That's OK, censorship is alive and well in many countries. For example, those in which truth is not an absolute defense in libel cases. It should not matter what your intent is if you are only using facts unless you are deliberately using them to defraud, e.g. by careful omission of relevant information.

This is not about that. This is about search engines creating accurate impressions. See, it was already illegal in many of these countries to say bad things about people, sometimes even when they were true. But now people in these countries have the right to ask people to forget about things about them which are true. In most cases they didn't need a new law in order to actually go after people spreading rumors about them on the internet, the original laws would suffice. What this does is actually protect them not from things they didn't do, but from things which they did.

The problem is, this information getting out is critical to society's advancement. Covering up people's actions makes them seem less commonplace without actually doing anything to curb the behavior. If the behavior is common and unacceptable for reasons of actual harm, then it must be uncovered so that something can be done about it. If the behavior is common and not harmful to others, then we benefit if it is uncovered and we learn more about it, so that we can learn (perhaps, someday) not to stigmatize it.

The right to be forgotten is not about making the world a better place. It is about permitting people to behave badly without consequences.

We had a program which located jets via afterburner IR signatures in the 1970s, I realize commercial jets aren't using afterburners but you'd think we'd have this problem licked by now.

It's reputed by the usual conspiracy theorists that every call goes to one of those shiny new government data centers they built not so very long ago, and gets analyzed for contents. Then the transcripts are stored, and the contents of any interesting calls as well. This would consume substantially less data.

That's dumb. What year is it? I realize it's not a non-trivial problem to track bits of metal from space or wherever you've got to be in order to have a good view of airliners, but seriously. What year is it? If we can't have flying cars, we should at least know where our jets are.

And you know that no government incompetence, overreach, underreach, or malfeasance led to those deaths because you've recovered the wreckage and studied the cause?

I don't have a dog in this fight, mostly because I don't have a dog. But let's not make assumptions in any direction without evidence of some kind.

There are reasons to find that airliner that have nothing to do with those particular human lives. As time passes, of course, the apparent likelihood of reward does decrease.

Mmmmm, safely.

Well, what percentage of online music sales come from sites which offer music in 24 bit or >= 88kHz?

And his father beat the living shit out of him. And look at how well he turned out! Boy, I'm sure he's happy today!

I think they're right. Most users would be better served with the SSD, because most of them aren't filling up their drives and most of those that are could probably throw away a bunch of crusty old data without remorse. The claim was not made that nobody needs the storage space, only that few need it. In my experience, it's probably true, even though I'm someone who has 1 and 3 TB disks online, and backup disks for them. That's not particularly much, either, I just know that I'm a niche case. Most people just buy a PC that costs however many dollars they want to spend on one, plug it in like it says, and open the web browser.

Drives like this exist, I don't know if any are being sold at the moment but they've certainly been made. I believe the strategy has been used both for dual-attach and for increasing throughput. Some drives also used to read/write multiple tracks (that is, on multiple platters) at a time, but (as has been covered elsewhere in this thread) it got to be too complicated to keep everything aligned as the temperatures and rotational velocities increased.

Nope. It only means that you won't have to install a codec pack with support for MKV containers. You'll still need to install codecs if you want to play the files with the latest, greatest encoding. The container support will still have to be maintained until the sun sets on current versions of windows, but if this signals a change in Microsoft's attitude towards container formats, it might help them remain relevant. I know I used to use WIMP a lot because it was the only thing which was very good at identifying albums by their signatures when the filenames were mangled, but now there are other things which do that and the other shortcomings have driven me to other players.

By that time it will look like something else. Maybe it will be Unix-based by then, and virtualize Windows installs for applications. Or they'll be out of business then.

Even Linux is moving on past those filesystems, except for the chunky-funky variety of embedded devices which don't use some adorable little flash filesystem you have to recook on your desktop, the ones which look more (internally) like someone shrunk the PC.

In the meantime, computing resources are cheap enough to waste them virtualizing Linux. Sometimes I boot an iso with gparted in vmware player and then connect devices to the virtual machine. It avoids so many embarrassing mistakes, it avoids reboots of the actual hardware with the stupidly-long PC POST, and you can use the same strategy on any modern operating system. That covers your ext maintenance operations. As for reading them, a very small virtual machine is sufficient to check, mount, and reshare filesystems to Windows via Samba.

Microsoft is used to controlling the dominant filesystem, they're not giving anyone a leg up.

Yes, but not in commercial use. Most commercial files without DRM that I've seen are just M4Vs. MKV is used more by hobbyists, IYKWIM. Microsoft has in fact never supported it. It's one of the reasons why you need a clever DLNA server to meaningfully feed your media to an Xbox if you play, uh, media from "disparate" sources.

So an obvious answer would be whichever one you use the most often. If you don't know that, you're probably not a programmer. I'm not, though I do sometimes write my own code, or more commonly develop a small patch for someone else's. I don't actually use data structures directly, I let languages handle the details for me. I'm not figuring out how to find an array element of a given type, there are functions for that and I simply trust that they are fast. You wouldn't want to hire me as a programmer. :) (I'm not applying for programming jobs, either.)

We used to have drives that read/wrote multiple heads at a time. But the drives are too dense for that. I think the last ones that did it had glass platters to reduce expansion. Now we'd need a separate arm for each platter. Some drives have two sets of arms, but that's still only two read/write tasks simultaneously.