Yeah, I'd like to see some matter from that star or system interact with something else at "normal" galactic speeds. That would be awesome, space opera stuff a la Doc Smith. A meteor or asteroid at 1/3rd c? Randall Munroe should look into this.

Radiological Society of North America (RSNA): High School Football Players Show Brain Changes after One Season - even without concussion.

Haha. I stayed at a hotel with a golf course once (I don't play golf) and every guest had to acknowledge in writing that walking outside when golfers are present is inherently dangerous and that the hotel is not liable if you're hit by a ball.

I gave up browsing at some point, it was so bad. Amazon was a bit slow but worked OK.

" I did not find it a good device for sketching; the interface in Photoshop CS5 (my usual painting program)"

When all you have is a hammer....

Seriously, PS5 is what you based a thousand dollar machine on? Considering the plethora of very good sketching programs out there the fact that you used PS5 tells me that you didn't really give the thing a chance, or that your idea of sketching is different than using a pencil and paper. I have a Surface 1 with Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro and it is a joy to work with. Smooth drawing, grea tool set you name it. I hope to get my hands on a copy of Manga Studio, but it isn't in the cards at the moment. Penny Arcade has been drawn on Surfaces for a while now, though I understand that Gabe has had some issues with the SP3. There are plenty of artists out there who are very happy to have an alternative to the side pad and the the surfaces are scratching that itch. Next time you try one, grab some 30 day trials of some software that is actually meant to do what you are looking for, PS is great and all, but lets be honest, it is becomming a backwater in the sketching deparment for a reason.

"Access time"="time from sending the request until data starts to flow." For 1,000 times the IOPS the transfer rate and overhead on the bus would have to scale by three orders of magnitude too, which they don't.

Not really. There are a couple of developed nations that still have a high birth rate which shows that reduced fertility is not an automatic byproduct of developmnt. The current UN forecast is 11 billion in the early 22nd century. I think mother nature will have something to say about that.

You forgot the time to charge the flux capacitors.

I have several VMs on my system that each need at least a half TB to be useful (better a full TB.) A local cache of our SVN repo is again a couple 100 GB. Next, backups of my other systems, each a couple 100 GB at least. Next, a mirror of my server at work - nearly another TB or so. And a couple movie downloads that I haven't watched yet. Voila, over 5TB.

For some reason extrapolating exponential growth is very popular in certain circles. I assume that's because it detracts from other areas of exponential growth, like total population, energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Singularity, here we come!

There was an article recently (can't remember where) that made the case that with slowing density increase the lifetime of HDDs has to increase because you're not going to replace them after two or three years anyway because the next generation is so much better. Much better MTBF is clearly possible - just look at HGST versus the rest in the Backblaze reports.

Yup, in large arrays the trend is to go beyond RAID6 - see e.g. NetApp's DDP. Too bad there's so little technical info available about it.

WTF? HDDs have seek times in the milliseconds while total access time for SSDs is in the microseconds.

The metropolitan areas of the US have the same population density as Europe.

There's a significant effect though: The market for lower capacity HDDs has disappeared, and with it much of the volume so the HDD manufacturers have to make their margins at the higher end. 1TB HDDs are an endangered species now because you can get a 120GB SSD for the same price and many consumers don't need 1TB while they appreciate the performance of an SSD.

Moore's law has been dead for years. It applied to Flash only in the beginning and the cells have reached physical limits, that's why it's only about cramming more cells into a package today.