Not that I am saying this was the cause for the discrepancy, but a uniform error COULD cause distance measurement errors, because your assumption is incorrect: the earth is very much not a sphere.

As a matter of interest, is English not your first language? It could be that someone is less able to determine subtle errors in languages with which they are less familiar.

In any case, it does make sense for Google to focus their efforts on the translations that are most requested.

Yes, like I said:

Furthermore:

Homo Erectus is a DIFFERENT SPECIES to us, and therefore may have had a lower life expectancy because of it.

The average lifespan of people living in poverty today is much higher than 200 years ago, even ignoring infant mortality.

Even so there are very few confirmed cases of people in poverty living to more than 110 years; admittedly some of that is because of much poorer record-keeping.

Additionally, you have a terrible understanding of statistics. The existence of supercentenials in ancient populations does not mean the median age was over 25.

Given that there are probably more individuals living in poverty today than there were Homo erectus in the entirety of history, if the chance of an erectus living to 110 was the same as a modern sapiens living in poverty, there is a very real chance that no erectus ever lived to 110.

Homo Erectus were also lucky if they hit the ripe old age of twenty-five years old. Cancer was the least of their worries.

Wait, what? It was already an interenational standard,Hypertext Transfer Protocol was invented before Hypertext Markup Language? That was an amazing piece of prescience! How did the original implimenters know that some time in the future, a document format called HTML would exist? Did they have to first invent TSP (Temporal Scrying Protocol)?

I am willing to accept that unlikely occurrence based on your well written (and well-moderated!) post. However, in all seriousness, I must call complete bullshit on your 'HTTP was just like FTP' statement.

HTTP represented a completely different model of how client / server communication should take place. FTP was closely related to it's popular contemporary protocols: SMTP, Telnet, etc. With it, you would first connect to a server, exchange credentials and other digital pleasantries, request a file operation, transfer data, and then bid a formal farewell to the server.

In fact, FTP was a different to the other protocols in another manner: it opened a separate connection for the actual heavy lifting, using it to send or retrieve file data.

HTTP is a completely different way of thinking: Simply connect to a server, tell it what you want and how you want it, read the headers and then read the file. Simple, agile, and low-latency.

Emma Peel is on this list (and currently the runaway winner): Option 8, Uma Thurman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(1998_film)

Just because it was terrible, doesn't mean it didn't happen :)

(except for Spiderman 3, Matrix 2 and 3, and...)

You have the wrong end of the stick, or are a troll. This response assumes the former.

The use of abuse@ email adresses is not to say that you, the recipient of the email has been abused. It is to alert the people who provide the email service that their service may be being abused by the person who sent the email.

Spam, 419 scams and phishing are all examples of mails that may be considered abusive by the people who run the email server.

You do not understand how typing works. The fastest speeds are achieved when the letters alternate between hands.

Advertising is even more pervasive than you say: even magpies prefer shiny coins to dull ones. Guess that proves that advertising if for the birds.

Okay, seriously, you are overstating your point. You are ignoring our innate sense of taste, which affects our opinion of design and utility. You are also ignoring the fact that it is our culture, not advertising, that informs most of our purchasing choices. Yes, advertising influences culture, but it is just one input in the massive machine that is society.

Let's hope he soon goes the way of Jack Thompson and Robert Cringely.

I find this business model of yours intriguing. A fully self-sufficient business sounds like a great idea, but I am not sure my business can afford the capital outlay. How did you manage to buy the oil reserves to power your company's vehicle? Or am I assuming too much? Since your company designed and built all your motor vehicle in house, they could run on anything, right?

Bad analogy. You wanting to use crazy hardware at work is closer to you wanting to drive your Harley over the Janitor's clean floor.

I thought that cat macros were catnip to trolls...

georgewilliamherbert does not have any good points as far as I can see. His latter comments are offtopic, complaining about non-Intel flash-based drives in general, when this thread is about Intel changing from SLC to MLC. (Ignoring that, I find his lack of references telling.)

To address his former point, the Intel drives use static wear leveling (as far as I know) so even if the drive is full, the flash is fairly evenly worn. That means you can get more space for the same price which mitigates the shorter lifespan of MLC.

Nowhere do I advocate cheaping out on your components, nor are my remarks aimed at home businesses. I think the rest of your comments about operating costs are a bit misplaced.

No. Two orders of magnitude is 100x. Good SLC vs good MLC is 10x, only a single order of magnitute longer lasting.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/4

What you forget is MLC is about 2x cheaper than SLC, so you can get 2x the space for the same price. With wear leveling, extra space is extra lifespan, so MLC dies 5x faster than SLC.

What does that mean for you? I put my money (job) where my mouth is. Our reasonably high traffic OLTP database server uses Intel SSDs as filesystem-level write cache. We get an average write level of 10MB/sec. The minimum expected lifespan of the drive is 2 petabytes. That means we likely have SIX YEARS before the cells start to become unwritable. At that point, no data will be lost: the drive will report the write failures to the OS and store to cells that haven't become unwritable yet, and you will be able to continue operating for the next few months while you get a replacement drive.