I though I would be one of those people.

But my latest work laptop has 16GB of RAM, which is basically enough to cache pretty much anything I touch during the day. So once the cache is hot, I don't notice any slowdows from the HDD.

As a result, the laptop is perfectly usable with a HDD once booted (I only ever suspend to RAM). And even then, Ubuntu 12.04 boots pretty quickly from cold, though things like Lotus Notes and Eclipse can be slow to start up.

By contrast, my old WinXP based laptop was totally transformed by an SSD, to the point that I genuinely didn't even notice it thrashing to swap when it ran out of RAM.

SSD good. RAM better!

What are you on about? The Fukushima reactors were scrammed minutes before the tsunami arrived, in response to the original earthquake. The meltdown was the result of the cooling system failure and the residual decay heat. Absolutely nothing like Chernobyl or an atomic weapon.

A lot of power? Hardly. A few watts, especially as the screen is never on these days. I've never measured the power draw, but it probably doesn't go above 10-15W, and that's not much more than newer routers that have to power those internal hubs.

Any wasted power would be on the order of $10-$20 dollars a year? Big deal.

And 99% (made up figure) of users don't use any of the internal switch ports. Most people connect to the interweb using wireless connections these days. And an Eee PC has a wireless port built in, with an ethernet port for the upstream modem connection. I have the USB ethernet connection to break out to a further wireless router, but I don't necessarily need it, and will retire it now I'm happy with the functioning of the AP functionality.

Perhaps, but then it has no built in UPS, and if you also use the machine as a NAS, a UPS comes in handy as well.

I've an old Asus EEE PC 701, augmented with a USB upstream ethernet, that does perfect service as a router with OpenWRT. Built in UPS (which I presume also conditions the power for the mainboard).

Uptime: 612d 3h 48m 4s, though I'll power it down soon to swap the RAM with a machine more deserving of the 2GB installed in there currently.

In summary, get a cheap old laptop/netbook, and configure it accordingly. A laptop with a broken screen can be had cheap as chips.

Prefab blocks, erected on site, what could possibly go wrong?

The heat would vapourize the rock, which would at least expand and exert some force on the rest of the asteroid. If the nuke was embedded in the asteroid before exploding, the vapourised rock would expand inside the asteroid, and probably significantly fracture the asteroid, perhaps into several pieces. And those individual pieces, as well as being less mass than the combined mass before (because of the mass lost to vapourised rock) would also be on a different trajectory to before, and so perhaps missing earth entirely. I think that's the point.

Also, don't think of asteroids as necessarily solid rock like you'd find on earth. They are just as likely to be coalesced space rubble, and not very tightly bound together due to insufficient gravity.

WTF would you need vectorization in a DB for?

I'd stake my dog's life that scalability differenes are not down to compiler switches and SIMD instruction selection. Amdahl's law is more likely to be applicable, and as DBs have many serialization points (disk IO, lock management) it is these that are more likely to affect scalability rather than compiler flags. Xeon Phi? Come on!

That's just pure FUD. Anything on the clean side of the reactor (basically anything this side of the primary heat exchanger is just like any other power plant. I can asure you anything copper is no where near the "dirty" side of the reactor, it just isn't a suitable material. And I'm not sure why you'd need neodymium magnets anywhere. I'd imagine any generator or motor magnets would be eletromagnets.

Even for materials exposed to nuclear waste, things like metals can be cleaned then recycled, the cleanup waste then being considered nuclear waste. Most metals can be recycled. Concrete that's been exposed to nuclear waste (like water from cooling ponds) can be tricky, but metal cladding is used for such ponds, that can be stripped and cleaned, leaving the underlying concrete clean of nuclear contaminants.

Wow, you should work in the futures market.

Perhaps Germany just buy in some France's cheap nuclear surplus energy to keep the costs down?

Fukushima was a catalogue of retrospective bad design, cover-ups, mis-management, a huge freaking earthquake and largest tsunami in memory devastating huge swathes of Japanese countryside and killing many thousands of people.

And still no deaths can be attributed to the nuclear aspect of the regional disaster. Perhaps even the destructive hydrogen explosions could have been avoided (thus preventing much of the fallout) if it had been allowed to vent, but as I understand it, that wasn't allowed due to the fear of "radioactive gases" being vented.

Three Mile Island and Fukushima show us Nuclear is inherently safe, only Chernobyl has had anything like a devastating effect on anything other than economics scales. And the Chernobyl reactors were a picture of how not to do nuclear power.

You're half right. Moderating as troll knocks off points (back to 4).

This reply is also partly to undo the moderation.

The study I've seen (no citation, sorry) indicated that drivers who were intoxicated were rubbish at the details, like fine maneuvers (think parking and fitting through small gaps) but not so affected by monotous tasks, like long highway drives, whereas sleep deprivation was the opposite.

In short, get plenty of sleep, stay off the sause.

Oh, and cayenne8 is a total twat.

Please tell me you're kidding!

TFS says "an internet". A network -> network connection is an internet connection, regardless of whether it's routed to "the internet".

And what about libraries? An app could contain 100's of MB of code, even if only a small fraction of it is referenced. I'd rather that code not push out my working set of data.

The paper above doesn't entirely refute my assertion:

This was based on observations of IO patterns from the studied applications in the paper.

Yeah, this was a bad example, as Word docs are highly structured. SQLite files operate similarly.