Possibly because they read the correct wikipedia article; the one where it says what the literacy rate is, instead of the amount of money thrown at a failed system.

I would point out that for someone claiming another is ignorant, I cited several articles for people to go an educate themselves on the matter. All you did was vomit up a multi-paragraph fuck you and tried to make it look academic, hoping nobody would realize you're really just a pompous asshole.

NewEgg also sells assembled machines. Want to take a guess at what proportion of their total sales each make up? If you don't believe me, go and look up the numbers. Last ones I read, well under 5% of all computers sold ever received an after-market upgrade, and most of those were just RAM upgrades.

When you're talking about a market with a billion or so sales every year, it's not surprising that there are companies that do well catering to a fraction of a percent of the total market, but that doesn't mean that they're statistically relevant to the overall shape of the market.

+5 insightful. Thank you!

I'd mention the three magic words that everyone seems to forget, "WELL-REGULATED MILITIA"

Hmm, okay, let's see... I keep my guns in good working order, know how to use them, and do not count as regular military.

Check, well-regulated militia. Anything else you'd like to discuss?

At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.

Or even better, a vacuum of 0.147psi has one-one-hundredth the density of air. Both a vacuum and filling it with helium require making the drive air tight; and at least with 3.5" drives, they have an impressively strong frame that could certainly withstand a modest vacuum. Or better yet, do both! Fill it with low pressure helium, saving helium and getting even more reduction in friction.


All that aside, though, I don't quite get the capacity boost - Drive capacity results from the number of platters and the areal density of bits on a platter. Friction has nothing to do with either of those constraints.

Still, not complaining - About time I upgraded the drive size in my home file server. Funny how that works - Every year or so I add another drive, and then every five years or so I replace the whole array with two new drives having more total capacity than what I replaced.

No it doesn't. Desktop upgrades were always a tiny niche for hobbyists.

That's why he's telling you to vote for a third party candidate, even if it's a write in. Your candidate almost certainly won't win, but now the winner will have one more vote against them and find it that little bit harder to claim that they have a mandate. It's easy to claim that you represent the people when 25% vote for you, 20% vote for you, and 55% don't bother to vote. It's much harder when 25% vote for you, 20% vote for the other guy, and 10% vote for write ins. Now only 45% of those that bothered to vote voted for you, not 55%.

Yes, I've also wondered about the wisdom of allowing Americans to have guns.

Sorry, couldn't resist a setup like that...

Yup, your gun will keep you safe from the guy next to you with a bomb...

How many solar panels would be required to 'pave over death valley'?

For large-scale installations, we have better, simpler, old-school tech than installing actual solar panels. My point more addressed the will, not the specifics.

TFA claims that we can't meet the world's power needs with renewables. I call BS, we just don't have the will to move off of the sweet, sweet teat of oil, for which we already have massive infrastructure in place to support its use. Do you have any idea how many gas stations the US has? How many miles of oil and natural gas pipelines exist? How much effort and expense goes into maintaining those?

To directly answer your question, though, it would take almost exactly six billion panels to literally pave Death Valley. We wouldn't actually need that many, however, since the entire annual US electric budget only comes in at 4,138TWh - Which a mere 5.2B (cheap consumer-grade) panels would satisfy. But as I mentioned above, we wouldn't really use 5.2 cheap consumer-grade billion panels - We'd use either an array of more traditional solar thermal plants (aka lots of cheap mirrors heat something up), or at the very least, use newer, more efficient and multi-sun panels with their own array of mirrors. Current cells exist that can take 70k suns - Lowering the number of actual panels needed (as opposed to cheap mirrors) to a manageable 74 thousand.

I'd actually be happy with a quite small array of batteries that would power a DC main in my house for LED lighting and charging electronic devices. The big energy consuming appliances (fridge, washing machine, and so on) could stay on AC, but I'd love to have a separate DC main for all of the things that want to consume DV, and avoid generating DC, converting it to AC to transmit it a few tens of metres, and then converting it back into DC inefficiently at the socket.

Having the $10K isn't necessarily required for the person wanting to use the solar array. There are companies here that will install a solar array for free and give you the power you use for free and make money based on feeding the power you don't use back into the grid. Unfortunately, they're only viable because of the (quite large) government subsidies. About a fifth of the money they make comes from the electricity company paying for the power and the rest from the government paying them to produce it. Solar panels have been improving hugely over the last decade, but they still need a factor of four or five improvement in cost per Watt to be economically feasible for most people (and good luck keeping the price down as demand spikes), which is likely quite a few years away.

Wind is often a lot more feasible. A relatively small wind generator can give you 1-3kW for about a tenth of the price of the solar array. The problem is that the supply is even less reliable than the solar panels. An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and overprovisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes.

I don't think it's overstated. The building I work in was designed in the late '90s, on the assumption that everyone would have a 17-19" CRT on their desk. Over the next decade, everyone switched to LCDs. Now everyone has a 24-30" TFT on their desk, and the heating system is struggling because the amount of waste heat from the displays is far less than the building was designed for.

Oh, and I think you're somewhat overestimating the efficiency of electron guns in your description of CRTs. If you could just stick a current across the phosphor and make it glow, that would be great, but the energy loss from heating up a cathode, sticking it near a magnet, and letting the electrons dump energy into the phosphor is huge.

Really? I didn't find any mention of open source on their site, except for an 'also open!' regarding Android 4.2. Do they ship a GPU with no proprietary drivers? What about the baseband processor?