I didn't really see the author mention anything about discarding data. Rather, it seems like he's saying that existing databases (which attempt to commit data to persistent storage as soon as possible) will be marginalized as the speed gap between persistent storage and RAM widens. Instead, business applications are going to hold data in RAM, and rely on redundancy to prevent data loss when a system fails before its data has been backed up to the database.

You're misinterpreting the post. No one said anything about long term data storage being marginalized or eliminated. Instead, the author is talking about the difference between persistent and non-persistent storage. He's saying that existing database technologies that rely on persistent storage are being marginalized as the speed difference between spinning disks and RAM widens, and the low cost of RAM makes it practical to hold large data sets entirely in memory. According to the author, data processing and analysis will increasingly move towards in-memory systems, while traditional databases will be relegated to a "backup and restore" role for these in-memory systems.

Forget running on Linux, many of those apps don't even play well with versions of Windows other than the one for which they were written. That's one of the reasons that Vista/7 is being adopted so slowly in corporate America - it has relatively less backwards compatibility than XP.

How do we evaluate our representatives fairly if all their misdeeds are cloaked under a veil of state security?

If governmental secrecy is guaranteed, the one's judging malfeasance and the ones keeping secrets are the same. Sure, I'd like to believe that there are more Daniel Ellsbergs out there, but I'd hardly rely on their existence in keeping my government accountable.

You seem to be missing how much more in social benefits Europeans get compared to Americans. Single payer healthcare. Subsidized child care. Actual pensions rather than 401(k)/IRA plans that leave the majority of your benefits to the whims of the stock market. Even with the cuts, Europeans nations redistribute significantly more wealth using these programs than America does.

Then there's the fact that a lot of social programs that would be administered federally in Europe are administered on a state-by-state basis here in the 'States. Things like welfare and Medicaid have been hit substantially. Essentially the reason we're not seeing the federal government cut is because the responsibility for cutting has been pushed onto individual states by virtue of the balanced budget provisions in state constitutions.

Its a myth that hashed passwords cannot be unhashed. Yes, if the password is secure (lots of random alpha-numeric characters) it will be difficult to find the password that corresponds to a particular hash. However, if the password is not secure (e.g. password="password"), or if the keyspace is small (e.g. limiting passwords to 8 characters), then its fairly trivial to build a rainbow table of all possible passwords or all common passwords. Then, when you want to crack the password, you look at the hash, and then look at your rainbow table to figure out which password corresponds to that hash.

I certainly do, with an exception for children of the deceased that are still minors. Other than that, if you didn't earn it, its not yours. I don't believe in the rights of the dead - after you're gone, you don't have any rights.

False. The borders of a metropolitan area can extend well beyond the limits of a single county or parish. For example, I live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That metro area encompasses seven counties: Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, and Washington. The city of Minneapolis is contained entirely within Hennepin county, but the housing markets of these counties are interlinked enough that a similar disruption would disrupt the entire market.

The same thing applies here. Even though the city of New Orleans isn't within Jefferson parish, enough of the New Orleans metropolitan area is within Jefferson Parish for this hardware failure to disrupt the New Orleans housing market.

Maybe its because Jefferson parish holds a significant amount of the New Orleans metropolitan area, even if it doesn't hold the actual city of New Orleans.

The presence of a negative externality doesn't mean the person or organization responsible gets off scot-free. It means that they aren't hit with the full cost of the problem they've caused. I would argue that security holes are a classic case of a negative externality as the organizations responsible for creating them pay a very small amount compared to the economic damage that these security holes cause.

Security holes, like illegal toxic waste dumps are negative externalities. Without some kind of regulation and enforcement, rational individuals and companies will continue to create more security holes simply because they're not paying the true cost of insecure software.

There's also the fact that it hammers the network connection incessantly, which absolutely kills the battery. I have a Galaxy S (T-Mobile Vibrant) and Firefox made the top three in the list of energy users after about ten minutes. This phone doesn't have an especially stellar battery to begin with. I don't need my web browser adding to the strain unnecessarily.

I never really got into the Baroque Cycle, because, well, steampunk really isn't my thing. But yeah, I did see those books on the shelf and they were very large.

Anathem was about the same size as Cryptonomicon, but I feel that it had much better pacing than Cryptonomicon. Cryptonomicon, to me, seemed to vaccilate between glacial and breathtaking. Anathem, on the other hand seemed to have a much smoother ramp-up.

Indeed, I just pulled Anathem off my bookshelf the other day and I was surprised to see that I found the story just as engrossing, even though I knew what was going to happen. There are very few writers good enough to pull that off, but when they do, the work is spectacular.

I might be putting myself in the "He liked Xenocide crowd," here, but I actually liked Anathem more than Snow Crash.

So does that mean that Apple will disallow VNC apps? Because, you know, those can also be used to manage BitTorrent downloads.