Yeah, I got a similar price on a 256GB drive back in June/July.

I'm more irritated by the bringing price down-part of that sentence. SSD:s are already about $0.55 per GiB and have been at that price point for several months.

I hope the $0.55 price will turn out to be more like $.40 once production is in full swing.

Nah. It's in your interest to stay as much off the radar of the Dear Leader and his buddies radar as possible. The second one of them perceives you as a threat you and your family is up for disappearance.

They will go to great lengths to treat famous people well, because you can't disappear those discretely. Random nerds, not so much. One of these elite hackers will be killed the second the leaders perceive that person as a threat.

Maybe there'll be a conservative version too...

Google Search: gay marriage
Did you mean "may marriage"?

Google Search: abortion
Did you mean "adoption"?

Google Search: the big bang
Showing results for "Genesis 1":

Whether you use metric or Imperial measurements is really a minor side issue.

The important thing is that you use a good steel ruler and compasses. None of that plastic crap.

That is mainly a problem if you sign up to get something for free. I don't expect that a company that makes 50 bucks net profit off of a fridge is going to risk their reputation in order to make a tiny bit more money by selling my data.

I'm more worried that the NSA would hack into an accelerometer intended to detect vibrations of the compressor and use it as a microphone to spy on my kitchen.

It's that too, but that's not what the (more serious) suits are excited about. The suits are typically excited about increasing profits for stuff that already exists, or about new business to business inventions.

Imagine for instance connecting everything in a factory in such a way that you can sit at a screen in a control room and detect or predict problems ahead of time. You could also have a risk function that quantifies risk. Sensors might for instance detect weak but unusual vibrations in a machine. Other sensors might detect that you only have spares in stock for one repair of that machine. The risk function has a model of how the factory works and the model shows that the machine is vital and that production will be significantly reduced if it breaks down, which means that you're looking at a fairly high economic risk. The system could then suggest potential fixes, like stocking up on more spares, or running the machine more slowly until the next scheduled maintenance.

I think this sort of setup is already in place in many factories, but it will get more common and more advanced in the future.

Yeah and there were virtual machines talking to other virtual machines and abstracting away resources long before anyone thought of the word "cloud".

Simple shorthands like "cloud" or "internet of things" are needed because the suit-wearing people who decide where money gets allocated often prefer fuzzy thinking.

You don't get it. IoT is a shorthand for the idea of having lots of networked sensors and actuators. In layman's terms: setups such as self-driving cars that warn each other about road hazards.

If this is the shape of things to come then there will obviously will be plenty of work for security experts.

We have to distinguish between the onset of mental illness and the prevalence. The onset is often between age 0-35. Look here for stats on schizophrenia http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/202/s54/s5.full Also note the comments about depression and anxiety. If you haven't had these before age 35 you're not likely to get them before retirement age.

I'm surprised to see the suicide figures, that the onset is basically constant with age. I guess I've been getting information about the <i>relative</i> risk compared to other causes of death.

The average age of onset of alcohol dependence is 22.5 http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jul2007/niaaa-02.htm Look at page 11 of this paper for age of first use for "other drugs" (as in not alcohol, cannabis) http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/11009/646_PP.pdf There does look to be a small peak in the 45+ bracket too. Medicine / opiate abuse, I'm guessing.

On the other hand, younger people are more likely to have a baby, develop a debilitating mental illness, develop a debilitating substance addiction, commit suicide, or die in a violent accident. All of which will drastically impact their ability to contribute professionally.

Employers take that into account too.

Perhaps if the bus driver makes minimum wage. But then, would you want to be driven by someone who makes minimum wage?

Subways are easy to automate, it's been done in countless cities, but there you have an average of 100-200 passengers per driver which really does make it pretty pointless to eliminate the driver.

Most of Joe Six Pack's data is going straight to his various cloud accounts, which he expects to be cheap (if not free). This means that Google and Amazon need the price per unit of storage to go down, if they want to keep their customers.

The limiting latency here is the > 50 ms latency to the servers and the limiting transfer speed is the 100 Mb/s or so offered by the ISP that Joe uses. Regular old HDD:s will do fine for the storage in that situation. The database that catalogs Joe's collection of "home movies" will probably be stored in RAM most of the time, but SSD:s do have their place here as well, of course.

This is not exactly a niche case btw.

Nah, real programmers just wire analog components together until they get the behavior that they need.

It's a bit worse than that. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you are not allowed by the laws of physics to simultaneously know all the initial conditions with arbitrarily high precision.