With rotational manufactures proving technology up to 60 TB on a disk (seagate I think), I don't see SSDs touching them for a long time.

We wan't more storage - and the more storage we get the more we want. SSDs just can't get on the right growth curve - the price/size ratio for SSDs just doesn't scale. Look at the class of "mobile" devices (phones, tablets etc.) - they are topping out for onboard starage at numbers that are pretty poor in a modern context - and the sizes aren't growing. You don't see apple saying with the release of a new ipad, "we are doubling everything: to 32, 64, 128 GB - for no extra cost" - because they can't, the prices haven't come down very much for those sort of sizes over the timespan of a number of years.

New technology may change things, but I can't see it happening any time soon - new tech introduced takes quite a while to get the economies of scale it needs to beat the incumbent technology.

There are so many variables here that it isn't funny. I frequently cringe when I see social science "foo linked to bar says study" headlines. There are so many ways to cut the data, so many internal biases that influence what is published, and almost always not enough evidence to definitively prove a correlation-causation linkage (small samples sizes, poorly defined data, poorly handled statistics etc.).

Gary Gutting (Philosopher, Notre Dame) had a blog piece in the NYT last week that tackles this head on:

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences?

Actually not quite true, in the year+ before Google's IPO they were making money hand over fist, far more than they had thought they would be, and so they were hiding it:

source

The surest sign that a bubble is occurring is that if those inside the bubble are asked if it is a bubble, they respond "no, this time it's different".

Honesty, look down through history, from the gold-rushes, through the 1920's, 1980's, dotcom, sub-prime, and you will see that same phrase come up again and again. Bubbles only pay off for those who know it is a bubble and who hype it - they are a long form legalised ponzi-scheme - and they only make money if the majority of people believe it isn't a bubble - hence this time, clearly, it is different - yeah right.

With the floppy drive they may just have been doing it to save space/appear to be cool, forward looking/grab some press headlines etc. They did lots of random "out of the box" stuff back in the mid to late nineties as a way of trying to get the company some "cool" profile.

I think now though there could be a good case to make that they want to remove (no pun intended) removable media as part of a general push. They are interested in the 30% or whatever it is cut of consumable revenue that they take. It is not in their interests for us to be buying a dvd and putting it in our laptop, they don't get a penny from that - they do get many pennies when we are forced to rent (and the word rent can be underlined) it from itunes - as it is never truly ours, it is always under their control.

Tech savy people will always get around their restrictions, but the great masses can be more easily subjugated.

Granted firefox can offer something close, but not quite. Cookieculler offers finer control, because you can whitelist the *cookies* rather than the domain. So I can (and do) choose to protect my /. cookie, but not anything else that /. place in my browser (hypothetical example, as /. don't place any other cookies).

Bit of a shoutout for the firefox extension cookieculler.

I have never found anything that matches cookieculler for features: it doesn't just purely delete cookies, it operates with a white-list based system (the way everything on the web should work). Cookieculler deletes all cookies each time you close the browser, except the ones you have whitelist "protected", that keep login information etc. as you choose.

Along with noscript, cookieculler is the main reason I stay on firefox.

This might be a little "tinfoil hat", and I doubt very much if it is the main reason why google started charging - but I just wonder if longer term thoughts like project glass might factor into their decision.

Products like Glass are basically just one big world of maps - mapping, satellite, traffic, public transport. Giving that away completely free no-strings-attached forever would just allow others to make products without the overhead that google have to shoulder alone. Something like glass is a long way off, but perhaps there may be a small degree of laying down the norms early on.

For basic mapping openstreetmap is completely fine, but if all of the finer granularity (streetview, satellite, traffic data) is required then that costs a lot of money to acquire/maintain - and fair enough if google want to start asking those that use it to contribute.

Electricity isn't the major factor - total energy is what matters.

Collecting tonnes of paper and transporting it to recycling centres, pulping, cleaning, processing, re-bleaching (we don't like blue-brown paper, we want white paper) and then transporting the finished paper back to where it is used. Calculate the energy in that.

At work we almost exclusively use reams of recycled paper. Print something on it and then sometime later (occasionally minutes later) it goes into a recycling bin. That bin is emptied once a week and the paper will travel 20 miles to a local depot. Where it is recycled and turned into new paper I don't know - but what I do know is that the reams of recycled paper we buy will come from at least 400 miles away (and will have travelled that via a circuitous route involving suppliers, buyers and distribution warehouses). Taking the same bit of paper and running it through a unprinter for 20 seconds and then reuse. Energy wise I don't think there will be any contest, but the numbers would have to be crunched to prove it.

sorry - above post retracted, in the default view the full thread wasn't shown, hence I didn't see the troll posting crap that you were replying to!