He's leaving next spring anyway. The Obama administration has already decided he should be replaced with a four-star general or an admiral of equivalent rank. They decided this because the head of the NSA is also the head of the armed forces Cyber Command ( http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256222466393090 , paywall)

The numbers given for Netflix and Youtube are all peak period figures, usually the local evening. Take a look at the Sandvine report at https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2013/2h-2013-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdf .

The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture

There's some truth to that, but to say the "largest" driver is something that nobody has ever demonstrated.

Growing up my family had a hog farm. It was started in the '30s before antibiotics and saw the effect of them on herd health when they became available for agricultural use in the '50s and going forward.

Keep in mind that farms don't use the most expensive antibiotics. Instead, they use common ones such as the various penicillin derivatives and sulfa drugs. They also use antibiotics which were never approved for humans.

So while farms may be the source of resistance to penicillin and sulfa, they can't be the source of resistance to expensive antibiotics used in hospitals. For example, we're running out of TB antibiotics that work. Most of these are never fed to farm animals, so any resistance comes from improper use in the human population. My point is that while farms may be a source of resistance, human misuse must also be a significant factor. Getting rid of factory farms won't solve the issue.

From the experience of my family farm (which was not a factory farm), there's no doubt the improvement with the introduction of antibiotics in herd health was huge. Before antibiotics we had massive die-offs that could take 25% of the herd. The only treatments we had for things such as dysentery were arsenic and copper sulfate, which were very hard on the animals (you basically try to kill the bacteria before you kill the animal). Other diseases such as pneumonia had no treatments. When antibiotics came along in the '50s the improvement was dramatic. While there was some resistance developed to the penicillin drugs, they still were effective in controlling dysentery and other diseases. It did take careful management.

The Wall Street Journal has forced commentators to use their real names for years. It hasn't stopped trolling at all. Some people just don't care what their online reputation is.

Annual disk drive production is around 600 million HDDs per year ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2012/10/03/have-hard-disk-drives-peaked/ ).

Not necessarily. Don't confuse the decision about *what* to cache with the actual structure of the data on the hybrid drive. Firmware on the hybrid drive can easily keep track of which data on the SSD and HDD is correct, even when you are running Linux or some other OS. The Windows drivers could be used to decide where to put the data (SSD or HDD) during Windows operation, but it also implies that the firmware on the hybrid drive knows where the data is (since it actually put it wherever the Windows drivers commanded).

What about places such as Wyoming and Colorado that are dry (under 50%) for most of the year?

Also, my family had a hog farm growing up. The hogs were outside exposed to the elements. Every November in the early '80s we got hit with a major influenza outbreak in the hogs approaching 100% among the hogs weighing 60 to 180 lbs. There was no major change in the humidity, and didn't depend on rain or other weather events. Assuming the infection mechanism is similar (and certainly the influenza viruses were similar or the same since hogs are the source of many influenza virus mutations crossing over to humans), how does this result explain this?

Actually, just this last year two rubidium atoms 20m apart were entangled ( https://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6090/72.abstract ).

I don't know about KC, but in Boulder, CO the power utility Xcel in 2008 delivered fiber to the curb for every home and business in the city of 100,000 (it was planning to run its smart grid demo over it). But the cost ballooned from $15 million to $45 million just to install the fiber and Xcel abandoned the project not long after the fiber was installed. Now the fiber network is only used to periodically poll meters every few minutes and may go dark entirely if Boulder decides to break away from Xcel (they can't afford to buy the fiber).

Sure, it could be always be improved, but look at the actual numbers. You would have to improve it by huge amounts. To reduce nitrogen and phosphorus use you would have to figure out how to recycle it or bioengineer the algae to use much less of it. Recycling it would require a lot more input energy, perhaps making the whole process a net loss no matter what we do. And if we could bioengineer algae to use less fertilizer, we would have done the same thing for our crops a long time ago.

It may be doable, but it won't be for a long, long time. People are already looking at these same issues in our crop production, which is even more important than fuel production. If there was a big win somewhere, we would have found it a long time ago.

Don't worry. The price of gummy worms in the store is far above what cattle producers can afford to pay. Any gummy worms that wind up at cattle feedlots will be out-of-date or otherwise defective.

The paper pointed to by the article (http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/IPAC2012/papers/moyap01.pdf ) talks about needing a 1.5 GEV superconducting linear accelerator to create the neutrons. While that's not the Tevatron or LHC, it's still going to soak up a lot of power. How much of the power of the reactor will go into keeping the linac running? I didn't see any estimates in the paper.

So when we finally make it back to the moon do we disturb the Apollo 11 site to raise the flag again, or do we leave just the way it is for historical purposes?

No, the drive generally does not remap bad sectors on writes. Even today writes are done blindly; the drive seeks to the track and then pumps out the bits when the sector comes under the head. The drive has no idea whether or not the media was good or the bits were written properly. It used to be many years ago that the drive had to read a "sector header" (which was located just before the data area) to find the sector, and during a write an error on this small read (only a few bytes) could trigger a remap. I don't know if sector headers are still used today, but if not a write won't trigger the remap.

If you want the drive to discover and remap the bad sectors, you've got to have it do reads. Any reads will work, even a simple dd to /dev/null.

I don't know why the random data writes worked for the OP in this thread, unless he was also doing reads.

Guttman has updated his original paper a few times, the last being around 2011. In his updated epilogue he says "In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of (normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement, re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X, and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now." See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html#Epilogue