Yes, it would very closely resemble NAS, but there would be no TCP stack involved.

The thing is we are starting to really push drive technology. Solid state drives, drives with bigger sectors, is the structure of the drive layout better suited for one thing then another, or could some very interesting optimizations be had by removing this stuff from the OS and putting it in firmware and having that hardware / firmware combo be an ASIC or a Programable Gate Array?

A LOT of things are done faster and more robustly in Hardware and there are other tasks that really require a more completely software based approach and I think this is one of those things that could really make large gains if realized in hardware.

If firmware was involved it could be upgradeable much like flashing the bios.

Except the FCC would have jurisdiction because Google is an American company which operates primarily on American soil ("Communications Act of 1934", which explicitly and implicitly details FCC powers over all forms of telecommunication). Not that I agree with the article in the least, but this arrogant American just wanted to prove the Anonymous Coward wrong.

This is my rationale:

Google's treatment of Foundem stifled our growth and constrained the development of our innovative search technology.

If Foundem was a search company worth their salt then they'd at least have an explanation as to how "The Man" was holdin' 'em down. Just sounds like a shill of another pissed-off advertising company who wasn't good enough to be bought out by Google. There are an awful lot of those out on Madison Avenue. As proof, I'll read to you a quote from the Oct 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The article begins on page 46 and depicts Page and Brin windsurfing:

As the C.O.O. of Viacom, Karamzin represented one of the world's largest media companies...Of more interest to Karamazin was the companie's advertising business...To turn this lucrative system over to over to a mechanized auction posed a serious threat...The Google executives thought Karmazin's method manipulated emotions and cheated advertisers...Karmazin looked at his Google hosts and proclaimed, only half in jest, "You're fucking with the magic!"

Having a dumber search is... harder? Maybe I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems to me that having a search engine that's biased would in fact be more complicated than an unbiased search engine..

Exactly, this is the reason why people started using Google in the first place. Everything else was absolutely full of spam, enough that relevant articles were sometimes first listed on the second or third page of results. I can see companies abusing this, but I suspect communities such as Slashdot will scream bloody murder when results are found to be skewed. From there, it's our choice to keep using it or move on to the next startup with a good search mechanism.

A life sentence would be preferable to most of those locations. At least you'd have a better chance of surviving in lockup.

A lot of people are in the wishful thinking brigade of "It would be cool to..." without ever walking the walk, they just like to dream about it. I know it with myself that it's pretty easy to dream up grand projects, something completely different to drive them to practical completion. I'm sure some people would have created a basic OS just to let it fizzle for lack of interest or because of final exams or because they got a job or got a girlfriend or family or didn't really like all the hard real-life problems or didn't cope well QA'ing code submissions as opposed to coding or any one of the million things that leads to dead halfassed projects on sourceforge. Linus wasn't just the spark that set off a community, he's been the one driving the community with massive amounts of code written by him personally and the persistance to drive the project to maturity. There's a lot of people who could have played the supporting roles, but there's few who could have walked in his shoes. I'm not so sure anyone would have.

I have an amusing story about Microsoft which I came across while travelling around India two years ago. One of the leprosy colonies we were visiting was paired with an orphanage school, with a few hundred children. They showed me their IT room - the head of IT proudly showed me a room with around 30 computers in. They looked a bit old, particularly in a time when LCD screen technology was what I was used to. Clearly, this was the future for the children of India. The IT guy explained to me how he'd had 30 copies or so of pirated Windows XP on the computers. An Indian rep of Microsoft discovered this and demanded the license fees for the software. As a charity, with a yearly budget probably less than the cost of these licenses, the IT guy had no choice. Overnight he switched all the systems to Linux. The school functioned perfectly well for months, until the Microsoft rep returned to find out what he'd done. Presumably, suddenly fearful that the emerging IT market in India were being brought up on Linux, he asked him to switch back to Windows and gave him the Windows licenses.

The sad thing is that it looked like the computers were running Windows when I was there - maybe some were Linux.

Because discussions are interesting in themselves. What other justification do you need?

Agreed, you need to quantify what you have , before guessing how much you do not have, effects
the overall structure. In addition, you need it to be understandable by management types. That
may prove to be impossible.

I thought i was gonna learn a new word, so i run off to the dictionary and find this "No dictionary definitions were found for: deplicant in English" so at risk of sounding stupid my reply is huh?

Exactly my point, that wasn't a typo. Take two meaningless datapoints and interpolate a third in between them and it doesn't matter what crazy math you use, because you're using magic to calculate fantasies.

lol. Enjoy implementing nothing because you didn't research and/or develop anything.

On what basis do you consider his post as arrogant and pricky?

Okay, okay, fair point, but ...

Come on, that one you just made up.