The transfer speed is still too slow to SSD/HDD storage to be feasible. OS's already use page files on the drives to extend the memory space and improve performance. However, you could conceivably create a hybrid memory unit that uses the slower SSD along with high-speed RAM (similar to high-performance NAS systems) that would potentially add a huge performance boost.

Actually, the Halo sniper rifle is virtually identical to the South African NTW-20. http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn55-e.htm

Absolutely learn C++ inside and out. You'll very quickly become familiar with good practices for OOP as well as the important aspects of memory management and thread synchronization. After this, you can learn just about any language or programming style very quickly. Also, as mentioned, the upcoming C++0x standard is going to address an number of the perceived deficiencies of the language, boosting it right back to the top.

At the university we've been playing around with a new storage system that has ridiculous capacity and speeds. It uses 120 1TB drives to create a striped 100 TB storage system with redundancy. Fast writes are made through the interface directly into the RAM for one of the control computers. These computers each have 32GB of RAM and write the data onto the hard disks over a longer time than the initial dump to memory. You can get effective transfers up to 10 Gbps through the fiber channels. The best part is that this system uses off-the-shelf components with a custom build of Linux to handle IO. It appears as a standard high capacity network drive.