I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

Yeah. Like I'd ever be caught DEAD or ALIVE in Arizona. Life is too short for that.

Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.

Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.

The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.

The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.

It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.

Ah, but that's just the regular bureaucracy, you can add another order of magnitude if you want a military grade hammer.

And if you want to make it exceptionally strong, you combine those techniques. "correct horse battery staple" is strong, "correcT horXe batt6ery st&ple" is heat death of universe-strong and actually not much harder to learn.

At the cost of travelling around with the keys to the kingdom. Imagine you're on vacation and you want to pop into an internet cafe and log into /. because abstinence. Except it has a keylogger/trojan that'll steal your key file and your master password. Now you've compromised your email, online bank, ebay, paypal, steam and all the other passwords that might really matter. Personally I tend to keep three:

1) My mail, because it gets all the password resets.
2) My bank, but it's using two-factor anyway.
3) My "assorted junk" password where I might lose my forum account or whatever that doesn't *really* matter.

I really try not to use the first two on an untrusted device unless I really have to, because afterwards I need to change it. In fact if I know I will need to use it I'll change it on a trusted device up front and restore it later, good memorized passwords are a pain to relearn.

Are you secretly planning to use it as a Dunning-Kruger meter and avoid all that self-rate as 10 out of 10? Because if you think you'll get anything else useful out of it, I want some of what you're smoking...

The problem is that unifying VAT and classifications basically regulating half a tax system without regulating the other half. You can tax income and you can tax consumption and there's pros and cons to both. If we're forced to lower our VAT, the other taxes would probably increase to compensate or the other way around. In addition many of the VAT brackets are made for a specific purpose because the goods are either particularly good or bad for society, like taxing books less (knowledge is good) and tobacco more (very bad for public health).

For example, around here we have about half VAT on food. If we can't keep that exception, prices would rise 10%+ on the spot. So would our taxes, in practice we'd probably funnel that money into agricultural subsidies instead which would make our food cheaper, thus creating an even more heavily protected, subsidized agriculture. And the things we want to punish, just add other taxes instead of VAT, unless the EU wants to regulate all consumption tax. That would be a tough sell, I think.

What products and services end up in what VAT bracket is sometimes controversial, for example here in Norway at the moment there's 0% VAT on buying a physical newspaper and 25% VAT on a digital newspaper, because it doesn't meet the criteria for an exemption. Also eating at a restaurant and takeaway ended up in different brackets, so if you take your burger outside and eat it on the sidewalk it's cheaper than sitting down at McDonald's. We have an exception for culture, they were probably thinking more like theater, opera, concerts but exotic dancers won at court as an "artistic performance".

Not saying it can't happen, but if it does it's a big step on the way towards a "United States of Europe".

G'day has always been the rendering - since at least Regency times, when t'was spoken aloud as such. ;-)

Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

You won't know if it's first until it's observed.... and it's not :(

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.