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 Any gummy worms that wind up at cattle feedlots will be out-of-date or otherwise defective.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

If you look at the hothardware benchmarks, they found very small improvements for high-performance HDDs, and only on large transfers. Contrary to what MojoKid wrote, even USB 2.0 was good enough for the usage patterns of most hard drives. While the USB 2.0 transfer speed couldn't handle the outer zones of the fastest hard drives, it could handle their inner zones and slower hard drives. When you factor in that most disk commands have sizable delays due to seek and rotational delays that the new USB Attached SCSI Protocol can't do anything about (command queuing and seek optimization are generally overrated), there just isn't just isn't a lot to be gained using this new protocol with hard drives. It does make a big difference with SSDs, though.

SATA ports aren't that expensive to implement, and there is a huge developed base for them. The hardware and protocol was designed from ground up to handle disk drives. SATA won't be going away anytime soon.

If only they can grow brain cells, we'll have something to stave off the zombie apocalypse, sort of like "True Blood" for vampires.

But the real problem is how much coal, natural gas, etc. do you have to keep on reserve even if you don't use it. For example, your windmills may be capable of providing 50% of your needs, but if the wind doesn't blow you need backup. Solar is more predictable, but you still get cloudy days and seasonal patterns. Keeping power plants in reserve is very expensive. All you save when you don't use them is the fuel. You might try massively overbuilding wind and solar, but that still increases the cost per delivered KWH.

Also, once they seize your computer for running a Tor node they can also look for evidence of illegal activity elsewhere on the drives. After all, they still have be sure that you aren't the source of the activity. Nothing says there couldn't be several independent sources of illegal activity running through your Tor node or open access Wi-Fi, including possibly your own.

If unfortunately *you* found yourself out of a job, I don't know if any CEO would hire you. You've basically said that at under 50 you've already checked out. You're only willing to give the company only 8 or 9 hours a day, never on weekends. You have a very bad opinion of many of the people who work for you, thinking you know their job better than they do. You may believe you're better at hiding those opinions than the programmer who's out of work, but really it doesn't fool anybody after awhile. It doesn't sound like you are a very enthusiastic supporter of your CEO. Given the attitudes in your post, what CEO knowing about them would hire you for a VP position? In short, I really don't think you're any better than the poor guy that started this thread, just luckier.