If anecdotal evidence on SSDs scares you perhaps you should re-review Google's hard data on hard disk failures. Certain brands of SSDs are already many times more reliable than hard drives if looking at failure rates over time. Hard drives are no more reliable. You will find plenty of anecdotes in NewEgg reviews of people buying x number of hard drives and y number of them arriving DOA or dying in 3 months.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html

Moneyball the movie was based off Moneyball the book. The concepts in Moneyball are real & have been implemented by most of Major League Baseball.

This must be why companies just randomly price their goods and never do market research to find out what price would net them the most profit.

It was early & my brain wasn't thinking.

Nuclear is synonymous with "uranium fueled reactor". When someone says "Nuclear" they're really saying "classical uranium based reactor like those currently in operation". Which aren't very economical when you count mining, refining(proprietary fuel rods aren't cheap), reacting, reprocessing, transporting & long-term storage along with safety hazards & initial construction costs. Plus the stigma attached to nuclear isn't helping it's cause.

The only benefit of current nuclear designs have is energy density which is really handy when you're on an aircraft carrier or submarine, but on a massive scale they really aren't that viable when you factor in all the costs associated with them. They do become viable if we have no other option(i.e completely out of fossil fuels & have no alternatives).

Thorium is more abundant, reactors are simpler to build, waste products are less toxic, with half-life as low as 100 years, plus there is less waste material.

Negatives: It's different than the current nuclear reactors, so engineers, businesses & regulatory agencies aren't really well versed or interested in doing a 360 on their current investment. There are no commercial thorium reactors currently available, until then Thorium is just a pipe dream. But the reasons it's not being used don't seem to be technical in nature, but more a mindset that needs to shift. We've tried uranium based reactors for decades now & there have been numerous failures & they really have not panned out as the end-all-be-all to our energy woes.

Everyone jazzed about Nuclear should hop on the Thorium bandwagon as it seems more viable & perhaps won't have as much stigma attached to it as "nuclear" does.

You can see the videos for more details.

Yes, I am aware that Thorium is just a different fuel & uses technique for nuclear reaction.

Nuclear is a waste of time, too complicated & too costly. Thorium is where it's at baby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LeM-Dyuk6g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk

Operatives within the free market would never buy government off & make the market less free?

Sure you're not actually using WooshTorrent?

This would be out of convenience. If there was a unified way to send subtitle data to the TV, the TV could save things like font, color, position, drop shadow...etc... Then that might be useful, since you'd configure it once on your TV & then any device will have consistent subtitling so long as they output a proper text stream.

It's just subtitles & closed captioning are often an after thought by the movie studios, which is why they probably don't get the attention some people would like.

Yes, multiple streams as in audio/video together on the same cable. That is a big deal. Component video + stereo requires 5 different connectors. SCART sounds pretty nifty for it's time, but yeah, it was never here in the USA.

Could they do compression & multiple video streams now? Possibly. Is it worth the hassle? No. Lossless at best would probably get you 2:1 compression ratio. It'd require new ICs that can handle realtime decompression of multiple HD(or greater) video streams, adding cost & complexity. It would only benefit displays that supported the new standard & given that these requests aren't really required for Joe Bob to sit in front of a TV and watch a movie, most likely they wouldn't be implemented in most consumer TVs.

We're lucky we have a standard 1920x1080 resolution, even if OTA broadcasts have to do it in 60i.

Regardless of which device is displaying the subtitles you will be limited to the options provided by that device. There is no reason you can't have the playback device offer different options as far as where text goes. Again, it comes down to complexity. Getting all manufactures of all TVs to decide on a universal way to receive, display & save subtitle preferences seems very unlikely. Would it be nice? Maybe. Is there demand that would make it worth the overall effort, probably not.

HDMI does have the benefit of no digital-to-analog conversion, multiple streams all on a more compact connector, reducing clutter & making connecting devices easier. That was kind of the point of HDMI. I am not sure why you don't think you can do high resolutions over an HDMI cable? I am not sure why you're hating on HDMI for expanding it's capabilities. Also the fact that it was made 10 years ago counts & if you really want to go back, the tech is originally based off of DVI which was developed back in the late 90s. So, yes we do have to go back & look at history for find out why things are the way they are. Would you like it if anytime a new CPU came out it wouldn't run your old programs, but it had all these new features you wanted? No. Backwards compatibility counts for a lot, which is why we probably haven't seen major changes to how video is encoded over an HDMI cable. It's "old tech" is a perfectly valid excuse.

Error: You are right that 8b/10b is used for video & TERC4 is only for data islands. I was incorrect. Still 8b/10b reduces the chance of signal degradation, not true error correction though. Why they excluded error correction? It's probably anybodies guess but most likely has to do with the fact that the original tech was pushing things to the limit back in the late 90s. Adding error correction possibly would have placed too much overhead & not added much benefit in the long run, you add error correction, but how much & do you allow retransmits, how do you handle retransmits, do they matter, i.e complexity. If they wanted to add compression, that adds more complexity as well. Simplicity can get you a long way sometimes & the perhaps they weight the costs & benefits of using a shielded cable, with 8b/10b encoding over short distances and decided error correction wasn't needed for the purposes they intended it for.

Compression: No, because HDMI is a high speed data links meant to carry uncompressed video streams. Did VGA, component, composite or s-video compress their data? No. Also it would have to have been lossless & it would have add complexity. Remember HDMI was being developed 10 years ago, would you have been happy if they implemented MPEG2 as the mandatory video compression stream? That being said, you can carry compressed audio streams over HDMI.
Error correction: HDMI uses TMDS which uses TERC4 & non-video data also gains BCH ECC...
Optical Cabling: ...okay? Either copper is or is not fast enough & obviously it is.
Text Channel: Line 21 VBI was a headache. Captioning & subtitles are better handled by the playback device injecting them into the video stream. This provides a single point of configuration. In the past you had to make sure the DVD player supported closed captioning & the TV supported it & any intermediary supported it & then you had to configure each one to make sure it was turned on and even then it didn't work all the time. Plus TV based closed captioning looks like crap. What with HDMI 1.4 adding a 100mbit Ethernet link, maybe we'll see more flexibility with data/text streaming. I still think closed captioning/subtitles should be handled by the playback device & not the display device.
Content protection: Yes indeed, and DVDs had CSS while DVD players added macrovision. Nothing new. It sucks, but it's not like it's predecessors didn't have this negative either.

You should despise corruption over a specific institution. The government & many private institutions are all culpable in the financial meltdown. What safeguards did the private firms have to protect themselves and the economy from meltdown? None. They took advantage of the situation, which is what most corporations do and with the US economy setup to value short-term growth gains over stability you will have a lot of shortsighted investments with most of the prosperity coming in the form of fraudulent growth predicated off a bubble.

It's kind of hard to be objective when the banks and investment firms fund the regulators and ratings agencies... Definitely not a conflict of interest!