If you have 8 TB of capacity in the form of two 4TB drives, you can trade speed for capacity via RAID. With RAID 0, each druve gets half of each KB, doubling throughput.

I've often wondered about building a drive with TWO sets of read/write heads. All drives going back decades read one cylinder at a time. Why not add another set of heads intge other side of the platters and read two cylinders at a time. Rotational latency eould be cut in half. One set could be used for the inner tracks and one for the outer tracks to reduce seek time.

Expanding on that, why does the head read from ONE point. The arm could be lined with a row of ten read heads. We can put millions of pixels on a four inch screen, why can't we put ten reading sensors on a two-inch arm?

It was an experiment. One that was successful enough that they've decided to do 38 cities for the next phase. Gmail was an experiment. So was [insert long forgotten Google project here ]. Some of their experiments don't turn out, and Google shuts it down. Others take off, like Gmail. At this stage, Google has invested a couple hundred million dollars or so, so that shows a significant level of commitment- they're probably not going to shut it down tomorrow.

One of the criteria Google uses to decide where to go next is the local competition. Comcast can probably convince Google to stay out of Milwaukee by offering 100 Mbps for $80. If Comcast is offering 10 Mbps for $80, Google knows they can get all of those customers. For consumers, we win if Comcast and AT&T keep Google at bay by offering a decent service at a different price, which is in fact happening in cities that Google is considering. Google wins by scaring the ISPs into offering faster service too - that means Comcast is providing a faster connection to YouTube, Gmail,and Google Docs.

Customers must pay more if they exceed limits â" but it's not a cap,

That's fine with me, if they'll also give me a refund if I don't reach my limit. After all, fair's fair, right? They estimate how much data I'll use when I sign up, and if I exceed it they charge me extra, if I don't reach it they charge me less.

"There's zero chance it can fail," said the young engineer.

Right, so it's just a matter of building a river, a dam, and a hydro plant next to my solar plant in the desert. That'll work. Some ideas have been tried like pumping water uphill, or molten salt for thermal storage, but are overly lossy. I'm a big fan of the idea of hydrogen-based energy storage (storing hydrogen as a palladium hydride is quite dense and safe), and that can work at small scale so individual home systems can use it, but again that's not yet practical, just another "looks great on paper" idea.

An abrupt 40% increase in power cost (totally do-able with solar thermal) would destroy the economy. It's a non-starter. Over 20 years, though, maybe. Of course, that's plenty of time for better solar panels to happen (today the good ones simply can't be made in the needed quantity, but technology marches on).

I don't share your religious beliefs, and object to your suggestion that they be imposed by force. Maybe you can persuade one of the governments that will actually matter though - China and India. China might be an easy sell there since imposing crazy economic ideas by force is the norm. Pushing down coal use in the US, though, that seems to have some popular support. Natural gas is so cheap, and vastly better in terms of genuine pollution.

Maybe it's you? I'm 45 and recruiters bother me more than ever. I keep my tech skills current, and carefully manage my career so as not to get stuck looking like an expert only on old things. Senior engineers are golden right now - I find it a great place to be. If what I do could be done by a kid anywhere, well, I'd be a terrible engineer after 20+ years.

True enough, but it doesn't matter. Other than during the dot-bust, it's never taken me long to get a series of interviews whenever I wanted/needed a new job. This is not a career where staying for a long time at any company is usually rewarded, this is a job where technical success stories on your resume from many years of companies are rewarded.

Any job that sounds fun like that will be exploitive and pay less. There's likely no worse corner of this industry than the large game companies. Find something to work on that puts your friends to sleep when you describe it, but people in the industry know is important.

That's kind of my point - it already exists. And it exists on the most gullible user, cash-rich platform ever - iOS. Find My iPhone would allow an attacker to send a message to the user informing him or her of a complete wipe of their data unless they paid up. These are folks who would have no idea if they've backed up their phone or not, and even if they had half of them done' know how to reinstall what they lost. Tens of millions of phones with owners who would drop $100 in a heartbeat not to lose their friends texts or pictures of their grandkids. And yet it's not happening.

I hate hipsters, assholes, and golddiggers. And I hate people that try to get ahead by stepping on other people's heads.
Watching the fight between Uber and Lyft, it feels like the appropriate way to do a little bit of social good is simply calling Yellow Cab.

Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one.

Too inexperienced to make good decisions + too strong to be easily controlled = excellent chances of dying young.

I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!

Not really. Remember, the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. So your dam walls only need to be higher than one layer of stones: after a layer of is finished, move the walls on top of its outer edge and refill. Sure, you need a system of levees to get the ships to the lake at the top of the growing pyramid, but that's okay: it can just rest against the pyramid wall. 45 degree rise is no problem if you can move weight one bucket at a time.

And if you use windmills to pump the water, you don't even need all that much human labour.

Indeed, and yet I'm dozens of posts into this discussion before you were the first person I saw even notice. :-(

This could in theory be used to prevent something like a phone triggering a bomb, though if there is a genuine threat of something like that happening, I would think that restricting or turning off transmission over the network was a much more reliable method than assuming that someone willing to blow up a bomb was also obliging enough not to mod their phone to ignore the kill switch.

Meanwhile, it has now been demonstrated beyond any doubt that video recording of police officers at work reduces both complaints of excessive force against officers and instances of violence toward officers, both of which are surely good things. It has also been demonstrated on numerous occasions that officers who did cross the line may then attempt to destroy evidence such as photographs or recordings on electronic devices held by passers by. Obviously if all it takes is accessing some centralised police system with insufficient safeguards and oversight to remotely destroy that evidence, as opposed to potentially physically confronting someone who is just an innocent third party and making their situation worse, there is less deterrent to the minority of officers who do abuse their position.

Even in the west, the grid is woefully behind (Texas is doing the best, but it's not great). Our 3 big power grids have been running on capacity that was originally intended as redundant for years now, and we've about exhausted that. It's a real and serious problem that no one is fixing. With most state governments going broke, it's not going to catch the interest of voters as a priority until the worst happens. And since that level of infrastructure buildout takes 20 years, it will be bad for some time once it goes bad.

Large scale blackouts due to cascading failures that take hours or days to recover from is the next step. "Off the grid" won't be optional, unless we change our ways and build infrastructure, or people can generate their own, thus taking load off the grid. "Off the grid" solutions are already somewhat popular in places where electrical power is unreliable - which increasingly will be "most places".

I hope we never have to "political will" to impose some guy's idea of what's best on everyone else. It's too expensive and awkward to store power today. There's not really a good, cost-effective solution for using solar as base load generation. The panels that are cost-effective are too tied to rare materials to be more than a nice product. We could make solar thermal work if we had to, at industrial scale, but since we don't have to, we won't. However, with better energy storage and panel technology, it all becomes practical.

Solar power will happen on its own when it's cheap and practical, no dictatorial imposition required. And it seems like that's getting close, just a couple of breakthroughs away. But not today.

By the time the police comes around there's nothing to be found anymore... *sniffle*

Let's put this in geek terms:

You're using "free" in the RMS sense, where the market itself is liberated. You and I agree on this. A free market is one that has been liberated from monopolists and others who want to lock it down for their own benefit.

The Koch brothers want a free-as-in-BSD market where they are free to manipulate it as they see fit without allowing others to benefit.

Which freedom is more important - that of the market or that of the actors in the market? I suppose the answer boils down to your demographic. If you're one of the billionaires who doesn't want to work for a living, you probably want the latter version so that you can run roughshod over rules meant to keep one person from screwing it up for everyone. If you are literally anyone else on the entire planet, you should probably prefer the first definition.