Have they bothered thinking about other cancers in all of this? I had testicular cancer last year, and my phone spends a lot more time in my jacket or pants pocket than it does up against my head.
Also, presumably there is a lot of flesh between your pockets and your testicles.
Actually we can even see now that ram is obsolete, once SSD catch up in speed (you don't even need current ram speed) why would anyone care about transfering data to ram, work on it then store it back? Just work straight on your data, gone are the days of saving, now will be the days of deleting, temporary working directory...
You must have seriously misunderstood the technology behind NAND Flash and (D)RAM. With this you may as well say that processor caches are on their way out... Which would be disastrous. Even if Flash were to reach the bandwidth and rewrite cycles of current RAM, we would still have serious problems arising from the block nature of Flash. In ram, accessing a single 32bit value is simple enough, but in Flash, you have to wade through all the surrounding data to get it (by which I mean fetch it). In fact, just to write a single 32 bit value, the block (Say, 4K, though it can be much, much more) must be fetched by the controller, the data at that memory location placed in the correct position, then the whole block written back, all while the processor waits to write a value in the slot just next to it, where it must do that cycle again. All in all, latency would make it unbearably slow, and RAM is already slow enough due to the speed of light (or electrons, you know what I mean).
Even worse is when you use temporary files. This is the single most idiotic thing I have heard. Do you even know how filesystems work? Needless to say, the filesystem overhead and the requirement for memory to access it makes it a very very poor replacement to the memory it may be intended to replace.
Forget hard drives, currently they are the main bottleneck in your computer, SSDs and the like are the future.
This is why we have caching. And RAM, And processor L1, L2 (L3) cache to make up for the slow access times. This applies to SSD's too.
hard drives, they ain't part of the future me thinks.
This is a point for debate. But there is one thing that hard drives have that SSD's do not. Density. Unlike hard drives, Flash is always connected. That is to say, that each block has a permanent circuit to access it. This takes up space on the chip, reducing the potential density. Hard drive platters are made up purely of the magnetic wells intended to store the data. This is why Seagate trialled the hybrid SSD/Magnetic hard drive (in effect adding another level of caching). One thing is certain, however. Flash/SSD is certainly preferred for mobile computing (including MP3 players) due to their lower power and physical durability.
the problem is I am not to keen on the opposition either.
Thus is the fate of a representative democracy. It is well established that people are idiots, more so in large groups.
Being given the choice of a party that believes in protectionism and another which believes in the same, but not for the economy (and infrastructure, like the National Broadband Network) will ultimately lead down this road. The problem with most people is that while they have logic, they lack the ability to assess the assumptions they are based on. So the simple logic of, it will protect the children by "ensuring" non-exposure, very easily appeals. The fact that it sounds like common sense, is the worst thing about it. What people need is education, and the culture needs to support the education, not ridicule it.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton