Vitalius

Thanks, will do. Great write up. Have you used Etrade? That is what I use. What do you think?

Haven't used it. Signing up for it now to try it out. 

I think @MyInnerFred uses it. Not sure though. Might be misremembering it.

Flyguygamer, if it's still black, Blogs doesn't auto set to white unfortunately. 

Use colonel_mortis' "black to white text auto-corrector". It's on this page:
http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/193630-complete-list-of-forum-addons-scripts-apps-etc/

Under "Dark Theme Fixer". It takes any text that's darker than a certain font and makes it white on LTT's website while Dark Theme is enabled. 

So if you switch to Day theme, it will disable. If you aren't on LTT Forums, it will disable. It works great and I highly recommend it because it fixes Blog posts and people who Copy/paste text without using "Remove formatting".

TDAmeritrade. I have no money in the account and the account has been active for months (i.e. I can access it and use my login for this program.)

The program they let me use is ThinkOrSwim. There's Paper Money (fake money for practice) and obviously normal, real, trading.

Commission fees are $7-9 per trade, so about average from what I've seen by most brokers. 

Exactly Askew. Ya know, it's amazing. I've never seen that version of the argument before. That is great. 

I actually read something interesting around the time I posted it. It was called "The Egg". 

Here is the post on LTT about it: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/140925-the-egg/ (Read it first, if you are interested. Then continue.)

I find that interesting. However, I disagree with part of it by nature. It makes sense at the same time. Ultimately, the only evil we could do in such a universe is to ourselves. Therefore no wrong is ever truly done, because we (Or rather, "I" in this case) have done it to ourselves (Me in this case). 

The thing I disagree with is that, as it says, time is not "a thing" outside "The Egg". If that is so, we wouldn't go through reincarnations in a linear path. From outside the egg, everyone would be born and die simultaneously, which means that encounter with "God" can't happen. However, it also means that there would be no reincarnation, in a sense because you need linearity for reincarnation (i.e. I was this person, then I was reborn as this other person.). However, this doesn't break the premise of the story. It only changes how it comes out actually occurring from our perspective.

I really liked it. I suppose I do so because of selfish reasons though. It basically means that, in the end, when all of the split conscious of our being comes together, I will get to experience everything I ever wanted and more (on top of a lot of things I never wanted to experience). All the everything that is our universe that humanity ever knew would be known to us. That would be epic. 

Of course then we also have to know the experience of every tragedy and pain, but also every miracle and joy. I just really like it.

There is. Trust me. :)

That is a very good question. Basically, I have little chunks of time that aren't enough to do anything meaningful, which I dedicate to this. 

Also, at work, when I'm stuck at a point in a project, I instead switch to surfing the forum and come back to the project later. That way I come back with a fresh mind. It helps, surprisingly.

I know Idea. Kinda my thinking on it. :)

Hmm. Just came back and saw this. 

... And I plan to buy a Tesla Model S. Outright of course, but still. That'll be a while. 

Interestingly, related (to an extent), I'm always surprised how having cash changes things for these types of transactions. Both in the Car Industry and the Insurance (specifically medical) industry.

My mother was someone who knew this and is who I learned it from. She wanted a used car, and so she went to a lot and found one she liked. It was for $5400. She told the salesman that if he'd accept $3600, she had it in cash right then and there. He went to talk to his manager and they sold it to her for that. The thing is still (miraculously) running.

Similar thing happened with my eye doctor stuff. The hospital was going to charge the insurance company something around $1,100. She said she wasn't going to put it on the insurance if it would cost that much (raises the premiums or wtv), so she paid cash and only had to pay $500-$600. 

I find this funny, because those are the two industries that I constitute as the most overpriced/biggest scams. You can kind of see why (them wanting immediate cash over loans that they can't be sure people will pay off).

Huh. Interesting.

I think the reason this doesn't exist already is that you can't be certain of what data will survive and what won't. It tends to be all or nothing, and I think companies would prefer it that way. 

For example, say I have a "betterRAID" array with 4TB of client files on it. And every file is important. If a drive should fail, I've increased the chance of losing something for lowering the chance of losing everything.

I'm pretty sure most companies aren't cool with losing anything. If they've bothered to put this much effort into backing up their data, they're probably only backing up things they can't afford to lose, which means increasing a chance of losing anything is a bad thing.

For consumers though, this might actually be interesting. People tend to use RAID 5 and such to backup things they can lose but don't want to be bothered in losing, i.e. media or things like that. 

However, I think the whole idea of this "betterRAID" is not for consumers either. The number of drives you use as examples is what I mean by this. The more drives you add, the better the chances are of not losing everything and the worse the chances are of losing something. 

The problem with that is it being expensive to buy multiple and many drives. Plus, considering that as you add drives (which would probably be consumer drives), your chances of any 1 of them failing goes up considerably, I don't think it's a good solution. It's sort of self defeating in that sense. You raise your chances of losing some data (i.e. more drives = greater chance of a failure) in order to raise your chances of losing some data (i.e. more drives = lesser chance of total loss but greater chance of partial loss).

Sure, I could get lots of cheap 1TB or 500GB drives, but that also creates more maintenance overhead due to drive failures and redownloading (or whatever) what you keep losing. 

It sounds like it creates more work for little benefit to 90% of consumers and it seems not of much use to businesses. 

Enthusiasts might like it, but I wouldn't call it "betterRAID". I'd call it "otherRAID" as the positives and negatives balance out, I think.

Still, good idea nonetheless. I enjoyed reading it and I'm glad people are still trying to think of better, safer, ways to store data.  

Supplemental idea: What would come of mixing traditional Parity RAID and this idea for RAID? Or, better yet, RAID 1 + this. Now that sounds interesting.

You could have the RAID 1 to prevent partial data loss and this RAID for "If everything else fails, we still have something." Which is better than nothing.

The problem with that is the obvious issue of resources. That literally doubles the required drives for no storage increase, so odds are, only businesses would use that (and extreme enthusiasts like Looney or us). 

That sounds really awesome. Thanks for sharing. :D

The crap you do in your free time man. XD

Edit: After reading it more thoroughly, I remember this from my Business Calculus class. This is cool. Thanks. 

So you're saying the optimal APR happens when you have no fun? /joke

The sad part is, it's funny because it's true. XD

You're welcome. I try to share what I feel God has given me.

And thanks. I try. I really do. ;) 

I have more of these. Lots more. Maybe I'll port them over from my Facebook page. ... One day.