For all those morons calling Snowden a traitor: consider this scenario.

Reviewing circumstances of that Petraeus scandal in the light of Snowden's revelations, it's pretty clear that NSA knew about CIA director affair, and more importantly kept the fact to itself (if, of course it wasn't a parallel construction by FBI, which is easy for them to check)

Now what we have? We have that NSA had dirt on a top CIA official, a popular political figure, with very probable presidential candidacy on the horizon. And what it did with that info? It kept it's chips to itself to cash-in at the most opportune moment! And the whole infrastructure at the NSA is built in such a way (intentionally!) that unless NSA wants to, nobody can say with absolute certainty what they knew and when they knew that.

In my books that is a direct threat to the republic.

My T41 runs lubuntu 13.04 just fine. So yes, you can! :) Google for "fake-pae"

I tend to write a lot between the lines. Here's the one of the lines I skipped: in COW setups, in stable state you write at exactly same rate as you free blocks. I.e. by writing 1 gig, you're freeing 1 gig. And so on to the end of block space, then you wrap and repeat. Wear leveling is additional side effect.

Sure, ZFS is alright too, but where's the excitement in that? :)

Well, if you don't do random writes, you don't need TRIM.

How to get away from random writes you ask? Simple! Just use BTRFS.

"But my database!" you say. Well, the answer is simple - time to move away from 50 year old technology and to a modern database engine, the kind that doesn't do random writes either (fractal tree based, for example).

Disclaimer: All of the above is not written for stodgy "enterprise level" types.

Actually, depending on how many clams were examined (and other things), odds of 1000s of similar age clams still out there might not be all that good.

There is a cool statistical result known as German tank problem

Actually, thin sheets of gorilla glass are fairly flexible.

It should be better at surviving drops. Part of impact energy will go into bending and not into shuttering stuff.

Are you refering to that stunt when Russians claimed that a bunch of BBC's senior staff members were on MI6 payroll? For that case, current consensus is that it was actually true.

That's not what I was talking about. Full discharge is a bad and, well, extreme case. No, when people talk about cycles, they mean how many times battery supplied it's rated amount of energy. For example, if you drive to work 5 times a week and each time discharge 20% of your battery, you do 1 cycle a week (regardless if you plug it in every night or not).

This does not apply to Teslas for very simple reason: their battery is HUGE. So for the same daily routine, they will accrue 1 cycle not in a week but in a month (same amount of energy is now only 5% of the capacity)! Thus they burn through li-ion cycles at a much, much slower pace (and that's why, again, your Volt's battery is bigger than needed for spec'd performance - to slow down cycling degradation - just re-read my previous comment)

That the battery's calendar life that is a problem that affects everybody.

Actually it's not "as good as new".

What's happening is that degradation is being hidden from you. Volt's battery is much bigger than needed for the purpose - they over-provisioned it because cycling of a smaller battery kills it really fast.

So as the battery degrades, cycles start to grow at faster and faster rate (even when you're keeping the exact same driving routine). So when that point comes that the car can no longer hide the overall state of the battery, your electric range will start dropping like a rock.

And my point was that when everybody will try to buy them, they would become either oversold or become really-really expensive.

Actually, regardless, money becomes an issue really fast anyway - few days ago Wired run a story that for many types of loads AWS does not make much financial sense anymore and people started to add two and two together. In other words - people are prepared to pay only so much (in a pinch a little bit extra) - ask a little bit more and they'll start to roll their own.

Saying that it's not a problem does not make it so. Besides, as soon as people learn to failover gracefully guess what would start to happen: other regions would begin buckling under load.

If you care that much about availability, you should do it yourself anyway.

The first rule of diversification: don't put your eggs into correlating baskets.

In this context it means that if your primary is on AWS, then your secondary must be on Rackspace or whatever - NOT other AWS.

Apparently that Guardian journalist's partner was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow airport. That's a reason enough.