$200 is roughly a monthly lease on a Volt.

Volt has 350+ mile range. Prius has 500+ mile range. So I don't buy your range rambling.

Sigh. In the U.S., the existence of the Copyright Law is due to Constitution, and the purpose has nothing whatsoever to do with creator's rights. The Copyright Law exists

Again, let's be clear: the purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The means of achieving it are to give authors and inventors some rights for a limited time.

Oooh, Colargol! Someone should something something Colargol in SpaceX's dragon :)

I forgot to add that if, due to a very unlikely circumstance, a domain will be partially magnetized during one track writing, it'll very likely be partially magnetized during another writing of the same track as well. So yes, a poorly inter-track domain may contain noise, not data. That doesn't make it useful for data recovery, and such domains are relatively few.

There's two things in this picture that are very different than what you have, say, in an audio tape recorder. 1. A head producing very high magnetic field gradient. 2. A high-coercivity material that doesn't give shit about fields that aren't strong enough to remagnetize a domain. This adds up to a situation where domains at the boundary between tracks work in a binary fashion. Either they flip, and they contain data from the current track, or they don't and they contain data from the neighboring track. There's no situation where they'd have previous data from the same track, because the head positioning errors are smaller than the domain size!

The head positioning error is much smaller than the width of the track. There are no buffer zones.

That's not the case with modern hard drives, at least nothing made in the last decade. You worked on such a machine long time ago and/or you weren't told really what it was for. The machine you worked on, if it was done for recovery of drives made after 1998 or thereabouts, was simply made to read data that was not overwritten. It was to be used when one wished to read the drive's contents without using the drive's electromechanical system to do so. Such a machine makes life easier iff you have reverse-engineered enough of the drive to know the encoding used on the data, and the formatting of all the housekeeping information. It lets you skip having to do platter transplants, and generally having to use the drive's own firmware for data recovery - where the firmware wasn't designed for that.

Nope. The drives manufactured in the last two decades, give-or-take, have the size of magnetic domains matched to the size of the field generated by the heads. The "edge" of the track is defined by where data from one track ceases to be, and the data from another track begins, and this is a binary thing. One domain here has data from this track, another domain there has data from that track.

What people constantly fail to realize is that if there was an area of disk, the mythical "inter-track gap", that was any good at storing any data, it'd be stupid for the manufacturer to not put the expensive platter real estate to good use. And they do precisely that: they use all of the platters to store your current data. There is no inter track gap.

Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.

For iteration, as long as you know a bit in advance what you will need, you can certainly issue prefetch requests. They can often remove cache stalls altogether.

Well, the modus operandi and know-how of the operator didn't change much, so there...

Well, an exchange really works by taking the bitcoins - they now own them, not you, all that you have is an entry in some other database - a digital IOU. They could have used the blockchain to store a tamper-proof backup of who was the "real" owner of the coins held by the exchange, too, but chose not to.

The symptoms are, in a nutshell: fans running full-blast, yet the system still runs too hot. To me this screams that the heat pipes are faulty.

Yes, they sometimes are either faulty from the factory, or fail shortly after you start using the system. One failure mode is loss of coolant. Another one is through detachment and pooling of the wick material. All the ones I've seen failed still had coolant, but the wick material was loose inside of the pipe, instead of nicely attached to the entirety of the interior surface. A failed heat pipe can't but accelerate the stress fracturing of the solder balls on the chips it services, and the cyclic stress amplitudes will be larger due to larger temperature changes.

Still, it's not catastrophic. All that will happen is the masks dropping, the pilots having to don theirs quickly, lowering the altitude, and that's about it. Nobody should die if you merely shoot out through the fuselage.