An incomplete list of types of vendors and organizations I have to trust not to be stupid or evil with my information: 1) bank 2) credit card(s) 3) doctor 4) health insurance 5) state and federal governments 6) employer Yes, I am not necessarily locked into any of these but changing some are more of a burden than others. Microsoft, Google and Apple are only recent players in this game.

Microsoft came out with a tablet and it did everything you liked about a laptop but less. Apple came out with a tablet that did everything you liked about a smart phone only more. Apple was a bit more clever.

The radius of Earth's orbit varies from 147166462 KM to 152171522 KM, or about 3.4%. Since flux is a measure of per unit area, the flux at any point in the Earth's orbit should be number of particles per square meter for a sphere centered at the Sun, and that goes as 4pi(R)^2. So the ratio of flux from closest to farthest approach should vary by those differences squared which is close to 7%. Maybe I am not interpreting the plots correctly but the claimed effect looks a lot smaller than that. If you are going to throw around possible explanations than it is important to check the basic predictions are at least consistent. I do not know whether the results are right or not. I do think having members from the earlier experiment means this does not qualify as independent verification. I didn't check the original papers but I hope they explain in detail the statistical as more importantly the systematic errors and how the latter were controlled and measured. It would be interesting to place one of these detectors near a neutrino beamline and compare results for beam on versus beam off in a similar time of year. I suppose one might even be able to place multiple detectors at different distances away from the beamline axis and compare rates by distance away. One significant challenge would be calibrating the actual flux at the various detectors from the beam when it is on. If it could be done it would reduce some of the systematic errors, but a lot would depend on how long one has to sample to get enough data.

And in a related story, the MPAA and RIAA has successfully lobbied Congress to ban any technology that allows copying of the stored information by claiming pirates will use it and ruin their industry. From this day forward it is now illegal to be in possession of RNA or mRNA. All life as we know it is in violation of the law.

I agree. As the amount of data and metadata increase a good way to organize it all is via a database. Then access can be done through queries on the metadata and all relevant locations returned. In some sense, it will no longer matter where the data is stored on disk as long as the database knows the location (and moving it can be done easily but requires the database be updated too). One of the simplest form for the directory structure is along the lines of date ordering, e.g. year-dir, month-dir, day-dir, dataset-dir. One of the advantages of a database is it can allow you to replicate the data, say for instance on tape copies, and store the location on tape in the database too. In High Energy Physics there are petabytes of data stored this way.