Much like another certain individual with the surname Dyson who is a also physicist, Herndon should stick to physics and take the word of reputable scientists when trespassing in a field they have little familiarity and seem to be uninterested in studying more, much less attempt to understand. Should either individual attempt this they would lose their current status as cranks, which would be advantageous for everyone.

On the other hand, the natural nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon is something that did happen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

We all point at you and laugh for using something as CPU intensive as RAID5 on a consumer grade SATA controller. What, you didn't think the XOR operations and striping came for free, did you? No, your CPU gets to XOR and align the data on the drive whenever a write to the array is made. This obviously kills write performance and is also fairly CPU intensive. It also defeats the purpose of DMA for writes. Reads are not impaired in a RAID5 array, however.

I suppose that SATA multiplexers exist which add additional ports, but since they divide up the bandwidth equally between each drive whether they need it or not, this isn't much of a solution.

Do Gigabyte and Asus err... Foxconn, Pegatron, Quanta, et al. own enough equipment to do the desoldering, cleaning, soldering, and X-ray inspections necessary to do this work at a reasonable rate? I doubt that the actual board manufacturers like Foxconn do very much desoldering and other types of rework on a large scale in their normal manufacturing operations. Next, if the manufacturers must look outside their companies, is there enough equipment out there up to the task of reworking these boards at a reasonable cost and rate? Next, is the cost of reworking a board less than the cost of scrapping and recycling the bad boards and building an entirely new board and taking whatever refund Intel offers? I realize that while Intel will replace the bad chips, if Intel is willing or Intel can be made to be willing to foot the cost of manufacturing an entirely new board, why rework these boards with defective chipsets? Maybe even the manufacturers could weasel some lower prices on the 6 series chipsets. It isn't like the 6 series chipsets are much more than an ICH9 southbridge with PCIe 5Gb/s links as opposed to the 2.5Gb/s links found in older chipsets. For that matter, Sandy Bridge should have required a new socket or even an Intel chipset, aside from the DMI bus used to connect to the processor having potentially slightly different software protocols that PCIe.

Heck, the AMD SB850, which is several months older than the Intel 6 series of chips has links electrically identical to PCIe that run at 5Gb/s and hypothetically could be made to work with Sandy Bridge. The SB850 also has six 6Gb/s SATA ports instead of the half-assed SATA setup Intel uses.

Well, there is the Secure Erase ATA command present on all current hard drives, which is a full drive form and something the NIST considers more secure than the old DoD multiple pass overwrite procedure. Granted, just erasing or copying over the data once is 99.9999% of the time is going to make the previous data totally unrecoverable anyway. Although the effects of an induction range on the permanent, rare-earth, magnets from the voice coil motor that moves the heads might be fun. The metal plate those magnets are mounted on might also be at least some fun. The alloys used have a high magnetic permeability and thus can screen out much of the magnetic field from those magnets, I dunno what that might do on an induction stove, let us know if you try this and survive.

Granted, ACTA also must exist in a "final" form for anything to happen. I'm not sure I've heard anything concrete, plausible, or credible about the existence of ACTA in the first place. When I might be concerned, but the amount of "secrecy" involved with ACTA as well as the required size of such an operation doesn't seem to be a conspiracy that is within the range of people. So a more probable conclusion needs consideration: the bits and pieces of information that are being attributed to ACTA are no more than idiots leaping at shadows.

There is also the matter of the "patriots" and such that seem to feel quite strongly on certain issues and conflate these issues with the Constitution. However, the number of /. posters that don't seem to know about the two-thirds Senate vote requirement for ratifying treaties appears to be astounding. Granted, this is not as astounding as the number of "patriots" that don't actually understand how the Constitution has been interpreted, which is important, as opposed to what these same individuals would like it to mean, which is irrelevant.

Meh, several years ago Intel had one of its engineers leak a paper showing that 5C/DTCP, the encryption used with IEEE1394 or Firewire was vulnerable to being cracked. I don't doubt that it is possible to crack DTCP. Some nice individuals from China wrote a paper on the subject here: http://ww1.ucmss.com/books/LFS/CSREA2006/SAM4740.pdf

Naturally, after Intel leaked the paper the stampede away from Firewire and to HDMI by the large media companies was rapid. All I can say is that with that in mind the new HDCP crack seems a bit ironic.

Granted, the entire concept of DRM is still flawed, it attempts to use encryption for a task that encryption just will never work for. HDMI is still reasonably resistant to copying, the volume of data is the issue. Although for Blu-Ray the already cracked AACS is a better option. I wonder how long it will be before large media companies figure out what encryption is actually useful for and that it is not useful what they want to make it used for, at least now?

Also, as usual, those who do not understand the lessons of a well designed, versatile technology like Firewire tend to reimplement it, poorly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDBaseT
I'm curious where the HDBaseT goofballs actually have a way to put 10.2Gb/sec ad offer 100W of power over the four twisted pairs present in Cat5e and Cat6. I'd also like to know why 10G Ethernet over twisted pair using Cat6 or Cat6e seems so scarce yet.

Well, yes "High Fructose" would be hard to drop, granted "High Fructose" is used as a relative descriptor, most HFCS has 42% or 55% fructose, unprocessed Corn Syrup, on the other hand is 100% glucose. I don't see "Processed" Corn Syrup flying too well with all of the asshats buying less reliable, less sustainable, and with higher environmental cost "organic" foods.

Not quite, Corn syrup starts out as 100% glucose after being converted into either 55% fructose Corn Syrup or 42% fructose Corn Syrup, the most commonly used types, the products do certainly have higher levels of fructose than unmodified Corn Syrup hence the "High Fructose" descriptor. Cane sugar on the other hand starts out as sucrose. If we start taking about carbonated beverages when the sucrose is put into solution with water and carbonic acid(from CO2) and in most cases with phosphoric acid or citric acid you have a low pH environment. Under these conditions sucrose splits into its constituents glucose and fructose. At this point, a 50% free glucose and 50% free fructose solution has shown no medically significant difference with HFCS. Better yet, something that affects both HFCS soda and cane sugar soda is that the glucose will start to convert into fructose under abnormally high, usually improper storage temperatures (90F), making this entire 5% part meaningless. So yes, one can end up with cane sugar sodas that for whatever reason have higher percentages of fructose than HFCS sodas.

Also, anyone ever look at the ratio of glucose to fructose on fruits, they are all over the map. Apples, for instance, have 90% of their sugar as fructose.

Yeah remind me when planes can autoditch themselves into the Hudson River after losing thrust in both engines. As to US Airways Flight 1549 itself, I personally like this quote from the second page of this report at: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=DCA09MA026&rpt=fi

Yes, the co-pilot was occupied with his own tasks as well.

Even though there are few incidents of this type, it is safe to say that there are probably nonemergency situations where having a co-pilot has prevented an emergency from occurring.

The "prism correction" actually causes the eye to aim down or up and left or right from its uncorrected condition. Before I had a prism correction added to my glasses I had trouble with eyestrain and splitting headaches near my right eye. My right eye didn't want to aim properly. What is unfortunate is that the necessary prism correction for a pair of glasses can change more frequently than insurance allows for, sometimes more than once a year. My eyes let me know when a change is needed with splitting headaches.

As for 3D glasses, I found that at a demo setup that nVidia's 3D glasses with actively polarizing lenses worked acceptably. These are essentially the same as the glasses used for 3D home theater setups. At any rate, my only technical complaint was that I had trouble with the right lens not polarizing. This may have been due to damage to the glasses or some other issue. I still have complaints as to the cost and value of a setup with glasses and a monitor.