One of the major online retailers last week had a 5TB USB 3.0 external drive for $129 how much data do you have??? My file server is setup with about 8 TB of space which is plenty it turns out.

Solar is already on par with electricity prices (which are mainly driven by the pool-table flat price of coal) and solar is expected to be half the price of electricity in 15 years. And that's in the first year. That means you get back 100% return on your investment in the first year. The next 25 years are just gravy (assuming no hail storms and your batteries never wear out). If you live in a hot state nearly free electricity during the hottest part of the day means you'll have a very predictable and very low electric cost for 10 months out of the year (12 if you have gas heat).
 
What I'm saying is, solar is already cost-effective, but in 10 years even with dirt-cheap oil, solar will still be cheaper, and there's no global fluctuation in locally produced and consumed solar energy.
 
Energy independence = less need for global intervention in war-torn oil producing states.

I would imagine ESPN is charging Dish at LEAST $20/mo per subscriber, and Dish is willing to eat that as a cost of being first out of the gate for internet ESPN cord cutter subscribers. The rest is free, really.

The hardware hasn't become less serviceable, it's that the hardware has shrunk to the size where it's not economical to break out the audio from the video, or the CPU from the audio and video, or the eithernet, disk controller, etc. As a result you end up with a tiny circuit board that costs pennies to produce, is easily maintainable and fits inside today's slim devices.

If you want a repairable computer with a separate chip for every application, I have a coal plant to sell you

The last event I went to like this, 12 oz beers were $5 and cocktails were $6. Which for downtown Dallas is average, if not slightly below the median price. And it was pretty fantastic. As a vet, an engineer and a computer programmer we had a pretty fantastic time, A+ would go again. Let the schoolchildren enjoy the museum during the day.

Taxis can pick up fares on the street. Private cars have to be arranged beforehand. This is a BIG distinction between taxis and Uber. BIG BIG. Taxi companies are terrible at arranging pickups, which is what Uber has replaced. The problem is that each Taxi driver is "independent" and has no quota of X% prearranged fares they have to pick up each week/month. If they want to sit at the airport and wait for a fare, they can. If they want to sit outside of a hotel and wait for a fare, they can. An uber driver has to take any fare they get selected for, and if they decline X%, they get a warning, and after that eventually lose their contract. Which means uber drivers actually pick you up.
 
In a lot of less dense American cities, Uber is something like 12x faster than hailing a cab. If a taxi even drives down your street once an hour. I'm near a major bar district and Taxis here only drop people off, then go looking for fares by the hotel again. Have you ever tried using a Taxi in an american city outside of the most dense urban core? They don't work. They're broken.

The first five miles around downtown are solidly urban, and Taxis fill a specific (and important!) gap between public transit and private transit. If the Taxis don't owe the city anything, why are they a protected and regulated monopoly? Why not just disband the taxi system entirely and let services like Uber replace them in cities with urban cores smaller than SF and NYC?

I wish(!) My car developed a short last winter and I switched to commuting by bicycle most days, Uber on the rainy/colder days (somewhat rare here in Dallas). It's about $6.50 one way to my office downtown from my house. I smashed up my hand (partial cut to my index finger's extendor tendon) and ended up taking Uber every day for three weeks while I was unable to ride my bike. I spend about $90/month on uber rides in the winter, it's pretty fantastic. If the city of Dallas were to ban Uber, I'd buy another car and go back to driving on cold rainy days. Between gas insurance and parking downtown, Uber actually comes out about $0.70 a day cheaper than owning a car full time. And I don't have to drive in rush hour traffic, so I can respond to work emails "in transit" which means I can leave the house 15 minutes later than normal, and my correspondence is already caught up for the morning before I walk through the door.
 
Uber is reliable and someone always shows up in 5 minutes. I've never had a taxi arrive less than 45 minutes after I called for one. Here in Dallas taxi's primary purpose is going between downtown and the airport. With Uber I've been able to finally write off my main reason for owning a car - reliable transportation, and do it in a cost effective manner.

Everyone I know uses Uber, at least once a quarter. It only takes 5 minutes for an Uber to arrive and typically it only costs $5 to get a ride back to your car, or $20 to get a ride back home. When calling a taxi, you may or may not have someone arrive within an hour, especially during peak hours. What's the point? If it takes an hour for a Taxi to arrive and you're going less than 4 miles, it's faster to just walk.
 
Taxi companies want the Uber business, of course they do. But Uber customers hate taxis. They're dirty, filthy, never arrive on time and dealing with change/tips is a real hassle. Especially if it's late and you've been out with friends all night. If Uber disappeared from my city I'd just stop using similar services. Uber makes it just this side of bearable. Taxis are a fucking disaster and unless I'm headed home from the airport in a foreign city, I doubt you'll ever see me in one. If Uber disappears, so does my desire to use "taxi" services.

8.1 has storage spaces/drive pooling etc but not all of the server-level functionality is turned on because Product Differentiation.

5TB may have been a significant amount of data in 2006 for a home user, shoot I have 2TB of consumer grade camera photos floating around on my home NAS. If you're storing your steam installations on a network drive and have a dual gig-e connection to the desktop you can start running in to I/O bottlenecks loading games etc over the network with your rotational drives. Businesses already running large RAM disks for SQL are moving to SSD for a lot of their secondary needs.

I'm using Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (that's HYPER-V SERVER, not "Server", it's free) and then a bunch of command line commands. Do a google search for "ssd tiering write-back cache". Works great on my haswell era home VM lab. 6 rotational 2TB hard drives and 2x4TB hard drives + 2 64GB SSDs I got cheap from a buddy.
 
Technically you could do this in Windows 8 if it weren't for artificial limitations. Clever dll usage can get it to work but it's best to just use Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 which is free and supported.

Is anyone with significant amounts of data not caching their frequently accessed data on SSD? Rotational is still about 8x cheaper than SSD these days, but the days of rotational speed for cold data are numbered. Storage is easily abstracted so it's not a legacy concern. A lot of shops I know have already invested in a complete switchover to full-SSD (we're talking racks of SSD) with tape backup.
 
Even my home file server uses two tiny second gen 64gb SSDs for read/write caching for ~20TB of data. I just buy the cheapest, biggest rotational drive whenever I start running out of room. When the price on those new Seagate 8TB drives (currently $230) drops to under $150 I will probably start swapping out my oldest 2TB drives to avoid having to upgrade the case in this decade.

I think the first quote is attributed to Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear) but otherwise is an acceptable opinion on the subject.

I ran five Battlefield 3 servers on two continents for a group of about 3500 registered users, and before that a Bad Company 2 server in America for a year or two. We had a Steam chat bot (IRC is Dead in this era, especially for games) that you could interact with and kick unregistered players. The first version was crude PHP run off of a godaddy account to register your account for Bad Company 2. The steam chat bot was some ruby glue code triggered by an AutoIt script/executable.
 
But later with Battlefield 3, we rewrote the whole system from the ground up. ChewieBot was a C# program that used an OpenSteam API dll, and called a URL via json which authenticated against another guy's custom Steam Authentication db (he handled the backend registration using the offical Steam API) and then we ran a python script from there to actually connect to the server and kick the guy(s). This actually ended up being so successful that we were blacklisted by the reddit guys on multiple occasions despite being a top 10 server. Another guy did the website redesign including custom CSS work. I didn't do very much of the coding, most of my skills were in project management and having the technical knowledge to pull together resources and people and make them work.
 
Over four years I worked with about 20 people in total to make the system happen and keep it running, plus bringing in regular funding to pay for the servers, mumble servers, and the actual game servers (never pay for your own servers, you're already giving them your time). All in all the project spent about $3500 in hosting, mumble server fees and the lion's share, top notch game servers (about $114/mo each) over four years.
 
I ended up getting the job with those project management skills I learned while putting everything together. I write a lot of server scripting/automation and also project management working with business analysts and our appdev team(s) for various internal groups' dashboards, interfaces and whatnot.
 
At least one other guy used the ChewieBot project to get a job as well, he added the json capability to give him a talking point in interviews. The guy who did our db back end already has a job doing C# stuff at an advertising data mining company in the UK but is pretty fantastic at what he does. With all the API hooks, free or nearly-free VPS hosting and a popular game it'snot difficult to build a reputation and portfolio (not to mention the real-world skills of dealing with true nerds) that will take you places.