You are probably correct there--I'm from the states in the 10+ category (studied abroad last spring and got to travel about quite a bit), but my guess is that I'm the exception rather than the rule. My aunt, for instance, just just last week left the country for the first time in her life, and she's married to a professor and in her fifties. I've also known people who have never left their home state, let alone the country.

Good answer!

"But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology ... showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph."

So... How exactly did this bird kill?

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that there's an ad for the iPhone 3.1 software update at the bottom of parent's linked page?

Yarr... Indeed, but don't forget to mention cursed booty.

"I'm not a crazed gunman, Dad, I'm an assassin! The difference being, one is a job and the other's mental sickness!"

Well, I must concede that I've only gotten as far as the POSIX standard in my computer science curriculum, so I'm not as familiar as I could be with system workings at the operating system level. I certainly agree with you that placing hardware specific code in a part of the operating system meant to generalize the algorithmic interaction with mass storage devices makes very little sense.

My understanding is that there is a logical representation of the bytes available on a physical disk (at which level the file system operates), and device drivers and hardware components translate that in some fashion into physical bytes, possibly generating this translation on the fly rather than as a simple bijection of "fixed logical byte maps to fixed physical byte". Wouldn't an algorithm implemented at these lower levels still be able to use the fact that more data is being written at a time to make more intelligent decisions about where to physically place that data?

A big limitation with flash drives is that repeated reads and writes to a given sector of storage "wear it out" and cause failure more quickly than the same amount of reads and writes to a given sector on a traditional disk device. The generally accepted solution is to use an algorithmic approach to distribute reads and writes evenly throughout the disk (note: transparent to software developers, at least above the kernel level), and this is what the GP is talking about--more time between physical disk writes means that there is more opportunity for an algorithm to decide intelligently where different pieces of the written data should go.