It's inevitable that face-recognition technology, combined with the myriad of other technologies that already allow individuals to be tracked in their daily lives, will become pervasive enough to provide a "dense surveillance grid" to anybody with access to a big enough dataset. The era of anonymous living is quickly coming to an end. We'd be better off devising technological counter-measures than trying to hold back this tide with laws.

If your swapfile is stored on a SSD, how much does it still matter that you ran out of RAM? And if you're not asking your CPU to do as many I/O waits, maybe you can squeeze more useful cycles and therefore performance out of it. A SSD should be a sure way to improve system performance... a reasonable way to spend $300.

> The deal fizzled out when federal antitrust regulators said it would challenge any deal made between the two companies. The way I understand it, the deal actually fizzled out because some Yahoo C-level egos couldn't agree on a valuation with Microsoft. Yahoo, whose stock currently trades for $12.60, wouldn't sell to MS for $33 / share because they felt they were worth $37 / share, and also because they are idiots. Slashdot actually covered this story at the time.

An infinite, static universe that had always been here would have a sun-like radiation density everywhere on the sky

It seems to me that black holes could explain this away. If there are enough black holes out there, they could be intercepting and sucking in enough stray light / radiation to prevent the sky from lighting up. Light could wrap around the universe a few times until it hit a black hole, then that would be the last you saw of it.