Are those mutually exclusive options? The industrial revolution resulted in a lot of reforms in the UK, including the beginnings of the process that ended with universal suffrage. It was also a time when the poor were exploited and oppressed, although this time by the upper middle classes rather than (or, more accurately, as well as) the aristocracy. Given the end results, I think most of us living in the countries that benefitted from this process are glad that it did, as well as being glad that we can look back on it as a transitional step. Given the choice, I'd much rather that we had gone straight to a post-scarcity utopia in 1750, but as far as I know no one has yet come up with a way of making that happen...

You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.

That isn't anything new. That's just immaturity, which (surprise) is characteristic of children. The problem in this world isn't childish children. It's childish adults.

Well, speaking as a parent with actual direct experience with my kids and their friends, they have *way* more work than I did when I was their age in the 1970s.The day is so stuffed with curriculum schools have cut the lunch period to under fifteen minutes, and "study hall" is something kids have never heard of, replaced with special content boosting classes to help them through statewide testing. The time pressure has spilled over into homework. Even as elementary students they seldom had less than an hour of homework per night, and often had two.

And, if I recall what kids were like in the 70s (as opposed to how I'd like to believe we were), these kids have a work ethic far beyond anything I ever saw back then. If anything I think we've gone to far toward instilling work ethic in these kids, who don't have the self-directed time we did. Compared to my kids' highly scripted and controlled childhood, my own feels like something out of Tom Sawyer.

Where videogames fit into this picture isn't stimulation. My kids look at videogame time (strictly limited in our house) as precious decompression time. If kids reach young adulthood less socially mature (which I'm skeptical of) it's probably not gaming per se. It's more likely that so much is expected of them and so little spare time given to them they don't have enough experience directing their own activities with their friends.

So far as I can see, this attitude is much more characteristic of *adult* Americans these days than it is of our kids -- at least the ones who are old enough that they should know this. We adult Americans don't want to plan for the future or to face anything unpleasant. When that neglect comes home to roost we want a quick fix and we want it yesterday. And if we can't get a quick fix we demand a scapegoat. If it is true kids are ignorant and lazy, does it make sense to believe the *kids* are responsible for their faulty education? It's not like the infants we got in this generation are somehow inferior.

But I don't think that kids today are no good. I look at the kids *I* know, and I see a generation that is brighter, more knowledgeable, and harder working than my generation was. If that's not what *you* see, then don't blame the kids. Blame the adults who raised them and the politicians you elected to set education policies..

Hiring good MS admins is hard too. Possibly harder, because, although there are more, the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.

I actually did see someone using one of them last week, but he was a tango teacher who also DJ'd. If you'd asked me the same question a week ago, I'd have said over a year ago. I rarely see people with stand-alone MP3 players now that a cheap smartphone and a decent sized SD card can be had for about the same price as an MP3 player.

Just to clarify: you are talking about mechanical hard disks there, right?

SSDs have been roughly doubling in capacity for the same price every 9 months for the last 15 years. If that continues, then they'll be where hard drives are now in 2-3 years in terms of price per GB. It's important to remember, however, that a more important metric than price per GB is price of the smallest drive bigger than what I need. For a lot of corporate desktops, 40GB hard drives are big enough. They get re-imaged periodically, so a larger hard drive isn't that important, and everything except the OS and a few apps is stored on a file server. The cheapest hard drive I can buy is 1TB at £60. The cheapest SSD I can buy is 32GB at £35. I can also get a 60GB SSD for £40. If I am buying 1,000 machines that are going to need under 40GB of local storage, I save £20,000 by going with the SSD.

Unlike hard drives, it's quite easy to make smaller-and-cheaper flash drives: just put fewer chips in the enclosure.

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.