Am I is the only one concerned about amount of RAM?

I mean, everybody is so excited about DDR4... But do people understand that instead of 8 dimm slots we'll get only 4 (1 dimm per channel instead of 2-3)? So while keeping costs on this side of reasonable, we're getting only half the amount of memory?

WTF?!!

Well, am an engeneer and a scientist.
And considering that arcs (as presented) do not have error brackets on them is a dead giveaway that qualifications of people who did the calculations are highly suspect.

Considering that the arcs are, well, arcs, I'll take a wild guess and say that they had data from only one satellite...
Some spy birds might help, but they tend to focus on land areas.

Data from other planes will not help much - mostly only to set error brackets. The ill-conditioness of the problem does not go away.

And what if the sphere does not intersect earth? :)

Navy guys will need more data.

Those much hyped arcs from Inmarsat are pretty much bogus. The trouble is that the problem is badly conditioned - because satellite is way too far (geosynchonous orbit - not your friendly neighborhood gps) and it's right on top of the search area. In other words - small errors in time/distance measurements, satellite position, etc. produce huge errors in estimation. They're lucky they placed the airplane on earth.

Maybe D.B. Cooper style heist? That would explain weird altitude behavior: need to lower pressure difference to open doors, set on autopilot, and then jump while westward crossing over Malaysia.

Are you sure about this? I mean, if you're not planning for subsequent take-off then your runway may be much - much shorter. Remember, a few months ago, Boeing transport landed in a wrong airport.

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.