You are conflating a bus address width with a storage technology. There is no currently-planned 1TB SD card, there is just a plan for the next generation of the standard to support addressing up to 1TB. If you made the same assumption about addressability equalling shipping products, then most current laptops would have 256TB of RAM...

I was at a talk buy some guys from FusionIO a few weeks ago. They said a lot of interesting things, but one of the points that they made was that every generation of flash was slower than the last, as well as less reliable. That's the trade you make for greater capacity, but it's not sustainable in the long term. It's not that flash is worse but getting better, it's that flash is better (but more expensive) and getting worse.

If current trends continue, then in a few years the improvements in capacity will be lost completely to the extra duplication required to achieve reliability. Flash is basically a dead end at this point. It will almost certainly be replaced by PCRAM, MRAM, memristors, or some hybrid, although I wouldn't be surprised if the the result is marketed as flash...

It's a mistake to think of Samsung as a single company. It's more a tightly-cooperating group of businesses. Departments try hard to buy components from other Samsung departments, and to cooperate on mutually relevant projects, but aside from that they're run more or less independently. This is, in part, why Samsung suing Apple while selling them a load of components makes sense: the part suing Apple and the part selling to them are almost separate entities. The CPU and flash manufacturer parts sell to both Apple and the phone-making part of Samsung and has no interest in the lawsuits in either direction except as far as it changes the amount that their customers are willing and able to buy.

Possibly. Given Intel's failure to produce compilers that gave good performance on Itanium, however, it is more likely that we'd have seen a bit more competition in the 64-bit arena. HP had committed to killing Alpha and PA-RISC, but POWER, SPARC and MIPS were both doing quite well until x86-64 squeezed them out. If they'd only been competing against Itanium, they'd have had a much better chance.

He could be right. The hard drive makers have all invested a lot in SSD manufacturing capabilities over the past few years. It's entirely possible that they're not interested in upgrading their spinning-rust factories and are putting all of their money into their SSD facilities. That would cause a gradual increase in their HD production costs as undermaintained factories slowly went offline. In the meantime, they have no incentive to lower prices, knowing that they will have to raise them again in a year or two, and knowing that the higher the HD price the more attractive the SSD price is. If profit-per-drive is still greater for SSDs (I would be surprised if it isn't) then pushing people in that direction makes good business sense.

Most of the civilised world has rough analogues of PIPEDA, such as the EU Data Protection Directive. If your data is hosted in companies with similar laws to yours with respect to access, it is less important if the wording is exactly the same. It's only when you host it in a company that has no equivalent and does have laws that directly contradict the ideas of these laws that it becomes a problem.

Assuming, of course, that not only is the underlying encryption algorithm that TrueCrypt uses secure (it probably is), but that the implementation is 100% bug free. Given the complexity of the code, I would hate to bet anything too important on that.

Yeah, I remember the journalists trying to find examples of stuff that didn't work on 1.1.2000 and they found peanuts. In retrospect I think we could have fixed just the critical systems and delivered a "good enough" solution for considerably less, but I guess it was better to err on the safe side.

Well, many of the people I am friends with are people that at some point was convenient to hang with, be it friends of friends, school mates, fellow students, sports team etc. so why not coworkers? When you're chatting at the lunch table you've already passed many barriers compared to making friends with a random stranger. Of course hopefully you have old friends as well but people drift apart and move away or get too busy with girlfriends and family so if you're not replenishing your social network it's likely to fade away. Sitting at home alone you've lost at least one avenue.

Half of your post is about the economy of it which is a good point, but the other half is projecting on everyone else. Why are there people living in the coldest parts of Siberia when they could move to the tropics? Why do people live on Pitcairn Island thousands of kilometers from civilization? Why do people want to battle their way to the poles or the top of Mount Everest? Not everybody wants it easy. Not everybody wants it comfortable. As long as we send the right people they will thrive because it's the challenge and the difficulty of surviving that drives them.

Weed out the romantics and idealists, let them live a few months in simulation and I think 99.9% would freak at the idea of the rest of their life being that way. Hell, even if the right kind of type to go is one in a million there's still 300 of them just in the US alone. You might not understand them, you might not share their point of view but they are there, and they're really just waiting for a space base mission to ask. That really is not the problem.

Well for one we'd have to make a really sustainable, closed ecosystem based on renewable energy. We couldn't go around polluting and making landfills and it wouldn't have oil. Sure you can't say it's strictly necessary that we do it in space but than there's no cheating, no shortcuts. A lot of that would probably have spin-offs to make us more sustainable here on Earth too. And I'd consider a first base a trial run for trying to bootstrap a colony and by colony I mean a situation where each added person adds more self-sufficiency than cost. It'll probably be a running expense but we can't afford an accumulating expense that only gets bigger and bigger then more people go.