"Screw SpaceX!"
We hate Elon because his politics don't align with ours, therefore we think it is great that NASA isn't giving his company money for this Mars mission, especially because Elon wants humans to colonize Mars so badly. Double whammy!
Slashdot has become so biased during the past decade.

You should not have, because the researcher who claimed you should retracted his own claim in 1989. This story is the latest release of a rough example working better than smooth.

I have to disagree. While I agree the understanding of roughness impact has evolved over time; The summary clearly indicates Ichiro Tani introduced this idea in 1940 and retracted it based on further analysis of data [from 10 years prior to his claim] in 1989. The rest is just examples of people hunting down the best inverse examples of what he'd previously claimed... with this being the latest 2026 release directly descended from his own work.

It's actually impressive flex to claim an idea you pushed that misled people for 40yrs before you retracted it [and arguably beyond that] is a fundamental principal of aerodynamic engineering which you then 'overturned' with your continued research into how wrong you were.

1940 - Ichiro Tani argues surface roughness prevents laminar flow.
1989 - Tani reviewed data from the 1930's and found "roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transistion.
1990s - Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions.
2026 - Same team announces this.

From TFS "This technology is fundamentally different from the "rivulet (shark skin) process," which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts."

You used the phrase 'junk emails' but it is clear from context and the rest of your remarks that you were not talking about SPAM but rather legitimate emails that you just considered useless junk.

Look at this statement, it would be nonsensical to claim this is referring to ACTUAL junk aka spam email: Pruning spam.

"Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."

"I will never keep an email where someone is alerting me they'll email me later, I'll just wait for that later email. I will never keep an email where someone is asking me to upload stuff to their site, once I upload whatever, they confirm, I delete the email. There's no the value to the email once the upload is done"

Right, emails you subjectively consider useless, but many people are required to keep ALL communications. They are not allowed to decide which are useful and useless. More importantly, you are describing a time consuming process where you spend significant time and worse, mental load, backtracking to determine old LEGITIMATE email is no longer useful. We just calculated a cost under 25 cents a year to simply archive all your email forever. That means if you make $15/hr flipping burgers and spend ONE MINUTE A YEAR managing email you've already exhausted the cost to simply keep all of it.

A lot of developers took a long time fighting your argument, only they were fighting for microoptimizations in code but the math kept crushing them. It's simply far more effective to save the time you'd spend choosing instructions that are slightly faster and instead use that time finding a high level design that is more efficient or timing execution to find the choke points. Email management is only useful to the extent it aids you in finding emails you need.

For YOU. https://slashdot.org/comments....

I answered the legal/compliance point seperately.

"I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 000 000 or 500 000 000 GB of email, which is also 500 PB, a 1/2 EB of email, that is most likely almost worthless. Where do you store 1/2 a EB? Why store 1/2 a EB of effective digital toilet paper? That's just email, now think about photos, videos, and cloud drive usage, if you start cleaning it up, and you're honest, most of that is junk."

Of course most of it is junk but you missed the point. Yes, I said 120 50GB email accounts and you sound like someone stuck dealing with people and their oversized outlook PSTs that crash and clobber their systems to me so I'm sure we can agree that in reality, you'll have some double that and most far smaller. So lets say that is 200 users covered by a $200 drive for 5 years. That is $0.20/user/year... hell lets pad it and call it a quarter a year for the benefit of never deleting an email you need later. At that price it's going to be the right call for 200 people or 10 million people. And that's talking about RAW storage... email is text, not only is text highly compressible but emails are highly redundant text... you only need to store unique blocks on disk if you do it right and the rest will just have references pointing to the same location. Just thinking about emails sent to 20 co-workers and their giant reply chains... how much less that becomes becomes because you only store the novel content once and store pointers for all the repetition across all those mailboxes.

"That's just email, now think about photos, videos"

Personal Photos and videos take up far more space than emails. Emails especially are redundant as well. 1/2 EB of email doesn't require anywhere remotely close to 1/2EB of disk to store.

"There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails."

See the problem with talking out your ass is that you are often wrong. There may be no legal requirement for YOU to retain emails/communications. That doesn't make it some universal truth.

Sure — there are quite a few. Common examples:
Financial services

SEC Rule 17a-4 — broker-dealers must retain electronic communications (email, IM, chat) for 3 years, first 2 in easily accessible storage, in WORM (write-once-read-many) format
FINRA Rule 4511 — similar 3-6 year retention for member firms
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) — public companies retain audit-related communications for 7 years
Dodd-Frank — swap dealers retain communications for 5 years
Investment Advisers Act — registered advisers retain records for 5 years

Healthcare

HIPAA — covered entities retain communications containing PHI for 6 years (longer in some states; CA requires 7, some require until patient age 21+)
CMS / Medicare — claims-related communications retained 7-10 years
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 — pharma/medical device communications related to clinical trials and manufacturing retained for the life of the product plus a period after

Legal / litigation

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — once litigation is "reasonably anticipated," all potentially relevant communications must be preserved indefinitely (litigation hold), overriding normal retention schedules
Attorney-client communications — typically retained 7-10 years post-matter under state bar rules

Tax

IRS — communications supporting tax positions retained 7 years (3-year audit window + extensions); employment tax records 4 years; some indefinitely if fraud alleged
State tax authorities — vary, often 4-7 years

Employment / HR

EEOC — personnel-related communications retained 1-3 years (longer if charge filed)
FLSA — payroll-related communications retained 3 years
ADEA — 3 years for hires, 1 year for other personnel actions
OSHA — workplace safety communications retained 5 years (30 years for certain medical/exposure records)
ERISA — benefits plan communications retained 6 years

Government contracting

FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) — contractor communications retained 3-4 years post-contract
DFARS / DoD contracts — often longer, 6+ years
Davis-Bacon Act — prevailing wage communications 3 years

Energy / utilities

FERC — communications related to wholesale energy transactions retained 5 years
NERC — grid reliability communications retained 3-6 years

Telecommunications

FCC — carrier communications retained 2-5 years depending on category
CALEA — certain surveillance-related records 6+ months minimum

International / cross-border

GDPR (EU) — retention varies by purpose, but documented retention schedules required for all personal data communications
MiFID II (EU financial) — communications retained 5-7 years
UK FCA — similar 5-year retention for regulated firms

Industry-specific

Insurance — state insurance commissioners typically require 5-10 years
Education (FERPA) — student-related communications retained per institutional policy, often 5+ years
Nuclear (NRC) — communications retained for facility lifetime in some cases

Public sector

Federal Records Act — government agency emails are federal records, retention per NARA schedules (varies from a few years to permanent for historical records)
State sunshine/open records laws — public employee communications often retained 3-7 years and subject to disclosure

The retention periods aren't arbitrary — they're tied to statutes of limitations, audit windows, and the practical needs of regulators to investigate after the fact. Most large companies actually retain longer than required as a hedge against litigation discovery, and many implement formal retention/destruction policies specifically so they have a defensible reason for deleting older material when it's no longer required.

"Businesses, it is worse. One lost email can mean a lost sale, or a customer unable to contact you and then resorting to legal means [1]."

This is very real and it almost seemed to happen overnight. Once upon a time as a freelance service tech I had dozens of small business clients who hosted their own email and it just doesn't make sense for a say a cabinet maker with 20 ppl on staff to pay for a T1 when they could have some multiple of the bandwidth and the same uptime from the same provider for a tenth of the price... but every so often they'd get a blacklisted IP or they might even really get some kind of bug and get blacklisted and the time it took to get off those lists grew and grew until eventually you basically couldn't get off the lists.

Luckily those large providers and spam battling champions saved the internet from the evils of people self-hosting email and spam exists no more....

1) The elite want you to be dependent on them in as many ways as possible. They want to be the sole providers of the energy used to heat your home and cook your food. In fact, they really want to just own your home so that they can rent it out to you. 2) Their greatest fear is the armed rugged individual who is smarter and more competent than them. They want to sew division and discord in homogeneous communities that have high numbers of these individuals. That is why they keep pushing that diversity-is-our-greatest-strength lie; to bring individuals into your communities that have suckier cultural elements, lower levels of conscientiousness, lower levels of empathy, lower IQ, and that have a lower net resource output or even one that is negative (i.e. net consumer rather than net producer). They are terrified of these prosperous communities that don't their currency and are minimally dependent on the companies and governments that they own and control. Examples: The Amish, certain Mormon communities in the West. 3) FACT: Wood is renewable, and when properly seasoned and burned in a clean burning stove, produces no visible smoke. It is an excellent heat source and can be harvested by anyone with a chainsaw, trees, some wedges and a splitting maul. Some seasoned woods when burned smell amazing, like fruit tree woods and certain coniferous woods high in sap. 4) FACT: Burning wood releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which plants love. The higher the atmospheric concentration of CO2, the faster plants grow, resulting in shorter growing seasons and higher crop yields. This is why they sometimes pump greenhouses full of it. CO2 makes the planet green. Without CO2 it would be a barren wasteland. So if you really want a green planet, then you should support measures that increase atmospheric CO2 levels up to about 1000 parts per million. This article is just further evidence of the mask slipping on the elites who seek to deceive people into becoming less self sufficient and more dependent on them. Remember the scene from V for Vendetta, "I want everyone to remember why they need us (government programs, the elite)!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... You would do well to become as self sufficient as possible. Burn wood for heat, get solar with LiPO4 battery bank for electricity, get your water from a well/spring, have your own septic system, grow your own food, hunt game and raise livestock, run Graphene on a de-Googled phone and GNU/Linux on your computers. Transact as much as possible via barter or alternative currencies. Pack heat. Burn WOOD. Then you won't care about what your government does because you won't be dependent on them and won't even need their fiat currency much. All governments are temporary and will eventually fail. Stay out of their way when they go down and don't believe their propaganda.

This is an excellent point. Especially because text is highly redundant and they can chunk things up and replace pieces that exist in another email/file with a placeholder to the same raw data rather than replicate things over and over again. Potentially TB's of email can be stored on GB's of disk this way.

"You don't need mass email storage, 99.X% of emails are useless, and should be deleted, for 99.99% of people. If you need more than 5GB of email storage, why? Can you come up with a reason that isn't just fear of losing your horde of garbage? Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."

You are right on the original point but your debunking of 'excuses' falls flat. First the legal requirement to retain email isn't something you can just ignore because you doubt some lawyer will ask for it. Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse. Claiming you'll probably get away with it is not a valid reason for breaking the law.

Also, Gmail was touted as unlimited email with no need to delete, only archive. You can 'star' email as important. I've had my gmail account since the unlimited storage beta and while I don't often dig for old emails it does happen; sometimes even a decade old and the emails I'm hunting for are often emails that I didn't think would be important at the time and therefore did not 'star' as important.

"How much storage could the world recover, is people pruned their fucking emails to stop being landfills? Honestly, how much? It's in the Exabytes, probably."

You could get a shiny new 6TB HDD with 5yr warranty for $200 3yrs ago. That's 120 50GB email accounts. If even one of those 120 people accesses one old email during that half decade the drive has almost certainly paid for itself; that's true even if it just saved them a couple hours finding that data elsewhere. Hardware is CHEAP. Storage is CHEAP. Either is effectively infinitely scalable. Time is not only expensive; it also doesn't always scale.

I remember during the beta when they claimed it was unlimited storage with no need for a delete function and only an archive feature.

Musk founded a non-profit and fully open AI first, remember? Altman and friends hit a point where they felt they had something powerful and decided to keep it closed rather than open it. That's really the end of the discussion to be honest. That he later founded a competing AI [with the openly discussed and disclosed purpose of making sure an ethically responsible AI existed] and it would benefit somehow from suing OpenAI is an irrelevant distraction.

What you just said is super-creepy in a "one of us, one of us" kind of way. Have you ever read Brave New World?