>I imagine (and this is an uneducated opinion) all the junk coal and oil plants pump out under regular circumstances is probably going to kill more people than the japan nuclear crisis over the long run

Not only that, but the junk that coal and oil plants pump out has killed/will kill more people in the short run too.

Coal power kills a million people per year worldwide. That's ~2700 a day. Half of those are in China, and ~9/10 of the rest are elsewhere outside the western world. Still, ~45 people will die in the USA today because of coal power.

The coal power plants in the Soviet Union killed more people than the Chernobyl disaster every day while it was happening. The coal power plants in the United States kill more people every day than all the civilian nuclear accidents in the USA combined. The coal power plants in Japan currently kill (much) more people than the Daichi plant every day.

The most casualties indirectly caused by Daichi will be in Germany. Because the accident caused enough political pressure to force Merkel to shut down the seven oldest nuclear plants in Germany for 3 months. During those 3 months, they would have produced 17 TWh of energy. Replacing that will kill 250 people. In those 3 months.

The entire discussion on nuclear makes me feel sick to my stomach.

When running, a cpu uses much more power. But on a mobile phone, (and on your desktop), the cpu spends most of it's time shut down and powergated waiting for an interrupt. RAM, however, has to be refreshed, and will steadily drain your batteries until they run out.

The true winner is a RAID of 2Tb WD Caviar Black & WD Raptors here. Get several of them and RAID, you get all the performance benefits of SSDs to a large degree (still failing a bit short on IOPS probably

Falling a bit short. By some 4 orders of magnitude.

The GP might have missed the point, but you certainly did. Let me put it more bluntly: Comparing the price of an ssd to a disk by $/GB is idiotic, and there is exactly as much point in it as comparing the price of your processor to the price of your ram by $/MB (looking at the size of the cache). His point wasn't that you get better $/GB in a smaller ssd -- it was that the very metric of $/GB is completely and utterly stupid when evaluating the usefulness of an ssd as an upgrade.

A SSD is not an upgrade that buys you more space. It's an upgrade that makes your computer faster. In that, practically all of them are great value; for normal desktop use I'd much rather have an Intel ssd and the crappiest still-in-production dualcore from AMD than no ssd and the most expensive available quadcore from Intel. And I have actually used both kinds of systems. That is how awesome the difference is.

(well, the high-end Intel rig was actually a mid-range i7, but it was overclocked way past any of the models they sell.)

Neutrinos are not particularly more common than antineutrinos. Both should annihilate in pretty much identical amounts.

Everybody knows that if you can design an economically viable improvement on present-day batteries, you are going to be wildly, obscenely rich. There are plenty of applications where people would be perfectly willing to pay several times more for a battery than what they are paying now if there was a significant improvement in capacity/mass. This leads to a lot of research being concentrated even on very wild potential ideas. Many are viable in the lab, but are too expensive to produce (by a margin of several orders of magnitude), too dangerous, too short-lived, or any combination thereof.

No matter how many misses there will be, this situation is more or less the ideal case for a free market to optimize for -- if it is possible to safely store more electrical energy in a smaller mass, it will be found eventually.

Btrfs. Modify-in-place filesystems work poorly with block suballocation -- reiserfs is a case study. On the other hand, Copy-on-Write filesystems lose nothing from it.

You can fix this on the filesystem level by using packed files. For the actual disk, tracking 512-byte sectors when most operating systems actually always read them in groups of 8 is just insane. (If you wish to access files by mapping them to memory, and you do, you must do so at the granularity of the virtual memory page size. Which, on all architectures worth talking about, is 4K.)