The thing with USB3 is that nobody needs it. USB2 is plenty fast for just about anything you want to connect over USB (external hard drives, usb sticks and keyboard/mouse). For everything else it plain sucks, you need a hub and the latency is horrible and the toll on the CPU for high data transfers is horrible so you're not guaranteed a certain speed. And it's not future-proof with a single 6Gb line where 10Gb has been in data centers for years now as an interconnect for fast data.
Thunderbird is what USB3 should've been - an extension of the PCIe bus directly on the CPU. Sure it's not widely implemented yet but it's pretty darn cool what the possibilities are even in the datacenter (for compute clusters)
DeployStudio PC works very nice to deploy a machine. You create an image and then just re-deploy it - it resizes NTFS partitions correctly and have had so far no issues restoring any version of Linux or Windows with any number of partitions.
For a bootable recovery partition, you could put a small Linux (busybox) image with the ntfs tools and dd that automatically runs when you boot it.
a) Who uses CRT's still? I think the claim was about reception on TV's and phone's which would not be affected by a static magnetic field. b) Their TV would be several feet away from either the floor or the ceiling (where those metal beams would be). The weak magnetic field of those beams would have no effect. If they did, you would see all kinds of dust, tools, keys inching towards the metal beam although having your keys suspended in air would be pretty cool.
Move. Ask them to pay the difference + x% and a relocation if you think the job is long-term. You also got to think, what will happen after I finish this project with this company. Loyalty is non-existent in business, your co-workers may be friends but true friends will support you whatever decision you make.
Apparently they already decided to have 2 junior developers who would gladly take your place for bug fixing - you gotta think - is that their strategy to 'work you out' while they take 2 cheaper people instead of keeping you and hiring 1 cheaper person.
Give them notice, work it out, be a consultant if your new boss agrees on that.
You should sign every page of a contract like that. Building a house from scratch (~1500-2500 sq. ft.) is easily a $250,000-500,000 deal depending on what you want, not reading every piece of the contract or at least having a lawyer go over it is your own fault even if it costs an extra $500. If you see that your contract says that there is another piece to it, go see it before signing away 5 years of income.
Even newly built houses should have an independent building inspector come (not the one from the city as those only look to see if the house won't crash down on you). But I call baloney on the claims.
Dangerous electrical wiring has been replaced in most places (the ones where the leads run uninsulated in the spaces in the walls divided by the wooden beams). Insulation is likewise easily fixed either on the exterior or the interior. It's also been noticed lately that new, fully insulated houses might be worse for your health than those with "holes in the wall". The air gets stagnant and mold develops much easier in these super insulated houses. I just replaced ALL my windows with double pane, LoE3 glass for ~$5000 done by a professional and that alone helps a lot. The siding has insulation and the attic has been finished so all of that (floor and rafters) has insulation. Sure there is still heat pouring out here and there but it's not too bad and as I said, keeps the air from getting stagnant.
Also, most wiring issues (disconnected ground, polarity reversal) can easily be fixed usually at the socket that's misbehaving. Grounding shouldn't be an issue if the wiring has been done since the mid-60s but for really old houses you just need to re-run electricity (a $2000-$5000 job for a professional).
Extra cable and CAT5 runs (installed it last summer) behind my siding to the basement to every room. It's invisible, you just need a drill. I installed a 220V line to get a AC unit and it cools the whole house. I could've gotten it with the heating system (if you use forced air, uses the same ducts). AC is not really necessary in a lot of places, you just need to circulate air and that helps a lot, you could use the basement as a heat sink as well.
Get an inspector before you buy though, it'll cost you $100-200 but they can point out a lot of potential issues. My house had a CO leaking heater furnace (the heating elements were rusted through) something you can't see with the naked eye.
I am very familiar with the effects of strong magnetic fields. To get such an effect you would have to have an active wide-band transmitter (to affect TV's, computers and everything else that's claimed) and the power consumption of the house alone (if it's even possible to create a magnet that size with the amount of ferro-magnetic material available) would be through the roof. A magnet with that power would require supercooling and at least a couple of residential power supplies from the power company to magnetize the space of a large living room.
I think he remained an Apple employee. Either way I think he simply lives off his money earned with Apple and does a bit of screwing around and philanthropy. And why not, not everybody has to make more money, he just enjoys life (as does RMS) from what he made early in life. I wish I could just quit my day job and start companies at will.
You could also phrase it as follows: Interesting way to invest in your local economy. Trust me, the research alone will get people (certain academics) to move there.
That's fine until the index gets corrupt or any other random piece of configuration or malware disables or replaces the search engine. Also, search engines are potentially vulnerable and usually lag behind on the latest changes or uncommitted/rolled back changes.
Will it work in Safe Mode? Will it require a service? Can we make a PE version without it?
That's what I thought too when I read this news post.
I think it's going to have a bad effect on their customer base. Guess who uses the top 5% - young people and geeks, people that are 'in the know' about technology and get asked for advice often. If you satisfy the top 10% of your customer base, the rest will simply follow, piss off the wrong types of people in your customer base and the rest will simply follow.
The problem is not that organizations are large or any of that. Small shops have the same problem. The problem is management. It's a manager's job to make sure the lines of communications up/down and horizontal are open and that his team gets the resources (whether physical or not) it needs to do a better job. SOOOO many managers fail at that. Some think they are good programmers and get in the way of architecting the software, others think they are good talkers and start acting as a filter. That's why there are so many managers because 80% of them micro-manage their domain that they're inflexible at them or their team taking additional tasks.
There is no reason that most dev, QA and test teams shouldn't have a single manager while each team has their own lead. However I see often that each team has their own manager, the 3 teams have a manager, IT has their own teams, managers and there is usually another manager or 2 and a VP leading the whole "IT" governed by a CIO. That's 9 managers for a group that is maybe 20-50 people large.
The US did attack somebody in an act of war (justified or not) on Yemen sovereign territory. This could be constituted as an act of war against Yemen if their leaders are so inclined (and don't mind getting into war with the US). Funny you never see people (officially) getting shot in the head in Iran because they damn well know the repercussions would be severe.
If the US wants to play police and shoot everyone in the head that has a problem with them, they are 'free' to do so in their own sovereign territory. SWAT and police forces only shoot when there is clear and imminent danger to themselves or a person. AFAIK Awlaki had nobody at gunpoint, he merely was a recruiter for a criminal organization (or gang) and if anything they should attempt to arrest him for that. If he gets killed during an arrest 'accidentally' (like Bin Laden) that's something else but shooting somebody and his family from afar is at best cowardly and in itself an act of terrorism.
Stopping a murderer by murdering him is still murder. You can (according to most laws) only act in self defense if you're in clear and imminent danger. The US was not in 'clear and imminent' danger by keeping this nutcase alive.
It's a slippery slope when you just shoot people down because they don't agree with you or even try to engage in criminal activities or other activities you don't agree with. Many religious organizations and cults reflect that type of attitude towards those that don't agree with them (Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists,...), not clear thinking, level headed people.
You would be amazed at how much data gets lost daily because enterprises are unable to keep a working backup system.
I've worked for a web host and the more money they threw at their backup solution (this one is shiny, this one is integrated with your management platform, this one gives control to your customers, this one gives blowjobs,...) the more unpredictable it got. They would fail to complete and/or fail to notify, 1 tape would fail and apparently the metadata for the whole backup was on that 1 tape. Or it would correctly back up everything but the restore would take a week (which was suicide for a lot of dotcoms).
I eventually wrote an rsync script to backup to a disk system and told the developers how to parse the logs and deploy it. Sure it wasn't shiny, no such thing as bare metal restore and didn't have a lot of other features but it f*in worked. I then also learned that singular tapes are relatively expensive and about as reliable as a medium as your average hard drive.
If as a content owner, you want copyright on your stuff and make money out of it I feel you have to protect it on your own. The government already grants you monopoly status on the content through copyright laws but in this and many other cases copyright owners also want the government to protect them against any costs made to protect such status and put those costs back onto society which has already been deprived by the simple asserting of copyright. Copyright is a privilege, not a "right". If you can't make money off your copyrighted stuff, maybe you shouldn't have it copyrighted in the first place and it should go into public domain.
Even if sites exist that in your opinion would not exist if not funded by piracy, you should not be granted the power to deprive other people's rights (any) by taking those forums away. Piracy will continue to exist, it's inevitable at all levels, whether on the sea or your precious 'Intellectual Property'. People still bootleg alcohol into the United States, does that make all boats illegal? Does that mean because a boat is capable of doing so and especially equipped that it should be prevented from merchandising?
... the provider did offer a YouTube-type "if you tell us we'll remove it" deal but BREIN didn't want that. BREIN ultimately wanted to create a precedent where the owner of a service is solely responsible for finding out which content infringes on random copyright, remove it from their servers and from everybody else who downloaded it.
Common clinical MRI's are 1.5-3 Tesla with 3T being more and more common these days, 1.5T is only in cheaper clinics or high-end doctor offices because you can get some Toshiba and GE units second hand for very cheap ($100k), 3T's run about a million and the service contract alone runs at $100k/year. Research MRI and units with very small bores (rodent-size) can go up to 11T.
It would indeed become a missile but even in 3T, if the magnet is not actively scanning you should be able to get to it within 5 feet (don't try it, I might be off by a couple of feet) if you are strong enough to hold on to it. If it's actively scanning or you come too close, the thing will indeed go fly and hang in the middle of the field, ripping through everything that's in it's way. But even so, I don't think the data structures on the disk would be too much affected if you come within range of still being able to hold it, hard drives are enclosed.
The mass of the object (the amount of ferro-magnetic material on it) has much more to do with the missile effect than anything. A pallet jack will get sucked in much faster than a pair of glasses (I regularly felt the pull on my own glasses when in the room but then I got titanium ones). But it's dangerous nonetheless, I've seen pictures of vacuum cleaners, scissors, keys, floor buffers and even a technician being pinned against the unit by a cable (didn't kill him but it could've if it were around his neck and it left some nasty bruises)
The first Nicene Council imho was an attempt to filter out all the ones objectionable to their particular flavor of Christianity. There are many books that weren't forgeries or political, just mythical tales about several bible figures and some were even about the childhood, angry Jesus figure and some of those tales were even included in the official canon (like the flood of Noah, Jesus throwing a hissy fit and withering the olive tree). Eventually those other Christians died out (some by force) and the rest didn't really have an influence on our Western culture (although some have had influences from and influence on Eastern, Islamic and Byzantine cultures).
You also have to account that many modern archeologists have been trying to prove their flavor of Judaism or Christianity by unearthing the history with as some say "a pick in one hand and their holy books in the other".
In the end, they are ALL mythical in nature. There is no proof of a historical flood, Moses (the Egyptians should've made some note of an (illegitimate) son of the daughter of Pharaoh), the exit of millions of slaves and the demise of Pharaoh and his army should also been noted in contemporary history, if not by Egyptians at least by their neighbors, King David (all constructions attributed to him were done centuries later than the narrative), Jesus (Romans kept very good records of everyone causing upheaval, local beliefs and trials and Christians back then would've tried to obtain copies or at least referred to official documents - none do) or even a village named Nazareth (which at it's current location was only settled in the 2nd century).
The fact of the matter is that after studying Christianity for a long time and comparing it to the historical record, they do not match up. Christianity in my opinion was never about Christ, it was a sect of Judaism that came out of disagreements within their own sects (such as Paul having been raised a Pharisee) and even in the Bible you can see reflections of where some were still holding on to the law of Moses while others were moving away from it. Especially after the temple in Jerusalem got burned down the sect gained because they were basically Judaism without the expense of sacrificing 10% of your livelihood and traveling long distances to do so. Especially when the Romans were already taxing people, additional religious taxes were probably hard to justify.
Because releasing damaging information about current religious denominations is dangerous not only to the releasers but also to the psyche of their followers. Many preconceptions and interpretations about the original biblical text will have to be changed.
Same problem with proof of aliens and disproving gods. If you can prove we weren't the "chosen ones" or you can ultimately prove what actually created the universe and create life from nothing in a scientific way, a LOT of religious people will be disappointed.
I doubt trash bags would do much if any damage. They get occasionally on highways and probably float on airports as well, most likely the thing will be shredded to pieces. Even a simple phone or whatever electronics the kid had will be destroyed or knocked out of the way by either propeller or jet engine.
Yes, in practicality it doesn't change very much because thesis hardly ever get read or even taken seriously. If students find something really interesting, they won't put it in their thesis but actually co-write a paper with their professors or wait until they graduate.
However even though the librarian might get laughed at, he might be right and in the end, it's what the courts think is what matters, not a small group of academia. IF you write something REALLY interesting in your thesis like FTL travel or something that really is going to upend the scientific community (which I wouldn't recommend putting in your thesis as said above, just wait and graduate, re-do the science and write a paper on it) what is the University going to do to either clear or involve their name in it? It's about money (grant or otherwise) and image, not about science in your average University leadership.
They just won't run MS Office which is the biggest problem for most office workers. They are currently indeed in developer and embedded stage. The problem is that occasionally you want a little more horsepower (even if it's just to play Flash games) so they buy a 'normal' computer. Also there is no real support available and very little experience by your average sysadmin.
Once somebody starts doing it, the ball will get rolling. Even $200 is not bad but once Raspberry Pi runs a browser and e-mail, SSH, VNC, X and OpenOffice and basically plugs into a display without too much trouble (or is embedded into a display even better) I will be deploying them in our shared computer spaces because that's all they're for - connect to the cluster to run your jobs, check your e-mail and Facebook while you're waiting, occasionally copy something from or to a USB stick. All home directories are already on the network (NFS) so I don't really need much storage.
I was posing the question, not postulating that asthma sufferers must die for the benefit of humanity. If the other inhalers work just as good then why are they priced so high? The government has a job and that is protecting their subjects from harm. If that harm comes from the healthcare industry, then they need to be fought against. We're fighting against drugs instead of drug manufacturers, we're fighting against terrorists instead of those that destroy a country from the outside.
I agree that sending humans to the moon again as a publicity stunt is kinda useless. But even human space exploration in itself brings us much needed enhancements to existing technologies (such as life support systems, waste recycling, radiation shielding etc.).
I agree that short term, investment in other technology would benefit us more but that doesn't mean we should choose which science to fund and which we don't want to fund. If the US would just cut the massive 'defensive' (aka offensive) spending and stop hunting down the ghost of Bin Laden there would immediately be much more money available. Yeah, 1000 people might have died in a terrorist attack 10 years ago but that's much better than 10's of 1000's dying each year from cancer, many of which would've been prevented if we just would've invested in the science to replace coal as an energy source.
Either way, SSD or HDD, they fail and sometimes they fail spectacularly. I currently manage over 100TB of data combination of SSD and spinning disks. GOOD SSD's don't fail that often, it's the "cheap" crap you buy at $3/GB. Even if they do, that's what RAID, ZFS-style filesystems and backups are for. HDD's fail silently a LOT more than you imagine. About 1% of my disks each month develop 1 unrecoverable read error (which is fairly good given I read a little over 10TB from an individual disk), 3% per year fails completely. Usually nothing is wrong in SMART but once there is an issue, the data is toast anyway. I imagine a lot of latent corruption happens on consumer disks too but it doesn't get noticed.
I recommend SSD's because in a rack, they're cheaper than HDD's. 2.5" 10k RPM hard drives get about 150 IOPS, 50MB/s on most of my (very random) work loads. Getting 5000 IOPS and 150MB/s on an SSD (the 20k+ IOPS on non-RAM SSD's is marketing speak, RAM-based SSD's either come on a PCIe card at $350/GB or SAS-based come in at about $500/GB) saves a lot of space (RAID enclosures are expensive too). If you're worried a RAID1 won't do, do a 3 device mirror or a RAID1 of 2 phys. disks and RAID1 those logical disks again. Even if you kill 1/3 or 1/4 of your IOPS you're still better off.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing with USB3 is that nobody needs it. USB2 is plenty fast for just about anything you want to connect over USB (external hard drives, usb sticks and keyboard/mouse). For everything else it plain sucks, you need a hub and the latency is horrible and the toll on the CPU for high data transfers is horrible so you're not guaranteed a certain speed. And it's not future-proof with a single 6Gb line where 10Gb has been in data centers for years now as an interconnect for fast data.
Thunderbird is what USB3 should've been - an extension of the PCIe bus directly on the CPU. Sure it's not widely implemented yet but it's pretty darn cool what the possibilities are even in the datacenter (for compute clusters)
DeployStudio PC works very nice to deploy a machine. You create an image and then just re-deploy it - it resizes NTFS partitions correctly and have had so far no issues restoring any version of Linux or Windows with any number of partitions.
For a bootable recovery partition, you could put a small Linux (busybox) image with the ntfs tools and dd that automatically runs when you boot it.
a) Who uses CRT's still? I think the claim was about reception on TV's and phone's which would not be affected by a static magnetic field.
b) Their TV would be several feet away from either the floor or the ceiling (where those metal beams would be). The weak magnetic field of those beams would have no effect. If they did, you would see all kinds of dust, tools, keys inching towards the metal beam although having your keys suspended in air would be pretty cool.
Move. Ask them to pay the difference + x% and a relocation if you think the job is long-term. You also got to think, what will happen after I finish this project with this company. Loyalty is non-existent in business, your co-workers may be friends but true friends will support you whatever decision you make.
Apparently they already decided to have 2 junior developers who would gladly take your place for bug fixing - you gotta think - is that their strategy to 'work you out' while they take 2 cheaper people instead of keeping you and hiring 1 cheaper person.
Give them notice, work it out, be a consultant if your new boss agrees on that.
You should sign every page of a contract like that. Building a house from scratch (~1500-2500 sq. ft.) is easily a $250,000-500,000 deal depending on what you want, not reading every piece of the contract or at least having a lawyer go over it is your own fault even if it costs an extra $500. If you see that your contract says that there is another piece to it, go see it before signing away 5 years of income.
Even newly built houses should have an independent building inspector come (not the one from the city as those only look to see if the house won't crash down on you). But I call baloney on the claims.
Dangerous electrical wiring has been replaced in most places (the ones where the leads run uninsulated in the spaces in the walls divided by the wooden beams). Insulation is likewise easily fixed either on the exterior or the interior. It's also been noticed lately that new, fully insulated houses might be worse for your health than those with "holes in the wall". The air gets stagnant and mold develops much easier in these super insulated houses. I just replaced ALL my windows with double pane, LoE3 glass for ~$5000 done by a professional and that alone helps a lot. The siding has insulation and the attic has been finished so all of that (floor and rafters) has insulation. Sure there is still heat pouring out here and there but it's not too bad and as I said, keeps the air from getting stagnant.
Also, most wiring issues (disconnected ground, polarity reversal) can easily be fixed usually at the socket that's misbehaving. Grounding shouldn't be an issue if the wiring has been done since the mid-60s but for really old houses you just need to re-run electricity (a $2000-$5000 job for a professional).
Extra cable and CAT5 runs (installed it last summer) behind my siding to the basement to every room. It's invisible, you just need a drill. I installed a 220V line to get a AC unit and it cools the whole house. I could've gotten it with the heating system (if you use forced air, uses the same ducts). AC is not really necessary in a lot of places, you just need to circulate air and that helps a lot, you could use the basement as a heat sink as well.
Get an inspector before you buy though, it'll cost you $100-200 but they can point out a lot of potential issues. My house had a CO leaking heater furnace (the heating elements were rusted through) something you can't see with the naked eye.
It's surrounded by a Faraday's Cage... twice.
I am very familiar with the effects of strong magnetic fields. To get such an effect you would have to have an active wide-band transmitter (to affect TV's, computers and everything else that's claimed) and the power consumption of the house alone (if it's even possible to create a magnet that size with the amount of ferro-magnetic material available) would be through the roof. A magnet with that power would require supercooling and at least a couple of residential power supplies from the power company to magnetize the space of a large living room.
I think he remained an Apple employee. Either way I think he simply lives off his money earned with Apple and does a bit of screwing around and philanthropy. And why not, not everybody has to make more money, he just enjoys life (as does RMS) from what he made early in life. I wish I could just quit my day job and start companies at will.
You could also phrase it as follows: Interesting way to invest in your local economy. Trust me, the research alone will get people (certain academics) to move there.
That's fine until the index gets corrupt or any other random piece of configuration or malware disables or replaces the search engine. Also, search engines are potentially vulnerable and usually lag behind on the latest changes or uncommitted/rolled back changes.
Will it work in Safe Mode? Will it require a service? Can we make a PE version without it?
That's what I thought too when I read this news post.
I think it's going to have a bad effect on their customer base. Guess who uses the top 5% - young people and geeks, people that are 'in the know' about technology and get asked for advice often. If you satisfy the top 10% of your customer base, the rest will simply follow, piss off the wrong types of people in your customer base and the rest will simply follow.
The problem is not that organizations are large or any of that. Small shops have the same problem. The problem is management. It's a manager's job to make sure the lines of communications up/down and horizontal are open and that his team gets the resources (whether physical or not) it needs to do a better job. SOOOO many managers fail at that. Some think they are good programmers and get in the way of architecting the software, others think they are good talkers and start acting as a filter. That's why there are so many managers because 80% of them micro-manage their domain that they're inflexible at them or their team taking additional tasks.
There is no reason that most dev, QA and test teams shouldn't have a single manager while each team has their own lead. However I see often that each team has their own manager, the 3 teams have a manager, IT has their own teams, managers and there is usually another manager or 2 and a VP leading the whole "IT" governed by a CIO. That's 9 managers for a group that is maybe 20-50 people large.
The US did attack somebody in an act of war (justified or not) on Yemen sovereign territory. This could be constituted as an act of war against Yemen if their leaders are so inclined (and don't mind getting into war with the US). Funny you never see people (officially) getting shot in the head in Iran because they damn well know the repercussions would be severe.
If the US wants to play police and shoot everyone in the head that has a problem with them, they are 'free' to do so in their own sovereign territory. SWAT and police forces only shoot when there is clear and imminent danger to themselves or a person. AFAIK Awlaki had nobody at gunpoint, he merely was a recruiter for a criminal organization (or gang) and if anything they should attempt to arrest him for that. If he gets killed during an arrest 'accidentally' (like Bin Laden) that's something else but shooting somebody and his family from afar is at best cowardly and in itself an act of terrorism.
Stopping a murderer by murdering him is still murder. You can (according to most laws) only act in self defense if you're in clear and imminent danger. The US was not in 'clear and imminent' danger by keeping this nutcase alive.
It's a slippery slope when you just shoot people down because they don't agree with you or even try to engage in criminal activities or other activities you don't agree with. Many religious organizations and cults reflect that type of attitude towards those that don't agree with them (Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, ...), not clear thinking, level headed people.
You would be amazed at how much data gets lost daily because enterprises are unable to keep a working backup system.
I've worked for a web host and the more money they threw at their backup solution (this one is shiny, this one is integrated with your management platform, this one gives control to your customers, this one gives blowjobs, ...) the more unpredictable it got. They would fail to complete and/or fail to notify, 1 tape would fail and apparently the metadata for the whole backup was on that 1 tape. Or it would correctly back up everything but the restore would take a week (which was suicide for a lot of dotcoms).
I eventually wrote an rsync script to backup to a disk system and told the developers how to parse the logs and deploy it. Sure it wasn't shiny, no such thing as bare metal restore and didn't have a lot of other features but it f*in worked. I then also learned that singular tapes are relatively expensive and about as reliable as a medium as your average hard drive.
If as a content owner, you want copyright on your stuff and make money out of it I feel you have to protect it on your own. The government already grants you monopoly status on the content through copyright laws but in this and many other cases copyright owners also want the government to protect them against any costs made to protect such status and put those costs back onto society which has already been deprived by the simple asserting of copyright. Copyright is a privilege, not a "right". If you can't make money off your copyrighted stuff, maybe you shouldn't have it copyrighted in the first place and it should go into public domain.
Even if sites exist that in your opinion would not exist if not funded by piracy, you should not be granted the power to deprive other people's rights (any) by taking those forums away. Piracy will continue to exist, it's inevitable at all levels, whether on the sea or your precious 'Intellectual Property'. People still bootleg alcohol into the United States, does that make all boats illegal? Does that mean because a boat is capable of doing so and especially equipped that it should be prevented from merchandising?
... the provider did offer a YouTube-type "if you tell us we'll remove it" deal but BREIN didn't want that. BREIN ultimately wanted to create a precedent where the owner of a service is solely responsible for finding out which content infringes on random copyright, remove it from their servers and from everybody else who downloaded it.
Common clinical MRI's are 1.5-3 Tesla with 3T being more and more common these days, 1.5T is only in cheaper clinics or high-end doctor offices because you can get some Toshiba and GE units second hand for very cheap ($100k), 3T's run about a million and the service contract alone runs at $100k/year. Research MRI and units with very small bores (rodent-size) can go up to 11T.
It would indeed become a missile but even in 3T, if the magnet is not actively scanning you should be able to get to it within 5 feet (don't try it, I might be off by a couple of feet) if you are strong enough to hold on to it. If it's actively scanning or you come too close, the thing will indeed go fly and hang in the middle of the field, ripping through everything that's in it's way. But even so, I don't think the data structures on the disk would be too much affected if you come within range of still being able to hold it, hard drives are enclosed.
The mass of the object (the amount of ferro-magnetic material on it) has much more to do with the missile effect than anything. A pallet jack will get sucked in much faster than a pair of glasses (I regularly felt the pull on my own glasses when in the room but then I got titanium ones). But it's dangerous nonetheless, I've seen pictures of vacuum cleaners, scissors, keys, floor buffers and even a technician being pinned against the unit by a cable (didn't kill him but it could've if it were around his neck and it left some nasty bruises)
The first Nicene Council imho was an attempt to filter out all the ones objectionable to their particular flavor of Christianity. There are many books that weren't forgeries or political, just mythical tales about several bible figures and some were even about the childhood, angry Jesus figure and some of those tales were even included in the official canon (like the flood of Noah, Jesus throwing a hissy fit and withering the olive tree). Eventually those other Christians died out (some by force) and the rest didn't really have an influence on our Western culture (although some have had influences from and influence on Eastern, Islamic and Byzantine cultures).
You also have to account that many modern archeologists have been trying to prove their flavor of Judaism or Christianity by unearthing the history with as some say "a pick in one hand and their holy books in the other".
In the end, they are ALL mythical in nature. There is no proof of a historical flood, Moses (the Egyptians should've made some note of an (illegitimate) son of the daughter of Pharaoh), the exit of millions of slaves and the demise of Pharaoh and his army should also been noted in contemporary history, if not by Egyptians at least by their neighbors, King David (all constructions attributed to him were done centuries later than the narrative), Jesus (Romans kept very good records of everyone causing upheaval, local beliefs and trials and Christians back then would've tried to obtain copies or at least referred to official documents - none do) or even a village named Nazareth (which at it's current location was only settled in the 2nd century).
The fact of the matter is that after studying Christianity for a long time and comparing it to the historical record, they do not match up. Christianity in my opinion was never about Christ, it was a sect of Judaism that came out of disagreements within their own sects (such as Paul having been raised a Pharisee) and even in the Bible you can see reflections of where some were still holding on to the law of Moses while others were moving away from it. Especially after the temple in Jerusalem got burned down the sect gained because they were basically Judaism without the expense of sacrificing 10% of your livelihood and traveling long distances to do so. Especially when the Romans were already taxing people, additional religious taxes were probably hard to justify.
Because releasing damaging information about current religious denominations is dangerous not only to the releasers but also to the psyche of their followers. Many preconceptions and interpretations about the original biblical text will have to be changed.
Same problem with proof of aliens and disproving gods. If you can prove we weren't the "chosen ones" or you can ultimately prove what actually created the universe and create life from nothing in a scientific way, a LOT of religious people will be disappointed.
I doubt trash bags would do much if any damage. They get occasionally on highways and probably float on airports as well, most likely the thing will be shredded to pieces. Even a simple phone or whatever electronics the kid had will be destroyed or knocked out of the way by either propeller or jet engine.
Yes, in practicality it doesn't change very much because thesis hardly ever get read or even taken seriously. If students find something really interesting, they won't put it in their thesis but actually co-write a paper with their professors or wait until they graduate.
However even though the librarian might get laughed at, he might be right and in the end, it's what the courts think is what matters, not a small group of academia. IF you write something REALLY interesting in your thesis like FTL travel or something that really is going to upend the scientific community (which I wouldn't recommend putting in your thesis as said above, just wait and graduate, re-do the science and write a paper on it) what is the University going to do to either clear or involve their name in it? It's about money (grant or otherwise) and image, not about science in your average University leadership.
They just won't run MS Office which is the biggest problem for most office workers. They are currently indeed in developer and embedded stage. The problem is that occasionally you want a little more horsepower (even if it's just to play Flash games) so they buy a 'normal' computer. Also there is no real support available and very little experience by your average sysadmin.
Once somebody starts doing it, the ball will get rolling. Even $200 is not bad but once Raspberry Pi runs a browser and e-mail, SSH, VNC, X and OpenOffice and basically plugs into a display without too much trouble (or is embedded into a display even better) I will be deploying them in our shared computer spaces because that's all they're for - connect to the cluster to run your jobs, check your e-mail and Facebook while you're waiting, occasionally copy something from or to a USB stick. All home directories are already on the network (NFS) so I don't really need much storage.
I was posing the question, not postulating that asthma sufferers must die for the benefit of humanity. If the other inhalers work just as good then why are they priced so high? The government has a job and that is protecting their subjects from harm. If that harm comes from the healthcare industry, then they need to be fought against. We're fighting against drugs instead of drug manufacturers, we're fighting against terrorists instead of those that destroy a country from the outside.
I agree that sending humans to the moon again as a publicity stunt is kinda useless. But even human space exploration in itself brings us much needed enhancements to existing technologies (such as life support systems, waste recycling, radiation shielding etc.).
I agree that short term, investment in other technology would benefit us more but that doesn't mean we should choose which science to fund and which we don't want to fund. If the US would just cut the massive 'defensive' (aka offensive) spending and stop hunting down the ghost of Bin Laden there would immediately be much more money available. Yeah, 1000 people might have died in a terrorist attack 10 years ago but that's much better than 10's of 1000's dying each year from cancer, many of which would've been prevented if we just would've invested in the science to replace coal as an energy source.
Either way, SSD or HDD, they fail and sometimes they fail spectacularly. I currently manage over 100TB of data combination of SSD and spinning disks. GOOD SSD's don't fail that often, it's the "cheap" crap you buy at $3/GB. Even if they do, that's what RAID, ZFS-style filesystems and backups are for. HDD's fail silently a LOT more than you imagine. About 1% of my disks each month develop 1 unrecoverable read error (which is fairly good given I read a little over 10TB from an individual disk), 3% per year fails completely. Usually nothing is wrong in SMART but once there is an issue, the data is toast anyway. I imagine a lot of latent corruption happens on consumer disks too but it doesn't get noticed.
I recommend SSD's because in a rack, they're cheaper than HDD's. 2.5" 10k RPM hard drives get about 150 IOPS, 50MB/s on most of my (very random) work loads. Getting 5000 IOPS and 150MB/s on an SSD (the 20k+ IOPS on non-RAM SSD's is marketing speak, RAM-based SSD's either come on a PCIe card at $350/GB or SAS-based come in at about $500/GB) saves a lot of space (RAID enclosures are expensive too). If you're worried a RAID1 won't do, do a 3 device mirror or a RAID1 of 2 phys. disks and RAID1 those logical disks again. Even if you kill 1/3 or 1/4 of your IOPS you're still better off.