One of the challenges is that there is just so much data from modern experiments. E.g. the LHC throws a lot of irrelevant data away before it even hits the hard drives. To a layman like me it seems likely that some potentially useful data gets thrown away in this process.

You cannot fault the LHC designers for doing this; the data handling and storage there is awe-inducing. Transporting and storing orders of magnitude of (probably useless) more data is just not feasible.

That is the trick: You do not need to pump water anywhere. You just avoid using water when other forms of energy are delivering. If there is a power surplus even with the turbines off, you try to export that somewhere, and if no one wants it even for free, you stop the wind turbines or solar plants or whatever. If you happen to have pumped storage available for the few hours a year with low or negative prices, great, but otherwise it is not a great loss.

The neat thing about reservoir-based hydro power is that you can multiply its output by using pretty much any intermittent power source. If the rainfall is cut in half, you "just" build enough wind turbines or solar cells or whichever to provide the missing half of yearly energy output, and save up water whenever you can. At a large enough scale, you can boost hydro power many times over, assuming the hydro generators themselves are large enough. Luckily hydro generators are reasonably cheap to upgrade, whereas reservoir capacity is hard to come by.

The bank can just insure the car themselves and add the cost to the interest rate they charge. However, most banks are likely large enough that self-insurance is the best option for them.

3D TV requires you to disassociate your depth perception and your eye focus. 3D needs to stay properly sharp despite your eyes changing focus (and ideally blur the things which are out-of-focus, but that is less important). The technology to do so is almost here now.

Alternatively, most children today probably watch enough 3D that their vision adapts.

Procurve is getting killed by software development. They are behind their competitors, and getting left further behind each day.

If you can make do with the limited software features (and you avoid the rebranded 3com stuff) they are great switches.

We have way more gold in storage than we have an industrial or jewelry-related use for. The primary use for gold is to sit in Fort Knox doing nothing at all. Gold-coloured plastic would do that job just as well.

There are plenty of places that run HD over cable on plain -C or even -T.

DRM does not have any connection to which particular DVB version is used.

Preventing Russia from placing drilling platforms in Canadian waters is a use. If your enemy has air superiority, all you can do is look on angrily like Vietnam does.

1080i is a disaster for sports. Then again, so are all the other things cable companies do to ruin the signal.

At least there is finally hope: 4k has no interlacing, and with 8x8 *PEG blocks you still get the equivalent of 512x270 uncompressed pixels, no matter how crappy the encoding is. That is nearly NTSC resolution...

"+"-characters keep out an amazing amount of spam. Please do not teach the world to recognize them.

What stops a BYOD from using multipath? It will have to use the 4G connection when it isn't on the corporate wifi, so what keeps it from using both?

Sure it can. You just push a new root certificate to your devices and intercept away.

USB device drivers are not of sufficient quality to make that mitigation very viable. Just exploit the broken drivers instead; on most operating systems device drivers have the equivalent of root privileges.

Personally I am much more excited about a gigatesla than a Tesla Giga.