Europeans just hate successful American companies.
The fact that a foreign source is influencing their populous makes them uneasy.

100 Terabytes.

Even I would have a hard time finding enough porn to fill that.

the performance war

Because, as we all know, performance comes in only one flavour.

This is an even sneakier version of what Daniel Dennett calls "rathering". This is where you write "The proponents of A would say that A resolves this issue. As we can see, A does not solve the problem, so rather B." The trick here is that no-one ever said the issue was a dichotomy between A and B. It's been implied by a rhetorical device that few readers even notice. Apparently Stephen J. Gould used this technique a fair amount. This surprised me. He was a pretty solid author for the most part.

Do you really think that SSD is the best storage option for Google Earth's highest resolution imagery of the Nunavut territory? I guess your philosophy is that if the data isn't in high enough demand to justify SSD performance levels, there's no point keeping the data online in the first place.

Then there's a few hundred people who charter expensive hunting trips in the Canadian north and afterwards they go to Google Earth to review where they've been and Google Earth says "Imagery 404: not enough demand to make it cost effective to host the data on SSD".

If it's just a few hundred people, so who gives a shit?

I know only what you chose to write and you said you are "now my life is betting on it." If that's hyperbole, then that's kinda silly and dial it back. If it is literal, then my point stands.

Now, don't get all pissed and shit and whipping out the negative mods, but in Austin, the primary cause of power failures are all the people who go ape shit whenever the power company starts to trim trees. "Preserve the Historical Nature!", "Save the Trees!", etc.

Then, when an Ice Storm comes along or high winds, the tree limbs break and fall on the lines. Of course, then they go ape shit because they have no power. What is really funny is that the power company is owned by the City.

Digital data needs to move.
Tape is analog thinking. Get your data write it down and hide it somewhere.
Digital data needs to move. To have the data properly backed up it constantly needs to move. So if you have ssd drives only. Just as long as you are taking the data and moving it to an other drive and that is moving to an other drive your data is being saved for the long run.
Once digital data stops moving it is open to threats from the environment.
Tapes go bad, ssd go bad, any storage medium has issues. To keep your data safe it needs to move.
That is RAID storage is popular. If a drive fails you can identify it swap it and resync it before the other device fails.

All well and good for most countries. However the U.S. has the distinction as being the third most populous country, as well as the third largest in geographical size, but 50th in density.
Which means any infrastructure project is expensive. More so then in other nations.

For the U.S. we need to get off the grid and start using more local energy sources.
Small hydroelectric generators, solar, wind. Especially for the less dense areas.
However there are so many stupid laws saying your power needs to be on the grid.

Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost).

The point is that it's not zero cost. Every penny of money "funded by the Fed" comes from your and my pockets - sometimes with a big multiplier - by paths that are not as obvious, but just as costly, as a tax bill.

The biggest one is inflation: If the Fed just prints money, it dilutes the rest of the money. Your wages go down (though the numbers don't change.) Got retirement savings? They go down, too. Your investments go down - but the numbers make it look like they wen't up, and the government taxes the fake "gain". Everything you buy gets more expensive.

Also sounds like it may be much cheaper, which would be nice. I have repetitive strain injury from computer use and while it is manageable, I'd like a way to be able to not use the mouse when possible. An eye mouse would work well, but they are too much money. However this sounds like it might be in the range of something I could afford, and use as alternate input.

It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.

In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.

I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
  * It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
  * It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.

The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. [Insurance usually has escape clauses for riots.]

Just heard on the news that more than half of the stores destroyed last night in Fergusun were minority owned, too. (I think it was actually "black owned" but I'm not sure.)

IMHO the main point of the burning is so that, once the stores have been looted, the evidence of who did it is largely destroyed. Video survelience tapes, fingerprints, serial number records, ...

Actually, I'd be for this. Nuke sub power plants are over engineered to be safer for obvious reasons and powerful and small. Design them into a black box and drop them into any power plant.

Design Defects discovered during construction or after completion would be be evaluated. Actual defects would be documents, fixes designed and repairs directed. This process exists for aviation and is well documented and tuned.

Operating costs associated with hiring qualified personnel are but a speck on the over all operating costs. You could double the pay from an average of $77k to $154k without materially affecting the bottom line.

See my comment on smaller nukes to address the manufacturing of parts.

It should be noted that I didn't say anything about the size of the nuke approved. I would prefer that the plants be made up of small modules that are completely manufactured in one location and transported to the site and then back again at the end of its life. Sealed and turnkey nukes are safer that "stick built" plants.

For that matter, the actual power generation portion of the plant should be completely independent of the power source itself. That allows you to swap fusion for fission, gas for coal, or whatever else comes down the pike. The turbines and grid infrastructure stay the same.