If your data is valuable, you will need to mirror the drives or use RAID. So one limitation is how quickly you can add a drive to your mirror system.

It would take 11 hours to fully mirror from one 6 TByte WD drive to another, if your system can actually manage to sustain 138Mbytes per second as shown on page 5 of the article. Obviously, the transfer will be slower, if the data is actually used for something.

If a disk dies, at best you are looking at half a day before the system is fully redundant again. Probably multiple days in the real world.

They are working with 6 mm samples. They need to improve that by a factor of 5. Only a small percentage of women at risk for breast cancer can tolerate having their breasts compressed to 30 mm for imaging, but it is a large enough percentage to start doing human test trials. Assuming the image quality is high enough.

With existing xray based mammogram machines the more the breast is compressed, the better the image. There is abundant research on breast compression for imaging, just a google away.

Perhaps in a few years, this technique will be refined to the point where it can image through 3 cm of tissue in a reasonable amount of time, and produce a clinically useful image. Then we will hear about this technique again. Hopefully, it will be improved to the point where it is suitable for use on the entire population.

There are rest stops at 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and so on, but 9 is not a rest stop. The first two overlapping sets of six rest stops aren't spaced the same as the rest, and thus don't have the same mathematical properties. The Riecoin compliant prime sextuplets, err, I mean rest stops on the infinite highway are {7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23} and {97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113}, except they are too small for cryptography.

TFA says that Home Depot expects to pay "$62 million this year to recover from the incident", referring to exposing the details on 56 million credit cards. That's only $1.11 per exposed card. I used a credit card there during the period, so my Credit Union sent me a new card, plus two other physical letters about the incident. That had to cost them more than $1.11 per affected customer.

They are using the same VID, but not the same design. images of real and fake FTDI silicon.

The fake chips that have FTDI stamped on the outside of the package are clearly misusing the FTDI trademark. On the other hand, those that don't cheat with the labels, and only use the string "FTDI" so they will inter-operate with existing software should be legal. I am not a lawyer. My opinion of what should be legal may not match what the courts rule as legal.

Sometimes the variations in reviews is due to variations in the product. Many years ago I worked in a brick and mortar store and resold electronics. I'd buy a small number of units from a supplier and test them. If they were good, I'd buy a bunch for resale. Assuming the customers didn't bring them back, I would buy more of the same, from the same vendor. Customers who were happy with units from the first few batches, were not at all happy with units from later batches.

I dissected customer returns. Again and again, the products in later shipments looked identical on the outside, but were "cost reduced" on the inside. For example, I would see empty places on the circuit boards where the filter capacitors were supposed to go. In one batch of one product, many of the units were dead on arrival, on the ones that worked when I unpacked them, the solder joints only lasted a few weeks. Once opened, I could see that the boards were either soldered at the wrong temperature, it was the wrong type of solder, or badly made solder. Every connection was visibly a cold solder joint. Either the factory had no quality control, or they ignored the quality control.

Other products looked identical inside and out, but based on the failure rate, the factory must have gotten a bad batch of one the components.

Even longer ago, I worked on a product that logged data to a Compact Flash memory card. It was an embedded product that needed to work across a wide temperature range, including in the winter in Minnesota. The big names like SanDisk would randomly swap component suppliers. Our largest customer saw less than a 2% failure rate, but that was way too much. We found a specialty supplier that charged 5 times as much, but they had a rigorous quality control process. They paid attention to the specifications. They tracked where parts came from, and promised that we would be able to test sample units if they needed to switch suppliers. Alas, the 2% failure rate from the earlier parts had already doomed that product line.

The talent behind xkcd is a former NASA engineer.

The Fine article compares this type of lattice structure to the structure of the Eiffel Tower. They didn't claim anything more than being able to do it at a very fine scale, and to do it sufficiently precisely to get something that can support 160,000 times its one weight. They are just claiming refinements on centuries of engineering advances. The strength of well engineered 3D printed structures is still impressive. Even some printers that hobbyists can afford can beat out solid materials. It's only getting better.

These will be used in data centers where it is common to have redundant systems connected with redundant cables, in order to maintain really high uptimes. Say a hypothetical system has a cluster which consists of 16 compute nodes and 2 storage nodes, Each of CPUserver01 through CPUserver16 will have two of these cables going to storageServerA, and two going to StorageServerB. For a total of 64 of these cables, for that one little compute cluster. Which would leave it an island, so of course there will be more network interfaces.

For this technology to get any market penetration, it will need to be cost effective at these bandwidths, and fit in the racks. Historically, Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, DWDM has been great at getting a lot of bandwidth on to a very long single strand (comparatively) inexpensive fiber, which allows in fiber signal amplification, and is the winner at going the distance, but not so good at being cost effective, or space efficient. These things, with the associated drivers should take up far less space inside the servers, and cost less, but they only will get 800Gbits in each direction, only go 300 meters, and use much more expensive (per kilometer of cable) 64 strand fiber.

Rigid silicon requires rigid interconnects. Flexible ICs allow flexible packaging, or different packaging. Instead of building from the printed circuit board up, build from the heatsink up. Use a precision pick and place system to glue the thin, wimpy, inexpensive silicon to the strong massive heatsink. Then mask on the solder balls. Then apply a thin, wimpy, inexpensive circuit "board". Attach all the old style surface mount components to the other side of the circuit "board". "Board" is in quotes because it would get all of its mechanical strength from heatsink. It might be so thin, it is no longer board like.

The big win here, is that one wafer is good for at least 5 sets of circuits. The lose is the grid of holes etched through the silicon as part of the pealing process. Assuming the grid of holes doesn't use up a significant portion of the surface area, the factory is getting close to 5 times as many devices out of each ingot of silicon.