The word you are looking for is "preventive".

No, it's not. The usage you're complaining about is perfectly valid.

"Preventative" has been in use since 1666 as an alternate pronunciation and spelling for "preventive".

In some regions (including where I grew up - almost in the center of the region natively speaking the "radio accent", which has been the de facto standard speech for the U.S. since the advent of commercial broadcasting) it is the preferred form.

If you want to be a spelling NAZI, you should avoid being provincial about it. Check the online dictionaries before correcting others, to distinguish between being helpful and imposing your local speech on others.

Unlike French ("a dead language spoken by millions"), American English does not have a regulatory body prescribing an official standard (though some educators have tried, since at least Daniel Webster). It grows and changes by usage. Dictionaries play a game of catch up and try to document how it's realy used.

(Yes, I know how it grates on your nerves when someone uses a different spelling or pronunciation than you're used to. I feel the same way when my wife pronounces "legacy" as if she was talking about a ledge. But apparently that's actually the first pronunciation listed in The Oxford.)

(Slashdot timed out on me and I lost the start of my post.)

As built the skywalk was so overloaded that eventual collapse was possible even without any load. Naturally when it did fail it would be at a time when both the upper and lower skywalks were heavily loaded with people, and the floor crowded below. 114 died, 216 were injured - many seriously.

Of course loads on things like bridges and skyways vary a lot. You can expect them to go in times of high load, which happens to be when there are a lot of people around to be injured or killed.

n this case it failed when there was a celebration in progress. The ground floor level was crammed with dancing people and the crowd had overflowed onto the skywalks. Pogo dancing was current at the time, and apparently the failure occurred when people on the bridges, synchronized by the live music, were jumping up and down in unison. (It's the inverse of the way soldiers are required NOT to march in step when crossing a bridge.)

Thus you can expect such structures to go when there are a lot of people around to get hurt.

(Interestingly, a crowd of people is MUCH more of a load, even without synchronized jumping, than vehicular traffic. San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was reported to have had its greatest load ever during its anneversary, a few years back. The bridge was closed to vehicular traffic and the public invited to hike over it. Normally the bridge span has a substantial arc. This stretched the springy cables and broght the span down until it was flat.

During the planning the load on the bridge had been anticipated and computed to be safe. But there were plenty of boats standing by to try to save people if the deck DID collapse, and the people had been warned of the possibility and asked not to dance or walk in step.

I mix up "Peoria" and "Pretoria" all the time. Is there much of a difference?

Nobody marches to Peoria.

Oh yes, it was the most implausibly bizarre book I've ever read. And the interior of phobos was hollowed out to be a habitat where the sentient saurians (hadrosaurs if I recall) had been living for the last 65 million years. Yes, something was done to keep the planet from freezing. I wish I could remember the name of that book...

And who knows, maybe they've got some oil, and not enough freedom.

There was a sci-fi book I read, and for the life of me I can't remember the title. One of the weirdest books ever. In it, dinosaurs had escaped to Phobos before they died out, and the earth had a massive world-changing event in which mountains split and formed into rocket engines that propelled the earth out of the solar system entirely and to another star. This was the aliens' way of meeting new species...bring them all to them.

It was a truly bizarre book, and I wish I remembered the title...

Phantasy Star III

Generally wormholes or warp drives require something with a negative mass to warp space the right way, so those are most certainly "new physics."

Fun reading with real-ish physics to aid your understanding of special relativity.

Most client machines don't have multiple drives mirrored either. I was thinking purely in a server setting when I made the comments, though I'll admit that I didn't specify.

A HD with two head systems still wouldn't match an SSD for random reads, but it'd be much better than one. Depending on the use it's seeing, it could even employ different algorithms depending on the use mode it's seeing to help speed things along. In addition, more cache might help it during a large sequential read, allowing the heads to leapfrog each other better. Like I said - engineering and programming nightmare, but an interesting thought experiment.

You're talking about how the system queues multiple data(read/write) requests with the drive, and the drive possibly delivering them out of order(because it's using an optimized path to collect all the data), right?

I assumed that capability from the start. The REAL trick to the system is that to date it's one read head per platter, thus one device serving all the data. With two head systems, the question comes up of how you optimally assign said demands between the two head systems to most efficiently move the data.

This is actually a very interesting proposal. While I imagine the engineering and programming would be a relative nightmare*, it would provide a number of options for hard drives.

While it wouldn't double performance in most cases, especially not sequential operations, for random operations it'd be almost as good as two drives. Maybe better if the access is typically really random and one head can 'field' mostly the outer disc calls while the other catches the inner disk ones.

*Just look at the difference between programming a single thread application and multi-threading!

I should probably have put some disclaimers in my post about affordability and suitability. I'm not a refresh snob but I can't help but think that 30Hz is a bit slow for gaming, perhaps even video watching.

I once had a job that involved a lot of standing. One day the boss brought in some shoes for us to wear.
As we put them on one guy said "What's the difference? These are just regular old shoes," but it turned out they were actually orthopedic shoes, and so he said "Well then, I stand corrected."

That's what I do. My kid has books he love, toys (including duplos), but also a tablet.