Honestly, you should talk to the pros. I would call a couple of storage vendors, give them the basic outline of what you want to do, and let them tell you how they would do it. You can even get more formal and issue a Request for Information (RFI) or even a Request for Quote (RFQ). If you're a biggish company, your purchasing people probably have an SOP and standard forms for how to issue an RFI/RFQ. For the big boy storage vendors, half a petabyte is commonplace. The bigger question may very well be what this is going to look like at a software level. Managing the data might be a bigger challenge than storing it. Is this going to be organized in some sort of big data solution like Hadoop? Is it just a whole bunch of files and a people are going to write R or SAS jobs to query against it? Sometimes the tool set that you want to use will drive your choices in how to build the infrastructure under it.

Actually, they have this data. The government keeps meticulous records of exactly who voted in every single election. And, oh by the way, that data is NOT private. You can get it just for the asking, and both parties do. That's how they target their "get out the vote" campaigns. They have a record of your party affiliation and your voting record, not who you voted on but everything else. Then they target calls to repeat voters that have been long-time members of their party. That's part of the role of poll watchers. They record everyone who voted and then, sometime in the middle of the day, they report to their party who didn't vote. Your phone rings at 3 PM saying, "Hey Mr or Mrs Republican or Democrat. We haven't seen you at the polls today. Do you need a ride to the polls or a babysitter or something? We want to make sure you vote!"

Maybe they weren't quite the lies that the left would like you to believe... http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

I'm with Anonymous on this one. Every home schooled person that I've met or worked with has been a social mutant to one degree or another, from just a bit odd to flat-out batshit crazy. I'm sure there are exceptions and I haven't met a statistically significant sample, blah blah blah, whatever... I'm just callin' it likes I sees it. It's been my experience that the purportedly better academics is vastly outweighed by the scary social damage.

As of 10 PM last night, they were still calling for 6-10" where I am. I'd be surprised if I got 2". People stayed home from work, schools closed. It was utter bullshit. If I missed the mark this bad with my budgets and time line predictions, I'd be out on the street looking for a job.

It could have been worse except for one determined engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, who insisted on a higher seawall for the Onagawa plant. A good article can be found at http://www.oregonlive.com/opin.... I have a quote on my wall from Tatsuji Oshima, one of his proteges. "Corporate ethics and compliance may be similar, but their cores are different. From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, we cannot say that there is no need to question a company's actions just because they are not a crime under the law."

DING DING DING DING DING! We have a winner. When you take someone who craps in a hole where they grew up, paltry wages seem like they hit the friggin' lottery.

"The only reason to outsource is because of the massive shortage of tech workers." I call bullshit grande. I'm living through an outsource right now and it's ALL ABOUT COST. The existing help desk, first level support, and second level support were shown the door and replaced with 50% off bargain employees from Elbonia and elsewhere. Competence had zero to do with it. Uptime of our apps has tanked, ticket queues are ballooning, the new support folks can't find their ass with both hands and a map... but they sure are cheaper.

Yeah, and the American workers laid off to be replaced by outsourcers at 1/3 the price, that's the workers' fault too. Capitalism will always leverage poverty and when you can hire someone who thinks that having a flush toilet is a luxury over someone who expects a decent wage, you can pretty much count on the switch being made.

Businesses will continue to take advantage of poverty, wherever it exists and whoever it is. Greed is blind to creed and color. All it cares about is profit.

"Relax. It's North Korea, the nation-state equivalent of the short bus."

I can't see the logic with this one. Off-shore even more well-paying jobs to low-cost replacements in third world countries? How does that fix income inequity? The H-1B visa is being perverted by big business. It was intended to bring skill workers to the US, presuming that at least some percentage of them would stay and add to the economic engine. In practice, these visas are used by shell companies to bring migrant workers here to train, then return to their off-shore operations centers, taking permanent positions with them. Greenspan is correct only in the theoretical use of the H-1B, not in it's actual practice.

... my BS meter begins to go off the scale. While I've done my fair share of brutal weeks (I'm an IT guy), it's been my experience that 99% of people who claim that they regularly work 60 hrs a week are full of crap. If you work an extra hour a day, and then put in five more over the weekend, you're still only at 50. You need to work five ten hour days and then STILL put in ten more hours over the weekend. Humans just aren't built for that. When people have boasted that in interviews, I've drilled into them and I'll get excuses like, "I was on call, so even though I wasn't actually working, I was still working..." or "Technically I have a home office so when I drive every day, I count my commute..." or "Well, it was 60 hours for the last three weeks before go live, but before that it was 45-50!" Yes, there are legitimate workaholics that do 60 hours a week. Average Joes doing it? Rarely.

Seems to me we should be figuring out how to tap into this stuff and use it for fuel.

The era of the PC is over. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised at this.