Reality of projects budgets 101:
If you give the correct high estimate, they won't give you the money.
If you give the fake low estimate, they will give you the money and pay extra later on because they're already invested.
Especially if budgets have to compete, they will most likely be too low.
When budgets are that high, nobody controlling investments really has a grasp of the value of the money.

I have some basic understanding on a non-physicist level of what quantum physics is all about, the weirdness that is involved with it and how it scales to the world I can see, but this I simply cannot fathom.

How can quantum fluctuations occur in absolute nothingness?

So if I suspect the MAFIAA of widespread invasion of privacy, the ISP's will give me their home addresses?

Yes you can and indeed the owner of the car would not be responsible.
If anybody steals your car and hits somebody, you won't be liable.
If you yourself are both owner and driver though...

I think Skoda or Dacia or whatever car brand you drive is not liable for damage caused by the owners or drivers of their cars either.

Exactly, you'd better pick a profession with an actual future in it, like patent clerk or something.

Auch! Don't have comeback to that, do you?
Probably mostly because there isn't a single argument to respond to, but still...
</sarcasm>

Indeed. Bring on the overworked doctor to cut me open!

0 in 5 is statistically about right, considering 6.6% of nurses in the US are men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Whether or not ST had "good science" or what their moral, ethical or scientific views were is completely irrelevant.
Even whether the actors in it cared or even agreed with those views is irrelevant if the actor knowingly agreed to do the job anyway.

The producers deliberately lied to the actor.

The point is that the actor was scammed into appearing in a movie they would not have done had the producers been honest about their intentions.

Placebo's have an effect on things the human mind can control.
Medication has an effect on things the human mind can AND cannot control.

Or rather, believing in not having the flu will likely cause you to misdiagnose flu symptoms as being something unrelated to flu, thereby curing the flu in no-time.
"I have no flu because those flu-like symptoms have nothing to do with the flu because I have no flu."

Being able to scale from 1 billion records a day to 10 billion a day does not a premature optimization make.

The simple fact is that there's not enough information to give any reasonable advise.

Basically the question is; what's the expected volume of records and fields per records?

A solution for 100 records a week with 4 fields each would be different from 1000 records per second with 30 fields each.
1000 records/sec with 4 fields would be yet another solution.

tl;ds

Oops. Forgot about the GPU.