this is slashdot and the very thought of real live social interaction makes most of the people here get a heart attack.
Not really. The United States is a very strong diplomatic ally, and has been since WWII. We tend to put up with that kind of shit.:)
And terrorism is a dire problem so we put up with the dire shit of shipping people off to CIA prisons for the good of everybody. It doesn't make it any better, just lets people sleep with a fuzzy feeling of their wrong actions being justified.
Evil people don't say they're evil, they almost always have a reason to justify their actions or even to claim they were in the right.
What I was alluding to was merely the current state of affairs where most Americans are more than happy to go on smug tirades on how much more free their country is, even thought there are currently dire problems with civil liberties in the United States.
And that is new how? I mean we've had civil liberties problems with communism, socialism, blacks, jews, any non-whites, drugs, the mentally ill/undesirable (we had eugenics till the 70s), the poor, terrorists, the japanese, immigrants and probably a few other groups.
I see it as downright stupid to say this is some sort of amazing new problem that is decimating civil liberties while implying that the US was a blessed land of civil liberties in comparison beforehand. Stupid as in the person saying it is an idiot as by their own logic the US is only marginally worse than it was in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of raid is that if you lose a hard drive you don't have to have half a day of downtime as you restore backups and then possibly deal with the data loss due to non real time backups. This is MORE important on a small server where you likely lack the staff and backups systems for a fast restore of some sort. I've had two hard drives die in an old server but thanks to Raid 5 I simply plugged in a spare with no real downtime or headaches.
Raid 1 on a desktop is sure better than spending half the day reinstalling an os, restoring data from backups and all the related headaches. It's also rather hard to fuck up a raid 1 array as each hard drive can at worst be run on its own.
I'd be tempted to say that the problem may be partially on your end either due to having improper conditions (heat, etc.) or bad power/power supplies. Likewise if you get hard drives with a 1 or 3 year warranty then don't expect too much from them (I mean if they're dead in a year then you're not out much as the warranty should cover them... well unless you buy some dirt cheap refurbished 90-day warranty pos).
Personally I backup all my data to a server running raid 1 (hard drives are relatively cheap and raid 1 is simpler to deal with in case of failure imho) daily and plan to back up important stuff onto DVDs. If you really need the space then raid 5 is better and I'd assume that with a good controller the performance hit isn't large at all.
I'd like to add that I'm not really paranoid as so far the fact that I do have such options is due to purely luck and favorable circumstances (inheritance leading to property/money outside US, unfavorable conversion rates so money is left outside US, immigrant leading to dual citizenship, etc.). Granted I plan to at least somewhat expand that on purpose but likely it'd just more side effects of other things than something I pursue of its own right.
Nope, no kids but it doesn't matter. My point was that in many ways I don't care if the US or EU implode or become insane dictatorships as long as one of their member states remains relatively sane (I'm starting to question if that is a good assumption but thats a different point).
People are inherently and irrationally afraid of change and taking chances, which doesn't mean that either of those is inherently a bad decision. My whole extended family is filled with recent immigrants, including my own parents, and between them they have moved with kids of every age and number. Is it difficult? Somewhat. Is it horribly bad for the family? Not really. They I should note didn't have anything planned when they came over and yet they all did relatively well. Like I said before, I hope to at least have some exit plan that would give me solid odds of finding employment and housing in whatever country I'd run away to.
Really, the biggest problem I see would be convincing my wife, if I have one, to move. Not that it matters when I talk about this I'm not talking about the "OMG Patriot Act" style problems but the "OMG Peaceful protesters are getting tortured daily" scenario. I wouldn't want to raise a family in such a location period, it'd be insanity to do so if I could at all avoid it (and extra $50k a year is worthless if my kids are turned into pro-government zombies in school).
The point of my statement was that I have virtually no nationalism, available options to move (dual US and EU citizen, money and property in both), the ability to succeed in a new locale and a goal of ensuring I have such options always open to me. Its a sort of implied paranoia but it means I don't have to personally care as much if my or any country goes down the shitter.
no one uses VBV
Newegg does and signing up is rather trivial actually, the bitch is remembering the password (assuming I'm thinking of the right system). It takes me a lot longer to add an alternative (shipping) address to the CC and many websites require that (including some whose incompetence at being able to check it leaves me shocked).
Why are credit card rates so high?
Interest rates? Likely there are a lot of cc debts which are simply never paid off. Furthermore its not like anyone has to pay interest rates, its not that hard to realize that CC are not free money and that the balance should be paid off each month. There are some exceptions to that (school, emergencies, etc.) but I doubt most CC interest charges are from them.
It's not "greedy" to want to be able to clothe your children AND keep your home.
They could rent or move. For a grain of security we will make ourselves slaves. Of course in this case they value their economic security over a, by most people's views, minimal loss of freedom. They're human, nothing more and nothing less. I'd likely do the same as I am human after all as well and its not like I see much choice. Then again I do accept that I'm somewhat of a heartless bastard.
I can only look at this with quasi-objectivity because it doesn't concern me and I'm just noting how I see it all ending. And I'm sleep deprived which makes my thought processes odd and at times incomprehensible even to me.
Personally I care only marginally, as of now I have hedged my bets across to continents. If I brush up on Spanish and learn some Chinese that may grow to three or four. I am intelligent enough (if I'm anything close to my father then it'll be more than enough) to be capable of, well in a few years at least, starting anew in most countries. If I make some contacts in the future then I'll be able to start anew with only a small loss of position (well accounting for the general world economic depression that'd result in anything major enough to cause me to move that far).
Welcome to modern western reality, no one remembers suffering or servitude or living under a real dictatorship. Liberals and conservatives both wish to rape our freedom for their own causes and while taking different roads the end results are essentially equivalent. All hail big brother, just hope your propaganda poster doesn't have a fly on it or its off to prison for you (cookie if anyone gets what book I'm referring to loosely).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." If its not people forget about it, they ignore it and the threat is no longer real to them. People have always been more than willing to give up freedom for security, imaginary or temporary or even false. Most either don't see or don't care about the threat of doing so, the inevitable loss of security that they will suffer in the long term.
We are a blind, greedy and irrational species. Maybe after another dozen centuries of dictatorships, monarchies, torture and servitude we will again fight for true freedom.
What GoDaddy debacle? I'm curious as I have domains registered with them.
To prevent you from having as many options and thus being as likely to switch to another registrar as soon as you heard what was coming?
Why yes, I do.
Then you make no sense, to do that would require lowering what constitutes cutting edge (ie: performances at the cost of everything). If you do that then you may as well just buy a less than cutting edge system and in the end you come out mostly the same. That statement would only make sense if there were no lower power options yet there are, and power consumption is a major problem for chip makers (when its not you get things like the cray).
Neither do the millions of others like it.
Yet again you make no sense, your statement would only be non-idiotic if no such power supplies existed and yet most systems do in fact have such power supplies. So now, you want portability and something else? See above for why that is stupid.
How about something a little more constructive next time?
Well, mostly I'm wondering wtf you're talking about as much of it makes little logical sense. Now if any of it did make some sense I could add constructive comments but as to me it doesn't I can simply point out what is wrong.
While we're wishing, how about a decent performing processor that doesn't put out waste heat or require a heat sink?
Get a laptop (or a laptop cpu) or one of those small via things, oh wait you want cutting edge performance AND low heat production.
How about a power supply that only draws as much power as is required to run the attached equipment?
What the fuck DO you think power supplies do, baring some minimal constant loss?
How about a respectably sized solid state hard drive to replace the millions of spindles running between 5000 and 15000 RPM around the world?
Hard drives don't take much to keep spinning.
They don't have to be efficient. The wasted heat is used in the building so there is effectively no waste. Any electricity generated is just an added bonus.
That may work in some place, some of the time. In most places that extra heat will have to be vented out somewhere as you don't want your house to be a furnace. Back in NY we shut off the heaters as the small amount of heat coming from the pipes passing by the walls, good insulation, sunlight and our own heat production more than sufficed (I had to open the windows at night in December when I visited). Then you have problems with reliability (thus costs and need for backup heating systems), safety and noise (need to keep that puppy quite).
Note how the countries where such systems exist are the ones that are actually in need of them most of the year, heats not something you want when you're running the AC over half the year.
I'm sure some solar heating would more than suffice for water heating and even house heating in most places. Honestly, if you're going to add something that will do everything you want it to with good reliability then I'd just go add some solar panels and solar water heating then call it a day.
Ah but what is your solution then? Since private ownership of things like water and air isn't exactly feasible what do you propose? All these problems we talk about are those impacting areas whose ownership cannot be restricted by their very nature (air and water flows around).
So yes his comparison is perfectly justified, for the problems in question you yourself seem to admit no capitalistic solution by your failure to actually challenge his point.
I remember that when this was first posted on slashdot a very pathetic energy savings was listed, to the effect that the costs needed to implement the change would likely be much more expensive than any savings. I'm starting to dislike democracy I think, society run by idiots for idiots.
And if I remember (read this a while back) the expected energy saving were downright pathetic, the costs of dealing with the time zone change likely being more expensive than any "savings" (dollar wise). If that low number is true then in all honesty DST it doesn't matter anymore in modern society, the bill is political padding and worse than worthless.
Let me repeat: Good documentation, granted it seems better now than a year ago. I mean the Session Store docs by Mozilla are incomplete and I think wrong in some places to boot, granted its nice to have something.
As it stands now 80+% of the time when I'm looking for how to do something non-trivial I need find an extension that does it or try to find it in the FF source code. Sure I look through the Mozilla documentation, search a few forums and search the xul docs (and google which does about the same thing as the previous three) but usually it'd be faster to just find an extension that already does it and copy the code. This includes things that should be trivial as well, sadly.
As someone told me before regarding this problem: "I wish they had docs like the PHP ones" (which include user comments on every page/function that usually contain specific example code). There needs to be a central places that explains:
-In detail the high and low level design of FF, xul and so on.
-Lists all the interesting ways to do things, and what can be done and how
-In detail describe any important methods/files/etc. that one is likely to access. Any relevant code or example should be included as well, either as comments or on the page itself.
I am right now working on an extension (to group tabs) that has been requested by many people, in many places for the last 9+ months. In that time no one has done work on the idea (a half dozen design proposals, some detailed, have been made), the idea has only been touched partially by one extension and that extension is a non FF2 compatible mess. A working implementation took me a day or two to get done and it would have been less time but I was rusty at coding and extension dev. Someone should have made this extension months ago, it isn't overtly complex even and something is damn wrong imho that no has touched the idea till now.
The thing however is that I don't blame them, developing extensions casually (ie: not wanting to know every detail of how FF works) imho involves spending half your time bashing your head against a wall (metaphorically and at times literately).
Only thing I wish was if they made a good set of centralized documentation for extension development. There are many people who simply give up on extensions because the whole process is such a giant PITA. Hell, some of the fucking documentation is plain wrong unless I'm reading it wrong (like session store and when it does certain things) which is even worse. Other parts are incomprehensible on their own. Finding out how to do something non-trivial should not involve searching five+ different locations (forums, 2+ websites, googling for good measure, other extension's source code, firefox source code).
I mean given the extensions are pretty much Firefox's only strength (Opera is leaner, faster and has more built in features) you'd think they'd put a lot more effort into making it as easy as possible for people to make them.
I'm a Stats major and professors enjoy once in a while talking about the bad stats they've seen in published papers. One such paper, in a journal that was a described as "if it publishes your paper you're nearly guaranteed tenure in the field," used statistical methods that were inherently flawed (it downright failed on simple examples).
Another one published in a prestigious journal and with a few million in government backing found 100+ genes that were significantly linked to cancer. The statistics was the type that anyone who has taken even a couple courses could find flaws in. So someone redid the analysis and found ~8 such genes at best and possibly fewer. Due to the profile of this one the proper analysis is being done as a follow-up with the original researchers help (otherwise the flaws would have been much harder to identify).
So yeah, published papers can and do have flaws but they usually they get caught after a while, the point of publishing in some ways. At the same time more researchers should release their data so it can be verified more accurately (this has its own problems as if too many people run too many methods on the same data there will be spurious results of one sort or another).
Yeah and they'd argue that it is impossible for someone to have used your phone, despite it being quite possible to copy a fingerprint. I believe insurance companies did that regarding some "unbreakable" security systems/locks in cars (ie: we're not paying because despite you claiming your car was stolen we claim such an act is impossible so go stfu).
Given how damn thin the Martian atmosphere is you're likely to get a lot more power per mass (you need proteins, proper coating to keep them from degrading, power pickup systems, methods to replace them when they fail, etc.) by just taking an extra RTG with you. If the expedition is sane they'd have dragged a full nuclear power plant with them anyway so power would likely be the last of their worries. I mean they'd need some sort of massive generator as getting the molecules from Martian soil as is I think planned probably will take quite a bit of energy. And hell, this is Mars where you'd likely need to bury yourself under the soil to keep the radiation away.
the only reason they even mention this is because they're trying to suck grant money out of the government due to Bush's vision of Mars or whatever.
Happened at work once, security system was accidentally disabled (its phone line was unplugged and plugged back in, the thing didn't reconnect or something). I think it took them a few days to call back or it may have been us who called them first, not sure. Either way, if someone had done this on purpose the system would have done us jack shit worth of good.
Honestly I'm amazed that security systems don't assume a disconnect of over x minutes should result in some sort of immediate response. I mean, if cutting the phone line renders the system worthless then what sort of protection is that given many phone lines can be cut from outside the house.
While setting policies on what patrons can and can't do with these resources will undoubtedly result in some arbitrary and inconsistent policy
Compared to arbitrary and inconsistent fines levied against libraries by local police? Or do you mean broad handed banning of anything remotely "social networking" like say wikipedia because some DA is an attention whore and idiot?
Go find some fascists paradise to live in and leave those of us who don't want big brother watching us crap alone. God knows that 99.9% percent of people who complain about such things would never go talk to the head of the library about, write them a letter or propose to them how they could go about fixing the problem. Oh wait I forgot, this is slashdot and the very thought of real live social interaction makes most of the people here get a heart attack.
Not really. The United States is a very strong diplomatic ally, and has been since WWII. We tend to put up with that kind of shit. :)
And terrorism is a dire problem so we put up with the dire shit of shipping people off to CIA prisons for the good of everybody. It doesn't make it any better, just lets people sleep with a fuzzy feeling of their wrong actions being justified.
Evil people don't say they're evil, they almost always have a reason to justify their actions or even to claim they were in the right.
What I was alluding to was merely the current state of affairs where most Americans are more than happy to go on smug tirades on how much more free their country is, even thought there are currently dire problems with civil liberties in the United States.
And that is new how? I mean we've had civil liberties problems with communism, socialism, blacks, jews, any non-whites, drugs, the mentally ill/undesirable (we had eugenics till the 70s), the poor, terrorists, the japanese, immigrants and probably a few other groups.
I see it as downright stupid to say this is some sort of amazing new problem that is decimating civil liberties while implying that the US was a blessed land of civil liberties in comparison beforehand. Stupid as in the person saying it is an idiot as by their own logic the US is only marginally worse than it was in the past.