I have four more years to pay off my house. I just have to survive the Trump administration without losing everything.

Wow, how are you retiring at 55??? I’m 56, and have spent this year re-vamping my IRA accounts with the hope of retiring in 10-12 years without any reliance on the social security that will be gone.

[Edit] I see below you mentioned having a pension. Must be nice!

Honestly I’m not really sure about that. What I’ve seen on the idea of damage to children usually has the caveat of “more study is needed”, but of course nobody wants to subject children to such a study on purpose. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any studies yet that concluded long-term use in adults would cause any permanent damage. I suspect there could be outlying cases of extremely heavy usage but in moderation it so far appears to be perfectly safe.

The current belief is that it can affect the brains of growing children, but they’re not sure to what extent. In my state the legal age is 21, the same as for drinking. In adults, straight cannabis will not harm you in any way other than the usual effects of being under the influence and not always making rational choices. Worst case, you sleep it off. Do keep in mind that smoking it can slowly damage your lungs, the same as breathing any find particulates over a long period of time. I personally prefer edibles for long-term use, but the baking process does reduce the potency.

Now, like any drug, the reason you want to take it can be very important. If you need something to escape reality on a permanent basis, obviously you have a larger problem that no drug is ever going to solve. However the occasional evening can be quite entertaining, much like a trip to the water park. Other people (like myself) take it on a regular basis to help with medical problems, usually pain relief or sleep issues, where CBD is the answer rather than the THC component.

For myself, I’ve had sleeping problems for the past 16 years (since a bad car wreck). I worked with my doctor for awhile trying to find something that would help. The problem is, I’m a computer tech and I need my mind sharp for troubleshooting or writing code. All the prescription drugs leave your brain in a fog through much of the next day, and then what use am I? It turns out that marijuana has a fairly quick drop-off, so it can provide help through the night, and is pretty much out of my system by the time I head for work. As with anything, it takes some time to find the right dose. I take it along with other prescription medications to address different issues, but I’ve been getting good restful sleep for the past 9 years and feeling much more like myself again. For these purposes I highly recommend it, but talk to someone knowledgeable to guide you to the right strains and give advice on what to expect.

At that capacity, I’ll cast another vote for SSD if at all possible, but you can certainly get small HDDs pretty cheap now.

If you want the easiest and cheapest way to add more drives, do a search for “sata port multiplier”. These cards go for around $25US on Amazon or Ebay. They are NOT fast! It uses a single SATA port to run up to five drives, so all the drives split the bandwidth, but long ago I ran some of them for a few years without any problems. You simply run a sata and power cable from your motherboard to the card, then plug in your drives, it doesn’t even require a slot on your motherboard.

China might want to have a word…

Maybe because we’ve been paying them a tax since the early 2000’s to provide fiber broadband to the majority of Americans, which they have pocketed and refused to actually build any infrastructure to support this?

So they’re going to provide a list of the pirate’s identities along with complete records of what filenames were downloaded, what percentage was completed, and proof that the labels actually own the contents of what was in those files (regardless of the actual filenames)… right? No? Yeah I didn’t think so. How are the courts still entertaining these broad lawsuits that never seem to prove any wrongdoing? Oh this person torrented some perfectly legal files so you want the ISP to cut them off because “they might have downloaded a movie we didn’t notice”?

Perhaps try reading the article? Or are you ok with people driving 63 in a 40mph zone? Seems like if your life is ruined from a justly deserved speeding ticket then maybe you need to re-evaluate your life.

Google originally made a name for themselves by building a global search engine on low cost, low powered desktop machines running in parallel, so it’s surprising because they have gone from high-efficiency to power hogs.

I still drive my SUV beside all the Prius’ on the road.

Call me crazy, but universities have libraries and labs with computers that any student can use to work on assignments.

I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.

Some don’t, I’m not sure about “most”. Regardless, I’m not waiting around to see what kind of passengers I’m traveling with. If everybody plays nice and works together then that’s great, we all have a better chance for survival. You still need to protect yourself against any hostile natives or wildlife because everything you know about what’s safe and what’s dangerous just went out the window.

Finding a weapon is definitely the highest priority. As soon as everyone starts freaking out they’re coming after anyone who has something they want. After the bloodbath you can use your weapon to get food or possibly help with making shelter, and you’ll be ready to meet the natives once they arrive – just in case they’re not friendly and are at a lower technological level than what you have available.

Any $5 laser mouse with a scroll wheel from ebay/amazon is fine for me. Plug it in and it just works. I prefer certain shapes for comfort but I’ve never had a mouse NOT work in linux.

Waze has popped up ads on me plenty of times while I’m driving. Yes it knows I’m driving, the map is still scrolling along my route. At one point it was bad enough that the ads were remaining after every stop light, and finally clearing about half way to the next light. I haven’t seen it happen in awhile though, maybe they finally got it fixed.

Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn’t work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to increase usability.

Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that’s definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.