It's that people think they can drop Oracle on top of a crappy design and that will somehow magically fix it. By the time people get done trying to use brute force, ignorance and massive amounts of IT resources, you may as well have Dbase III on your back end. Oracle might let you get away with a shitty design if your application didn't really need a database, but it's not going to help you that much if what you're trying to do is complicated enough to need one.

How do the Strontium and Cesium go away with reprocessing? Maybe processing removes some useful and some harmless stuff from your waste stash and so you're slightly better off, but I fail to see where the issue of hazardous nuclear waste is actually dealt with.

In fact it's not even clear that reprocessing spent fuel is useful. You get more energy out of fuel, but the fuel is cheap and plentiful (and you need little of it). I'm glad that France is doing it, but just because maybe having that capacity and experience may be useful some day if we can transmute harmful elements by throwing fast neutrons at them or something.

Further info : Mint 17, 18, 19, 20 (assuming they keep a 6-month release rate) will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the changes supposedly will be linux and Xorg updates for compatibility/performance of newer hardware, and newer versions of Mate and Cinnamon.

Of course. Let us not forget NSA lying to congress, engaging in corporate espionage, subverting crypto standards, spying on Senators, spying on foreign leaders, and monitoring and managing online discussions on technology websites like Slashdot. But I don't see how any of that would help us track conventional military units overseas.

I'm guessing you're heterosexual then?

Please point out the part of the US Constitution that says the Federal Government can't spy on foreign countries, then justify Snowden's leaking of intelligence methods and sources that had nothing whatsoever to do with American domestic civil liberties.

Put his actions before a jury of his peers, like the numerous whistle-blowers who came before him, none of whom fled to hostile countries? Restrict his leaks to pertinent information, rather than dumping EVERYTHING? Attempt to work within the system before trying to blow it up? Leak the information without outing yourself, remaining anonymous like Deep Throat did?

You'd probably have a different perspective on that if you lived in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Finland, Georgia, or any of the Central Asian Republics.

It'd make more sense to play the realpolitik game: "Put Mr. Snowden on a flight to New York and we'll quietly acquiesce to your annexation of Crimea."

Unfortunately realpolitik is not something the current administration is very good at. They're very good at making promises they can't keep, and threats they won't follow up on, but making cold calculations to further American interests in a dangerous world? Not so much.

As people said PCIe SSD always have been available as cards, but they're typically damn expensive. So what is needed is a more standard and common format. Intel touted SATA Express, a connector that you can use either as a couple SATA 6Gb or as a single PCIe 2.0 2x link at 1GB/s ; but that didn't work out (for now at least) and instead the next round of motherboard with Intel Z97 (maybe lower end ones, we'll see) will have a connector for M.2 format drives (a small "chocolate bar" form factor), which is PCIe at 1GB/s again. Maybe that'll get to 2GB/s some day.

If you want to do something that needs IOPS (I/O per second), e.g. running Slashdot's comment system, you can use RAID. But maybe you'll be running eight 15000 rpm disks in RAID 10, and not using the slower half or third of the drives (that makes the heads fly back and forth on a shorter segment as well).

When you're down to that point, using a single SSD will allow you considerable savings on all manners of cost and you get higher performance even.

Maybe old school subterfuge? Or are you arguing we need mass warrantless surveillance of American citizens in order to track Russain military units overseas?

The blue guards in Wolfenstein 3D shout "Mein Leiben!" when they die, or that's what I seem to hear.

Yes he does. Because Alphawolf_HK is a college kid with no real life experience himself.

If they use them in criminal investigations the usage eventually becomes part of the public record when entered into evidence. Using them for search and rescue ought to be non-controversial enough. "National Security" is of course the grey area, though there's a fair amount of overlap between National Security and criminal prosecutions, for offenses like espionage or terrorism, so a lot of that use would eventually make it into the public record as well.