NaibofTabr

You gotta have a place to put your orbs so you can ponder them as needed.

We do not speak of it.

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On second thought, let’s not go outside. 'Tis a silly place.

You’re welcome. Here’s another good one if you enjoy Star Trek parody:

Star Trekkin’ - The Firm

The USS Make Shit Up

poor Tim

Yes, surely TOR will protect us from government surveillance…

The project was originally developed on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community and continues to receive U.S. government funding, and has been criticized as “more resembl[ing] a spook project than a tool designed by a culture that values accountability or transparency”.[177] As of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project’s $2M annual budget came from the United States government, with the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation as major contributors,[178] aiming “to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states”.[179] Other public sources of funding include DARPA, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and the Government of Sweden.

[…]

Critics say that Tor is not as secure as it claims,[185] pointing to U.S. law enforcement’s investigations and shutdowns of Tor-using sites such as web-hosting company Freedom Hosting and online marketplace Silk Road.

But also…

In October 2013, after analyzing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported that the NSA had repeatedly tried to crack Tor and had failed to break its core security, although it had had some success attacking the computers of individual Tor users.[27] The Guardian also published a 2012 NSA classified slide deck, entitled “Tor Stinks”, which said: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time”, but “with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users”.[186] When Tor users are arrested, it is typically due to human error, not to the core technology being hacked or cracked.

[…]

A late 2014 report by Der Spiegel using a new cache of Snowden leaks revealed, however, that as of 2012 the NSA deemed Tor on its own as a “major threat” to its mission, and when used in conjunction with other privacy tools such as OTR, Cspace, ZRTP, RedPhone, Tails, and TrueCrypt was ranked as “catastrophic,” leading to a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

YMMV, and your implementation and usage matter.

just doing the FAFO approach.

Please consider the following:

How did early humans find out which food sources were safe to eat, and which were not?

the thing is that cleaner production methods benefit big industry because they get to produce higher-quality products which makes them more profit due to higher price.

Sure, maybe in the long run. But that will cost money now and the quarterly earnings report is due.

So all those problems are fixed but somehow new ones keep popping up?

Yes. Welcome to reality.

Maybe it wasnt real change but actually just band aids and the root cause stayed unadressed through all those years.

The entire history of human civilization is an example of building the airplane while you’re flying it, without a plan for either the airplane construction or the flight path.

Somehow the system you want to maintain and support keeps creating these problems.

There are a lot of problems, and yes the solutions to old problems often create new problems, because reality is not a video game where collecting a dozen McGuffins ends the quest and you get a reward and then never worry about that issue again.

Sometimes the airplane crashes: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

The options are:

1. Pick up the pieces and try again.
2. Give up and die where you are.

You could have spent a century testing CFCs in a lab environment. The problem they caused with the ozone layer would still not have become apparent until CFCs were used in the real world where they could interact with the ozone layer.

There is no amount of testing and preparation that can account for every possible outcome or interaction.

Asbestos is another good example. It is naturally occurring and quite common and was used as a building material for millennia. It is lightweight but strong, flexible in thin sheets, and fireproof. It’s an extremely useful and versatile material, and abundantly available.

It wasn’t until the 1900s that medical testing linked asbestos fibers to several health risks. It basically required the entire history of human development for our medical technology to identify the danger. No amount of testing, analysis or review done prior would have mattered.

The hole in the ozone layer is now repairing due to international regulation of CFCs

Acid rain is no longer a problem because of regulation of sulfur dioxide emissions

Leaded gasoline has now been banned in every country

Asbestos exposure is rare now due to regulatory controls. It’s bad that it took so long to get done.

Government regulation is effective in protecting people from health risks.

Collective action (e.g. through voting) is effective in establishing such regulation.

If you spread the lie that voting in favor of such policies (and politicians who support them) is a useless waste of time, you are spreading industry propaganda.

Effective, large-scale change is IN FACT at the polls.

It is nowhere else.

Yes, actually.

Do you remember the hole in the ozone layer? It’s self-repairing now because the chemicals that were damaging it were internationally banned - by government regulation.

Do you remember the acid rain scare? It’s not a problem now because of regulatory control of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Do you know why gasoline is unleaded?

Do you know why asbestos is banned in building materials?

Government regulation actively improves human health and wellbeing, and has prevented several outright disasters from progressing.

Real change does, in fact, come from voting for politicians that support effective environmental policies. It is industry propaganda that wants you to believe that regulation is ineffective.

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

The nose?

Roddenberry died before the production of DS9.

Tertiary question: we know that Vulcans/Romulans were descendents of the Progenitors, but are Talaxians?

If not, it might not be technically possible for them to interbreed at all, meaning that a Vulcan/Talaxian hybrid could never occur naturally, and also that Tuvix would probably be genetically incompatible with everything and everyone. Therefore, no species - only an anomaly produced by a freak transporter accident.

Does Tuvix have two species, or none?