Yes, to both.

SMART has in my career not made one difference to notice whether a drive was bad. SMART only shows things after the drive has gone bad already. A rise in the number of read/write retries in a large disk array is immediately noticeable and you don't need SMART to tell you that a drive is bad (and just the timeouts will usually cause the bad drive to be kicked out). Bad data is immediately noticeable (and likewise, will cause the drive to be kicked out) if you use ZFS, even before SMART catches on to an ECC fault.

If they return any relevant SMART data at all, most of the 'important' data is locked behind manufacturer specific codes. SMART is good for desktop drives, useless otherwise.

But I'd still be nervous, near the nozzle like that.

It's actually due to a bad firmware bug (I've replaced 12 of them in the last few months) which still doesn't seem to have fixed the issue completely.

If you issue a SMART command at the exact same time something is writing to the disk, data is read back corrupted (the read times out or something, the controller kicks it out due to inactivity). If you are monitoring your SMART eg. every hour, you would eventually start having 'bad disks' in a seemingly random fashion. In my case, there could be months between bad disks and other times 2 or 3 would fail at once.

Disabled SMART monitoring on my controller -> no more bad disks (although once a disk has encountered the bug, it will continue to report faulted through SMART).

The demand won't stop, we'll always need more cheap storage and until we can make chips as fast and cheap as we can coat a piece of metal with magnets, we'll have spinning rust. The spinning rust will get heavier and slower though as we are nearing the limits of what is physically possible but that's another decade or 2 away from now.

Eventually SSD will outperform hard drives in cost on other levels (energy usage, price per cubic feet) just as hard drives did to tape and their robots (robots are too expensive to operate and take up too much space for anyone that has their infrastructure in less than half a rack).

Look at tape, even it's demand has not stopped and they're still inventing larger and larger versions because if you can spare a rack to hold your robot, you could hold several PB's worth of data whereas a rack of hard drives barely holds 1PB.

There are also few workloads where block-level dedupe is any better than block-level compression. Most people don't store the same data over and over (yes, disk images of virtual machines, but even there the images stop converging soon after deployment).

With block-level compression I get ~30% for what is basically 'random' data (user home directories and medical imaging data, 100TB). Block-level deduplication would only give me ~15%.

Compression does internal de-duplication already (one of the easiest ways of compressing is finding duplicates and eliminating them, the hardest part of compression is finding the best way of doing it).

Since you asked:
http://www.religioustolerance....

The main problem is that they don't sample your entire DNA, only specific parts of it which sometimes could also match or partial match your siblings (eg. identical twins), parents, clones and other close relatives.

Despite what you may think, DNA tests as performed by police have never been scientifically proven to be globally unique. It is unlikely for someone to have the same DNA markers than you but it's not impossible.

If there is no original footage, there can be no copyright violation on the original works.
Fan-fiction, whether the author allows it or not, is not part of the original author's copyright. The author has legally no say in what other people can and cannot write (and any legal decision that says they do is unconstitutional).
A fictional character can be copyrighted only if they are very well-defined (usually written) and non-generic, it can also be trademarked but that does not exempt them from parody and a whole other litany of copyright/trademark exceptions also known as fair use. A "power-ranger-like" character is fairly generic (costumed (teenage) super-hero?).

Golem? You're the one who doesn't understand that I'm laughing at the crazy old woman. Oh well - try to keep up next time around.

Yet again, some punk tells me how happy he is that I'm mortal.

It isn't government's job to regulate marriage. That is society's job. Society has repeatedly rejected homosexual marriages - time and time again. Remember Prop 8 in California?

But, the homos can't accept society's rule, so they get these activist judges to pretend that homo's rights are being violated. It's pretty sick. Which part of "democracy" do all the homos fail to understand? Societal norms are societal norms.

BTW - to into any chat room, anywhere. "Gay" is still a derogatory term, no matter how young the speakers.

Yes - and THAT is what is wrong with the cloud. Unless you are encrypting it independently before uploading, your stuff is going to be scanned for various purposes. All of those purposes are detrimental to your privacy. It's great that they took down a pedo ring - IF they really took down a pedo ring. But, they are going to use this as an excuse or reason to continue spying on all honest citizens.

Your first point is laughable. Yes - insurers raised rates, every year that they could get away with it. Various groups, including the government, fought them tooth and nail over those rates. Obamacare? Who, precisely, do you think put that whole package together? Obama GAVE THE INSURANCE COMPANIES everything they wanted, on a silver platter. Obama mandates that EVERYONE MUST BUY the insurance company's products. Obama mandates that everyone must purchase packages that meet certain criteria. The mandate penalizes you if you aren't doing business with the companies that have been preying on you.

And, you don't recognize that Obama acted the willing pawn of the insurance companies?

Health insurance. I'm paying considerably MORE for my health insurance than I did in years past. All the suckers who THINK that they are paying for their new health insurance are deluded - they can only get that insurance with the aid of SUBSIDIES. How long do you think the subsidies are going to last?

Read Pieroxy's comment below. France's version of Obolacare is bankrupt - and so are all the other versions of Obolacare around the world.

Queer people marry? Nope. It doesn't happen. You can have a legal fiction built in the image of marriage, but queers can't marry. And - you're going to give CREDIT TO OBAMA FOR THAT???? Utter nonsense. Activist judges around the nation deserve the blame for that. They have been moving forward with this agenda for the past twenty years.

Which party do I prefer? I PREFER conservatism. Neither party offers that though. I've become more and more libertarian over the years, largely because both major parties are utter failures, and both have betrayed the American people.

Yes, they are identical.

Oh - you believe that ages old tripe about Republicans being warmongers, while Dems avoid wars? That nonsense was laid to rest long ago. Remember Johnson? That rat bastard set up a false flag operation and got some Americans killed to make propaganda to get us into VietNam.

Lay aside your worn out stereotypes about the parties. Your democrats promote that nonsense, and laugh at you for believing it!

I would really like to have that demonstrated to me. My telephone cares little which way I point it. Nor does my telephone much care which side of the tower I am on. Maybe the donut is flattened on one axis, but we all know that there aren't tens of thousands of antenna on the tower, each one mounted on independent gimbals, tracking each user.