Absolutely not.

The main advantage of a SSD for most users is not the 5x faster sequential performance, it's the >100x faster access times. RAID does improve throughput but it does very little to improve access times and random IOPS.

How about not recklessly endangering others' lives and not showing contempt for democracy and the rule of law?

If you want to spend a few trillion dollars of your own money to build your own private road network where you can drive at whatever speed you darn well please, go right ahead. But if you want to use the road infrastructure paid for by your fellow citizens, you need to live with the rules your fellow citizens have put in place.

Protecting the rest of us from numbskulls like you is not just honest work, it's a great benefit to society. You could do the rest of us a benefit too by not touching a steering wheel or gas pedal ever again.

It's their future (and their past thirty years), not mine. Just tossing in a reference to one of the longstanding repeating acts on everybody's favorite radio variety show.

Perhaps tomato soup may have some beneficial effects, but if you really want to find feelings of well-being and contentment, you should have more ketchup.

Ketchup contains natural mellowing agents which help you stop worrying about your minor medical ailments. You don't need homeopathic medicine; you don't need a placebo. All you need is to relax, have some ketchup, and let your body take care of things naturally.

These are the good years, in the golden sun,
A new day is dawning, a new life has begun,
The river flowing like ketchup on a bun.

Ketchup. For the good times.

A message from the Ketchup Advisory Board.

Our old Chevy Sprint- a 5 passenger hatchback- weighed < 1500lb and got 44mpg city / 53 hwy. For the sake of "safety" the Smart Fortwo- a dinky two-passenger car with little cargo room- weighs 2250 lb and gets 34 city/ 38 hwy. The engineer giveth, and the safety inspector taketh away.

Safety involves tradeoffs, and people should be able to make their own informed decisions about their own safety and the risks they will tolerate. Safety regulations should be based on the damage your car does to other cars (and to pedestrians and cyclists), since you shouldn't get to decide what risks other people face.

Failing to admit that safety involves tradeoffs, and regulating cars only based on their own occupants' safety, has led to a curb weight arms race. The easy way to be safer, if you ignore the tradeoffs, is to make your car heavier compared to the average; but when the average weight rises everyone is less safe (especially pedestrians and cyclists), all the advances in engines and materials are outweighed, and MPGs stay stagnant.

The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.

Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.

Fridge logic and dubious explanations abound, yet somehow the show goes on.

As I've said in another post here, a lot of the problem is that you sent people back to beta again and again to solicit more feedback before the very most basic problems- esp. content width and comment section information density - had been addressed at all.

This gave people the impression that those things weren't going to change, and solidified in people's minds the idea that beta was horrific and that a redirect to beta was a reason to scream.

Though the present beta isn't ready, it is enough of an improvement over the earlier betas as to reassure me somewhat about the future of the site. But until a few minutes ago I had no idea of its improvements because previous horrific betas' lack of improvement over the months had trained me to avoid beta like the plague.

Because of how awful previous betas were, and how gradual and unannounced the improvements have been, the knee-jerk reaction to "oh, we're going to try redirecting you to beta!" is "OH HECK NO YOU DON'T."

The beta is still terrible, but it is substantially less terrible than the versions I looked at last year. During that time, I and many others gave careful feedback but it seemed like there was awfully little improvement over time. It got to the point that a redirect to beta just instinctively causes panic and anger because people have had such terrible experiences with it in the past.

I'm afraid that in the past couple of days some of the complaints and feedback I've given were no longer accurate for today's beta.

I still think the information density and the comment system have a long way to go. I still think the (thankfully slightly rarer now) stock photographs are uninteresting, uninformative, stupid, uninformative, and a total waste of space.

But at least you're not only using a third of my screen's width for content, making it so only ~3 comments can be seen on screen at a time, etc. like previous betas did. That was horrific. Before you redirect anyone to beta, help them know about what's been improved with beta and apologize for past mistakes.

And for pete's sake, give people the option to switch the silly color scheme. Should be simple enough.

Calling the number Dice lists for Slashdot results in a recording which in turn tells you to call 415-625-0856.

The receptionist type who answered was polite, said they'd already had several calls today, jotted down my complaints to relay once more to a guy who's involved with the beta, and said "we're withholding his snacks until this is fixed." They said it was nice to realize there were people out there who were passionate about the site.

Make your voice heard. Let them know that wasting screen space, butchering comment sections, etc are going to result in their visitors leaving en masse. If the phone is ringing all day, day in and day out, with users who don't want to see this place ruined, perhaps things will turn around.