News Flash: Solid State Drives Rock, Dan the Last to Experience

I'm honestly not sure how old my laptop is off hand but it's at least five years. It's a System76 Serval Pro 5 that I originally ordered with 8 gig of RAM, Two Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU P9700 @ 2.80GHz processors, an NVidea GeForce GTX with 1G of RAM, and a 7200rpm 500G hard drive. It was a higher end workstation replacement class machine back then and cost a few thousand dollars. It has been a great machine but the old hard drive was finally giving up the ghost. The occasional random file would go corrupt and the various disk utilities couldn't fix the bad sectors.

I finally made the jump to a Solid State Drive and highly recommend it. Without the moving parts of an old fashioned platter and spindle it's blazing fast. While I had it open I removed the years of built up gunk from cooling system that was apparently making the poor cooling fan run non-stop. Between the cleaning and the new hard drive this machine is now nearly silent. What a difference! Here's hoping this investment will make extend usefulness another five years.

I know that I'm coming late to the SSD game... I was always interested but, between price and a lack of need, I just never bothered. So far, it's absolutely worth every penny.

Double Standard?

Many have already heard that Mayor Schmitt has formally invited Pope Francis to Green Bay.

I wonder if the FFRC would object so strenuously to an invitation to an atheist leader or even the Dalai Lama?

My view? Bring on the Pope! The Catholic church is heavily woven in to the fabric of this community and many-- probably the majority?-- in our community would love to see it happen. While no organization or individual is perfect, I believe Catholics do way, way more good than harm. I also believe that will become more true given the less individually judgemental and more organizationally critical approaches that Pope Francis seems to be taking.

Besides, the economic infusion for our area from a papal visit would probably be at least that of an NFC Championship game and that is a good thing for everyone. If the pope came on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, so would others and that would result in a never ending bump in tourism spending.

This whole papal visit thing is a long shot but what does it hurt to ask? I don't know if Mayor Schmitt thought this up or not but kudos to the person who did and to the mayor for giving it a shot.

Abuse of Power Behavior, Meet Consequences

Late 2011 I posted about the jackass who pepper sprayed a bunch of kids for absolutely no reason. He was a University of California Davis campus police officer. I'm still stunned thinking about the restraint of each and every one of those students in the video... I'm glad my 20 year old self wasn't there. I'm pretty sure at that age my righteous rage would have gotten the better of me -- I would have tackled and restrained him and probably sparked a riot. It's just difficult to watch one human being abuse another one, doubly so when the abuser holds a position of trust and authority.

I have wondered what happened to that guy and saw this today. I assumed he would be fired and, well, I was right. Turns out he was fired after a stint on administrative leave and went on disability due to stress. The school payed him 38k for disability and ended up settling with the students.

Decisions and Consequences

I don't know all the details-- there were probably confidentiality agreements-- but I do know that HTC opted to start paying patent blackmail (aka patent licensing) fee to Microsoft. HTC's other option was to lawyer up and fight to defend the free and open source operating system on which they based their phones. HTC's phones would not exist if not for the work shared in the commons by scores of companies and individuals.

I got my HTC phone before this all went down, but I'll never buy another. Samsung is the new king of Android based phones now. In some small part, I think HTC's behavior helped that change along.

HTC posted a loss of 101 millon in last quarter. I wonder how many units they shipped? Rumor has it, the patent deal was $5 per unit. I'm betting that five bucks a phone give away is looking pretty bad about now.

I love it...

...when a plan comes together.

"Greyhound officials on Wednesday unveiled plans to shut down the bus station and relocate to the city-owned Green Bay Metro bus depot at 901 University Ave."

Putting these bus depots together is a good thing. I always envisioned a new Greyhound station where Olde North Crossing is now but if there's room in the existing facilities, even better. I believe this will result increased ridership on both Greyhound and Metro, more convenience for the passengers, and reduced costs for both organizations.

The next phase in my mind is a car co-op and/or car rental company in the immediate area and an express bus to the airport.

Like wave bouncing around the ocean, it's hard to know how much of a difference your splashing made. I don't recall anyone talking about this back then but I did. In my own mind, I'd like to think I had something to do with it.

Government Data Collection vs Privacy

Much has been said about how the government isn't grabbing the contents of communications, only the metadata about those communications. The government believes this is ok, to track who is talking to who but not what they are talking about. I do not agree and here's a brilliantly implemented historical perspective on why. Would we be an independent country now if the British had this?

Climate Tit for Tat

We're not sure what is driving global warming and it cannot be linked to extreme weather.

vs.

We know what's causing it and the alarm bells are ringing.

Which is FUD? I get why conservative folks want to deny climate change, they are concerned about the impact a carbon tax or the like would have on the economy-- and the energy business owners that fund their campaigns. What I don't get is how scientists profit by putting their ideas out there. They are simply sharing their view that the longer we wait to manage out of the ground carbon going in to the atmosphere, the worse the impact on Humanity. Where is the ulterior motive for the vast majority of scientists? I see this as a battle of fact based altruism vs moneyed interests. Who do you believe?