Is it 2013?

To continue:

pretty straightforward

Okay, I am going to be an ass here.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+fi...

Your question is fairly easily answered.

Bitdefender Free FTW. Light, high catch rate. MSSE lets too much through now.

You don't all use these: http://www.amazon.com/Cell-Pho... ????

More annoying is the auto crap textured fake 3d in satellite view. Please let me turn that off and not have 4 polygon tree tops blocking my view.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2...

Personally I have been lobbying my city council to put in a park/greenspace shaped like this.

I use public transport when I am going to en event to drink, so I will not drive.

A few years ago, I used it regularly and had no choice. I live in a smallish college town. We have 2 bus systems, the college (free for anyone), bu only near the university, and only a few of connector points with the city system.

Leaving the Uni's system out, let us take a common task, getting from a near downtown residential area to Walmart on the north side of town. This involves the following steps: 1. Wait for bus closest to home, it is on a 30 minute loop,takes 10 minutes to get downtown if you catch it, and downtown is a 20 minute walk, so depending on timing a walk is faster.
Time 10-30 minutes. 2. Exit at downtown xfer center, wait for bus that goes in that direction. It is on a 10 minute route, so typically not a long wait if any. Ride out to the mall (not the location for walmart), depending on stops 15-30 minutes.
3. Wait for transfer to route that completes journey, walking not a good option here as the last 2-3 miles are not very pedestrian friendly. 30 minute loop for this bus so up to 30 minute wait, time on bus 7 minutes. 7-40 minutes.
4. Shop, wait up to 30 for return bus. 15-45 minutes (long on return trip as this bus hits up a lot of apartments on way back from Walmart).
5. Catch the downtown connector 15-30 minutes
6. Wait for your bus home and ride it 10-40 minutes

Total time: 1:10 to 3:45, time if you drove from same location 15-25 minutes depending on traffic.

Our system is a pretty good one too, and this is one of the longest trips with the most xfers. Could you imagine trying to plan getting to work on time with a 2+ hour error margin? Or getting home to make dinner or get your kids to an event?

Not very feasible. Even if the longest time is rare, it is still quite a swing and an incredible portion of your day to waste riding a bus.

Calling a spade a spade is racist. Don't tell me you did not know the racial conditions of that term.

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

All users and phones are different, but look into your mobile data settings and see what is using the data. I have 3 phones, 2 heavily used, one streaming google play music when commuting as well as heavy web use on weekends and all three phones together rarely hit 2.5GB. Turn off the streaming and it is closer to .5-1GB. I use chrome, waze, facebook, google play music, and google photos the most. I have play store set to only update on wifi, photos to only backup on wifi and FB set to only play cat videos on wifi and it works.

I would see what apps are the most egregious, make sure you are on wifi at work and home and go from there. You can also look into cyanogen or other roms for your phones that allow you to turn data off at the app level.

Also, look into ting, since now you can use GSM or CDMA phones on their service. Well worth it.

All drives fail. Yes with HDDs I can recover data from about 70% to 80% of failures. It is often a labor intensive and expensive proposition for the customer, and never 100%.

SSDs most often fail hard with no chance of data recovery.

I still recommend them to customers. With one caveat - I will not install one for you if you do not have a good (automated and preferably off-site) backup system.

Drive failure of any kind sucks ass (yes that is the technical term). If you are not heavily pushing backup solutions to your clients and warning them of them of the dangers in any drive system, the fault is yours. If you do inform and they balk at even If you do this, then the speed benefit from SSDs far outstrips any failures now that the price is reasonable.

Unfortunately it is not infinity writes or reads. Google grown defects. Magnetic platters fail from bit rot/failing sectors more frequently than head crash/mechanical failure in my experience.

Are drive I/O speeds important in your environment or are magnetic disks sufficient? If your use case does not require high drive I/O then any longevity issue (real or imagined) is moot and buying SSDs is a waste of money. If drive IO is important, then does your use case demand lots of writes? Does the OS support TRIM? Are you using a drive geared towards the numbers of writes your system generates? If so, then is is a simple calculation.. my application writes on average x bytes per y. SSD z can handle n write cycles. With that you can estimate your replacement rate and costs. SSDs are great, but they are not a panacea, and require proper planning to use correctly in many environments.

One of the more interesting aspects of Robinson's books to me are the socio-political ones. Specifically, the fact tha Mars was a new place, with initially a very intelligent population, it came to be a place to rethink society and economics, in often painful ways. Also, there were attempts due to resource pressures on earth, of using it as an escape valve for human populations, which it could never completely be.

Assuming we ever make it to Mars, do you see it as a likely spot to foment revolution? Do you see a presence there as being able to relieve or change issues here on earth? How so?

What do you see as the primary reason we should go to Mars? I agree we should and have my own reasoning, but I want to know yours.