Then you're going to be disappointed.

The speed of light in optical fibre is about 200km per millisecond. So a round-trip ping of 10ms, ignoring all other sources of latency, limits you to a range of 1000km (call it 600 miles). And that's never going to change.

Yes.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to point out that while America might be building walls to keep unwelcome visitors out, the Soviet Union built walls to keep its people in. A state that needs to imprison its entire population is not a state that has any right to exist.

I'm really not sure why we even need to discuss this. Assuming people are too young to personally remember this, were they also asleep during their history classes?

Communism is an economic theory that can't work in theory - it centralises economic planning leading to an insoluble information processing scaling problem, while at the same time destroying precisely the information (prices) that are needed to make sensible decisions - and has been proven not to work in practice. There have been plenty of Communist states. They all failed spectacularly, generally displaying massive corruption and brutal oppression as they did so.

They may not have looked like you imagine Communism should look, but that's because Communism cannot function at the scale of a nation-state, not in the real world, not with real people. And an economic theory that doesn't work unless people stop acting like people is not a very good theory.

Yes. The Soviet Union was a nightmare state.

Tell that to Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Not to mention North Korea and Vietnam. I'm sure they enjoyed doing their "own thing".

What? Seriously, what? How old are you? Do you actually remember the Cold War?

The fact that America is a flawed nation is no excuse for false equivalencies with brutal totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. Those countries, under those leaders, deliberately killed tens of millions of their own people. We never want to see anything like that again.

I agree with that for the most part (and history bears you out with regards to Communism). However, Fascism doesn't tie itself to a specific, unworkable, economic theory; it accepts capitalism so long as the state maintains control. Which is is a very prominent factor in Russia of late, possibly even more than in China.

Fascism is far more apt for Russia's state of government under Putin than Communism.

£5.5M for a year's support for hundreds of thousands of of XP systems is extremely good value, and far cheaper than any other option.

Of course, they'll still be in the same position a year from now. But in government, if you pass the buck for long enough, it becomes someone else's problem.

That would be awesome.

It's just the photino birds.

Caused by policies enacted during the Clinton and Carter administrations, which the Republicans had twice tried to repeal. The Clinton-era economic boom was the bubble rising; Bush and Obama inherited the bust.

Actually, the root causes can be traced back to FDR's New Deal, and probably further. No-one came out of that mess smelling like a rose, but trying to pin the blame solely on either Bush or Obama is simply short-sighted.

Yes. And one of the reasons for having hot spares (and replicas and backups) is the chance of multiple drive failures close together. So it's not a problem if you've planned things properly, but it's something you need to consider to create a good plan in the first place.

Depends a lot on the drive, but that can be a problem. The best solution is to either buy a drive with a significant amount of over-provisioning built in (like the Intel S3700 or Seagate 600 Pro) or over-provision it yourself. That means that when it fills up it still has plenty of spare area to remap blocks.

Enterprise drives typically have at least 20% over-provisioning; consumer drives can be 5% or less. A 400GB Seagate 600 Pro is the same as a 480GB Seagate 600, except for that setting.

Micron and Toshiba make them, but they're hard to find. You can also get SLC ioDrives. But the Intel S3700 looks to be nearly as good, and much, much cheaper.

Not off hand, sorry. I haven't been the sysadmin for 18 months (moved back to programming), and I don't want to give a guess that might be off by a factor of two.

Because if write wear is the prime failure mode and you're running RAID, you're likely to lose multiple SSDs in a relatively short interval.