Well, Snowden is clearly a pawn, but in some sense so is Putin. Why shouldn't Snowden play this game? His goal is to get some accountability for the US surveillance state and rein it in a bit. So he stirs the pot.

Right now the US and EU are struggling to find an approach they can agree on for dealing with Russia. Snowden brings up the NSA which is a sore subject with the EU, making it harder for the US to get them on-board. If the US ends up agreeing to more transparency or less surveillance in order to get the EU to back more sanctions against Russia, how is that a bad deal for anybody but Putin?

That is REALLY hard to pull off these days. There are only so many people with access to that kind of data, and the NSA/CIA/etc could do quite a bit to try to figure out who he was. If he remained in a country friendly to the US he could have been extradited.

I don't think he went to Russia because he's sympathetic to the Russians. He just knows they would do anything to embarrass the US so they'd be likely to harbor him. This just seems like mutual interest.

Well, it might be hypocrisy, but pretty much every nation both engages in espionage and outlaws it at the same time. That's how it has worked since as long as anybody can tell. Some nations admit that they do it, some don't, but they basically all do it anyway. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican engaged in espionage.

Do the cells not form a blastula? The article was a bit fuzzy on the details. If these form embryonic stem cells it just seems like a matter of degree to outright produce a whole embryo, which of course means the possibility of human cloning.

Well, I can't say that my SSD sustains much more read/write throughput than my 4-drive 2-copies-per-block RAID1ish btrfs. It certainly seeks faster. Maybe my SSD just isn't particularly fast.

Hardly. The office I work at has about 7k people working at, in a suburb 20 miles from the major city (which isn't NYC). It used to have over 10k - mostly with STEM majors. Sure, most of them wouldn't work at Google, but the point is that you can find people with advanced skills in suburbs. Quite a few are willing to drive a fair distance to get there as well, but with a LOT less hassle than a commute into a major city.

Agree. I run an SSD myself for my OS drive, and RAID for general storage (which keeps the cost WAY down). Things go WAY faster on the SSD, though not quite as fast as I'd expected, actually.

The advantage of RAID1 is in parallel seeks, which is a big advantage if your drives have a lot of reads. However, the latency of any read is still the same so if reads must be sequential they will be slow.

I don't see how the one follows from the other. Sure, they need to investigate. I don't see why that requires everybody to show up in a room at the same time. Investigate and figure out whether there is any truth to the defense. If there is, then dismiss charges before wasting time on anything more formal.

Why should one have respect for the legal system, if it isn't about justice? I'm fine with there being laws as guidelines so that we can all agree on what right/wrong generally looks like. However, following the law should not be an excuse when you do something that harms others, and breaking the law shouldn't be reason to punish somebody who does nobody else harm.

Some of the bigger changes have to do with things like sharepoint integration, which really does work fairly well in newer versions of Office in a corporate setting.

However, it still can be rather buggy, and doesn't play nicely with Chrome unless there is some plugin I'm not aware of (that is, the more web-based parts - if you just directly open a file from Office no browser is involved).

Even that comparison is a poor one. Really this all depends on your mission.

If all you want is an OS drive for your Chromebook/etc, then you want to look at the cost of 16-32GB of SSD and that is as cheap as any hard drive you could get in that size configuration. The SSD is an obvious choice here.

If you want to store your video collection and your options are RAID HD or SSD, then you don't care how big the individual drives are so you look at price per GB. That usually will end up costing $80-110 for the hard drive in any year - the only thing that changes is the size. That will get you about 2-3TB of HD, which is about 4 cents/GB. Compare that to something like 50 cents/GB for SSD. Clearly if you're storing video the SSD is a really bad choice.

When you look at HD prices you need to stay close to $100. You don't save much money by cutting capacity below that, and you don't get much capacity by spending more than that. I'm not as familiar with the dynamics of SSD, but I imagine that they too tend to have a sweet spot, and it only makes sense to compare apples to apples.

Sure, but neither have hard drives. The 1TB SSD of tomorrow may very well be competitive with the 1TB HD of today, but will it be competitive against the 64TB HD of tomorrow?

RAID does not always mean stripe. Mirroring does improve seek performance. It increases the chance that a drive has a head closer to the data you want already (if the implementation is smart enough to be aware of this), and it also allows seeks to occur in parallel (which isn't exactly the same as latency reduction, but is fairly equivalent in practice since drives are almost always busy).

That's basically what RAID1 gets you, though at a cost to write performance. You'll never beat SSD random write performance via RAID, though writes on SSDs can leave a bit to be desired as well.

RAID 0 really only buys you throughput, and I don't think SSD really has any advantage over HD for throughput (I'm open to correction there).

The big difference is in seek time. RAID 1 is what buys you seek time for reads, and of course it has no safety issues. There is nothing that limits RAID 1 to only one mirror either beyond the implementation (mdadm supports any number of mirrors and will divide reads across them). Of course, if you have a RAID1 with 8 drives in it, and write is going to block across all 8 of them.

But, write performance on SSD isn't quite as good as read performance either.

So, I imagine whether RAID competes with SSD is going to depend on the task. Of course, you can always put SSDs in a RAID as well.

Only if you look at the sales of the spectrum. Subtract all the monthly cell phone plan payments those taxpayers are making and AT&T/Verizon don't look like such a great deal any longer.

Too big to fail is a recipe for disaster. When a market gets dominated by one or two players, they should be handicapped until their customers have incentive to flee elsewhere and the market share drops to a moderate level. This should be done whether they're doing anything wrong or not - it is just good for the economy. Nothing personal - just business.