Use of TRIM fights the deleterious effect of write amplification on lifespan, as well as reducing degradation of performance over time. Why does that "make no sense" for individual users?

There are two strategies for using TRIM.

The first one is "discard" in the mount options, which causes the drive to be informed via the TRIM command at the time a block is freed (file erased). The second strategy runs a utility (fstrim) periodically - for example, once a day - to TRIM all the blocks freed since the last time.

The first strategy somewhat slows down each delete in normal operation, and is considered to be dangerous. For this reason the second strategy is considered to be preferable. It is not clear to me why grouping the TRIMs and executing the groups infrequently is considered safer. But I have used the second strategy for a long time on my M500 SSD and never discovered any corruption.

References: 1, 2, 3

ZFS is COW and still cannot magically eliminate rrandom writes due to fragmentation as it gets near full. I daresay all filesystems have this problem to a degree. Reserved blocks and over-provisioning in no way can prevent it.

Reserved blocks are solely present to allow bad-block replacement. Over-provisioning adds to the general pool of available blocks, but as soon as they are used they have to be erased before re-use, just like any other block. As your writes cumulatively total multiples of the capacity of the drive, over-provisioned or not, you end up with exactly the same situation that TRIM is intended to address.

Whether all blocks are written to when you have written 1.0 times the capacity of the drive (no over-provisioning), or 1.5 times the capacity (strongly over-provisioned), this occurs when only a tiny fraction of the drive endurance limit is reached.

No aircraft ever had to come anywhere remotely close to pressurizing air from 0.1% (one millibar) to about 75% (what you need in a cabin when not using breathing apparatus). The Concorde had to pressurize from 7.5%. Typical airliners of today pressurize from about 25%. This is a hell of a lot further from the Concorde than the Concorde was from sea level.

So no, we haven't been "doing this for 60 years".

It's not a vactrain. It's not even that similar to a vactrain. It functions like a very high altitude aircraft

Let's not underestimate just how ridiculously low the pressure will be. It's actually damned close to a vacuum. The audacity of it impressed me. The quoted one millibar of pressure corresponds to about 48 km of altitude. The highest cruising altitude for any passenger aircraft was the Concorde at 18 km, corresponding to 75 millibars. Consider: the pressure at the Concorde's altitude was 7.5% of sea level; the Hyperloop would be but 1.3% of Concorde, or 0.1% of sea level.

Correct; thank you.

What's with the "helped" bit? The House Reps were pretty solidly in favour of the Bill, the House Dems were pretty solidly against it.

Are you talking about the vote on HR 1314 today, motion to agree on the Senate amendment, which I believe is the topic? Because you couldn't be more wrong if so.

Final roll call:
R, 86 aye, 158 nay, 2 not voting
D, 40 aye, 144 nay, 4 not voting

"House Reps" were most assuredly not "pretty solidly in favour of the Bill" with the Senate amendment, which is what TFA is about.

The debts he [Reagan] piled up were unconscionable.

Arguably so, but he was far from the only one, or even the first one, to do so - and Obama dwarfs all of the others. Here is the amount of national debt, in billions of constant 2012-adjusted dollars, accumulated during the terms of various Presidents.

Wilson, 1912-1920 239
Harding, 1920-1922 15
Coolidge, 1922-1928 -78
Hoover, 1928-1932 91
Roosevelt, 1932-1945 3068
(same, prior to WW2 only), (1932-1941) (454)
Truman, 1945-1952 -1091
Eisenhower, 1952-1960 -22
Kennedy, 1960-1963 80
Johnson, 1963-1968 -7
Nixon, 1968-1974 -80
Ford, 1974-1976 301
Carter, 1976-1980 23
Reagan, 1980-1988 2597
Bush, 1988-1992 1661
Clinton, 1992-2000 939
Bush, 2000-2008 3223
Obama, 2008-2014 7125

Roosevelt kicked off the tradition of accumulating huge debt in peacetime, even if we leave out the WW2 years. And nobody came close to repeating it until Ford. However since 1912, only Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon left the country's debt better than they found it.

A History of Debt in the United States

What in the heck do you think the Federal COMMUNICATIONS Commission has to do with regulating a bank as a non-bank? I was under the impression that that is the FDIC's purview. As far as I know, PayPal and other such enterprises are also subject to the regulations of the individual states

it's [Beaglebone] hard to update

No it isn't.

the eMMC space is a little too small to be really useful.

No it isn't.

So you boot off of SD instead, but that requires you to hold down a button while it is booting to bypass the eMMC.

No it doesn't.

Zero for three.

A corporation has no accountability to customers. It is accountable to the shareholders. See "fiduciary duties". A corporation taking maximum advantage of its customers is WORKING AS INTENDED.

A government's duty, the reason it exists, is to serve the people. Yes, corruption and poor performance happens, but they are DEFECTS.

It's because government owns it, and government is building it. Government is concerned with one thing and one thing only: steering as much money as possible to their own pockets. They do it by cheaping out on critical safety valves.

I have to smile at how much more apropos that statement is if you s/government/corporation/g. Any corporation by its very raison d'être is like a corrupt government. At least with a government you get a chance.

A reactor that costs $10.1 billion, and the fucking critical coolant valves don't fucking work when brand fucking new? WTF????? How is it possible for the design process of a doom machine to be that lackadaisical? Consider; this is after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Flames are licking out of my head; smoke is curling up. If you gotta mark me flamebait, I almost understand it. But you gotta ask yourself: if anybody is less than filled with rage at this shit, are they really paying attention to Stuff That Matters?

That doesn't prove shit. Plenty of people are perfectly all right with Windows. Most Americans think the Republican and Democrat are not both a living joke.

The coolant used in all US Navy nuclear power plants is pressurized water, with the secondary circuit being a separate water/steam loop. The experiment using sodium cooling in USS Seawolf SSN-575 was (predictably) a miserable failure and was never repeated. The Soviet Alfa class used lead-bismuth cooling. In operation they were very problematic. They could not even be refueled. They could never be shut down without elaborate port installations to keep the coolant liquified. All of them were retired early.

Yes, any steam power plant, whether nuclear or not, requires the water to be purified to an extreme degree. Scale from salt would cause devastating damage long before any rusting has a chance to occur. This has been a consideration throughout the age of steam.

The Navy is moving to all-electric propulsion. So they won't have steam turbines.

Even if that happens, if they are deriving the electricity from nuclear power (as they certainly will for aircraft carriers), they certainly will have steam turbines to drive the generators. Whether the turbines drive the propellers through reduction gears, or by running generators which in turn drive electric motors, is a mere detail of power transmission.

Yes, in theory you could run a gas turbine using a gas-cooled nuclear reactor, in place of a steam turbine using a water-cooled nuclear reactor, but that would be far off in the future if it happens at all. There hasn't been a single inch of progress in that direction in the 60 years of marine nuclear propulsion.

If you are going to try to correct someone, try to have a clue how the technology works so you don't embarrass yourself.