You only wrote 7TB in 2 years to your 120GB ssd? ;-)

Oops...TB, not GB. But yes. It is the OS (currently 8.1 Pro) and just about all applications. Things that do not need that SSD speed (music, movies, etc) live on spinning drives or PC's. My playlist is not going to switch from one track to the next by virtue of being on the SSD.
Things that DO matter, OS+applications (1 SSD), and working files (second SSD), live on SSD's.
Total writes between the 2 SSD's is ~11TB.

7TB is still tiny in relative terms.

The 'wear out too fast' concept is wildly overblown. You can listen to old rumors, or read actual test data.

600TB total writes - http://techreport.com/review/2...
800TB total writes, and some of these consumer grade drives start to fail - http://techreport.com/review/2...

"By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Even the most demanding power users would have a hard time pushing the endurance limits of these SSDs."

By contrast, my main home machine (120GB Kingston SSD) has ~7GB total, in over 2 years of 24/7 use. I'll leave you to do the math on lifespan for that.

That commenter at Amazon is totally incorrect. Of course you can search an SSD when indexing is off.
Indexing simply makes searching faster. And seeing that searching an SSD is already several times faster than an indexed HDD, it is not needed on the SSD.

It and the journal you wrote Saturday and a third you wrote Sunday. So yes, it's borked.

Did you miss the second sentence?

Why is a pay check important?

Eating is kind of important.

What's amazing is that this 1996-era hack for extending the functionality of the Netscape browser, in a rather kludgy and unsafe way, still exists at all in 2014. I took a class at the Netscape office in Mountain View in 1997 to learn how to write NPAPI plugins and thought then that it was an ugly hack that deserved to go way soon, though I was glad it existed to solve my immediate problems. Not only did it not go away (though MS removed NPAPI support for IE a long time ago), nearly all major browsers today still support it.

Good for Google for deprecating this crap. Firefox (which is to some degree a descendant of Netscape) has also been reducing its support, per the WP article.

FWIW, I don't worry over much about carbon. My EV purchase was based on purely economic analysis. Having driven an EV for a while, what I really dislike about gas burners is the noise and the smell. This isn't an environmental concern, or not a global environmental concern, anyway. It's about the environment of my garage.

You people who believe in the singularity very obviously don't know how a computer works. It's simply an electric abacus; look at schematics for an ALU or a logic gate. How many beads do I need to put on my abacus before it becomes self-aware?

The danger is anthropomorphism; it's simply too easy to fool people into believing they see sentience where there is none. Evil people will use this to their evil ends.

Easy! I stand corrected. :-)

I suppose. I generally want to stop every few hours for an hour or so anyway.

I don't think the number needs to be anywhere near that high. Not remotely.

Don't make the mistake of thinking of supercharger stations as analogous to your average neighborhood gas station. They're nothing like that. Supercharger stations are only needed for long-distance travel. They're analogous to the big travel centers you find along the interstates and other highways which carry significant amounts of long-distance traffic, and the numbers required are similar to those of travel centers. If there's one every hundred miles or so along every long-distance travel corridor (which in the US is mostly just the interstates, though there are a few areas with long-distance highways) then coverage will be complete.

With electric vehicles, 95+% of charging is done at places where vehicles spend lots of time parked, primarily homes and workplaces. Such charging doesn't need to be particularly fast. Fast charging only matters when you're driving distances beyond the range of your battery.

You mention North Dakota, for example. Move the slider on that map to 2015 and you'll see they plan to put three superchargers there. That will cover the long-distance travel across ND, and most long-distance travel within ND. Add another supercharger on highway 2, midway between Grand Forks and Minot and you'll have covered nearly all of the rest. Add four of five more and you'll be able to get to any destination in the state without worry.

Randomly-driven evolution, no. But we aren't very far from being able to deliberately evolve ourselves, to achieve specific purposes.

There's a good argument, though, that deliberate, directed evolution is also evolution by variation and selection... it's just that the variation and selection is carried out in brains and in computers rather than in genotypes and phenotypes. In fact, there's a good argument that all knowledge creation is via variation and selection, including all knowledge created by humans, though there we call the process speculation and criticism and much of it happens internally so that truly bad ideas never get uttered or written.

So, no need to abandon the theory of evolution.

Yes and no. What you say is true, and further it appears we've already reached and passed the maximum number of children born per year, in absolute terms. But the population is still growing because the world population is youth-heavy. Assuming we stay on the current trend of gradually declining births and assuming we don't start living longer than 100 years in large numbers, this means the world population will stop growing at about 10B, then start a very slow decline, but that will be far above the levels Spy Hunter thinks we should reach.

I don't think I'd want to live in Spy Hunter's world, though. I certainly wouldn't want to live the "hunter-gatherer lifestyle", which was fully Hobbesian (nasty, brutish and short). In some senses perhaps those people were "healthier" than we are today, but they experienced a lot more pain and died a lot sooner. I suppose Spy Hunter is theorizing some world in which we eat like hunter-gatherers but live in a technological civilization, but that seems like a silly approach when we can, instead, continue our research into human biochemistry to understand exactly what humans need (with much more precision than "eat like hunter-gatherers", who almost certainly never got an ideal diet) and into food production, until we can create food that is healthy (ideally so), safe and flavorful.