They are torrents.. not thesilkroad. if you are concerned use your neighbors wifi or a decent proxy.

I was not surprised either. However, we purport to be a free country with certain rights, including privacy. To not follow that is not just insulting and hypocritical, it is dangerous. The sheer amount of data collected is too much to handle period. This was proven at 9/11 which the NSA had intel on (with far less noisy data than now), and with the Boston marathon bombing.

The question then is what will this data be used for if it is not usable/used for its intended purpose? I can think of nothing good, and this is the reason for those rights in the first place. To prevent tyranny.

That seems exceptionally short. I run a repair shop, and dead/dying HDDs are the second most common problem. While I do not know the operational hours of these devices, the great majority are past the 3 year mark when they begin to fail.
I guess it also depends on your definition of high density as I do not see many drives > 1TB in consumer/SMB equipment.

Check your math. 100,000 hours / 24 = 4166.6~ days
4166.6666~ days / 365 = 11.4 years

Slashdot. Quickly becoming the PopSci of the geek world. Soylent is often tastier.

A Faraday cage jams a signal like a building jams the weather.

Fermi's paradox assumes that intelligence is the endgame of evolution, and that any (or some) intelligent species will survive. Perhaps intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, that we just have not reached yet.

Regardless even if billion year old civilizations do exist, as posted above, there may well be hard physical limits on expansion due c etc. And just listening for radio evidence is unlikely, both due to distance, and the fact that out own radio window (and any other species) is likely to be short. already more and more of our radio transmissions are low power and directed. This will only continue, reducing our emissions, Listening for any leakage from a great distance is akin to trying to smell a fart in a hurricane.

Someone could. Someone could get past the legal and financial barriers. Secure capital to build an infrastructure, and keep their investors from bailing when the incumbents apply legal and other challenges.

Be careful there bud. Water is known to always contain dihydrogen monoxide. This dangerous compound is needed by living creatures, but in the wrong doses can lead to low blood pressure, sunken eyes, kidney and other organ failure, spinal and brain swelling and death.

No matter how good, I won't pay Hollywood or the mpaa. Period.

We need voter friendly measurements. Instead of "Los Angeles to San Francisco in 28 minutes.", we need "like crossing 20 Olympic swimming pools in 13 parsecs."

Good job boys. Stop those dopers! They would be raping your grandma and selling acid to your 5 year old if we didn't do this! Look how violently they fight over the black market we created!

Now, kindly pay your taxes, drink a case of beast and watch the football game. Thank you!

It is not 'a simple browser' when loaded with extensions. Without extensions, the performance of chrome and firefox are fine. My argument holds, and the issues is not the browser. The biggest issue I see is webpage bloat. 2-3 tabs can easily take over 1GB RAM, but RAM is cheap and easily upgradable in most cases.

Wrong. They give lip service to it, but pork projects abound with th GOP. Especially if it feeds spending/defense etc in their home state.

Think that's invasive, try a plethysmograph. Required of sex offenders everywhere.