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Gang members generally only bother you if go in their neighborhood. Last I checked they didn't fly planes into skyscrapers. The police can easily deal with gangs if they want to. Many police forces don't want to because they extort money from the gangs in return for letting them do their thing...

Exactly. I'm not advocating carpet bombing the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a first step. That would be more like a last step if all else failed. Try selective nuclear strikes designed to kill as few innocents as possible. There's something about nuclear weapons, even small ones, which...

Let's tick off the boxes. We've tried diplomacy. We've tried securing high-value targets, to the point places like NYC are virtual police states. We've tried cutting off funding. We've tried to bring down their communication network. We've tried conventional attacks against terrorists, which...

Perhaps because they were focusing on superficial traits like blond hair and blue eyes? The Germans basically scapegoated an entire group for their problems, then invented pseudoscientific reasons to justify the mass extermination of this group. In the process they also happened to eliminate the...

So then you're basically OK with continued terror attacks because that's what's going to happen if we don't wipe out the threat? I don't know why you're comparing the Muslims elsewhere to those in the Middle East, either. The conditions in the Middle East have bred radicalism for centuries...

You need to measure the air temperature inside the case before doing anything. If you have enough airflow into the case so that the air temperature inside is close to ambient then you won't get much improvement from more case fans. Assuming the air temperature inside the case is close to...

I lost a friend on 9/11 and saw the effects first hand less than two weeks afterwards, including the smell of burnt flesh lingering in the air. I also explored the site a bit after (illegally) going inside the perimeter but didn't get too far inside for fear of falling into a hole. This was...

Unless I'm missing something you can't sample a 20kHz sine wave at 44ksps and then use that digitized version to get something resembling a sine wave when you play it back. A good rule of thumb is the sampling rate needs to be at least ten times the maximum frequency if you're dealing with...

Fissionables in the back of a truck can do quite a bit of damage in a place like Times Square. Try hundreds of thousands, perhaps low millions, dead from a blast of a few tens of kilotons. Not to mention upwards of $1 trillion in property damage, and who knows how much in long term economic...

First nuclear terror attack by Iran will likely cause a rain of ICBMs on their entire country. That's true whether the attack is on Russia, or on a US run by Trump. Problem solved. It'll also keep the remaining Muslim ME nations in line. I did and still do think an appropriate response to 9/11...

We will soon have the ability to improve ourselves via genetics. We already can do so via selective breeding and/or selective sterilization. Whether or not we choose to use these tools could well determine the survival of the human race. We can't afford to have a large percentage of the...

You're right to concerned. If Trump screws up the US bad enough, you might have a flood of American refugees at your border, including me. I guess at that point Trump might emigrate to Canada, run for Prime Minister, and offer to build a wall, all while uttering the lines "When the US sends its...

Today no but look at the percentage of the population killed in WWI and WWII in the countries where the war was fought.

I didn't read the entire article. It was way too long and rambling, plus the author was making me violently ill talking about guys who had over 100 sex partners (seriously, unless you're willing to sleep with anything with a vagina, I'm not seeing how you can get laid with that many people)...

Yep. It's bad enough if you do this with a credit card or maybe a utility bill but I knew someone who did this with a student loan of all things. Student loans are managed by companies who apparently feel it's OK to sell the loan off to someone else, but when they do this they add a collection...

Given his penchant for putting his foot in his mouth, I'm not surprised.

Hey, I'm seeing a pattern here. My sister's ex moved out too, and she kept the house. Your predicament makes me glad I have no business with Citibank, not that Chase is anything to write home about, either.

Why? That strikes me as pretty vindictive. My sister wasn't exactly on great terms when she split (i.e. she was seriously considering my offer to put her ex in a dumpster), but she still forwarded him his mail.

Don't they already do that on The Biggest Loser? :D

Backblaze has some interesting data on that. 5 years sounds like a reasonable number here. It would be interesting to know a similar ballpark figure for the archival life of SSDs. I know the data in 3D NAND decays more slowly because they're using larger cells. How long out can one expect...

Not too many really poor can afford cars. If being regressive concerns you, you could always have a refundable gas tax credit which gradually phases out as income increases. I was figuring we got through $4+ per gallon gas once, so we're not jacking the price to levels which never existed...

No such limitation. A heavier vehicle actually has more room and weight capacity for batteries than a lighter one. It has to do with basic physics. A good amount of a vehicle's energy is expended pushing air out of the way. A larger vehicle may have more frontal area, but a 40,000 pound bus...

The reason for choosing a lighter vehicle is often to save money. Gas may be temporarily cheap, but it's still expensive enough that a small vehicle will save someone a significant amount of money if they drive 10K or 20K miles per year compared to a hulking SUV. And some people, like my sister...

Agreed. Now especially with gas prices low this would be a great time to have a sane gas tax. Have a variable tax which keeps the price of gas at, say, $4 or $5 per gallon regardless of the actual price of oil. Increase this in 50 cent increments each year until you hit maybe $10 per gallon...

Exactly. I recall reading something a number of years ago where a woman was so thrilled her SUV saved her in a collision (at the expense of everyone in the car she hit) that she vowed to buy an even larger SUV next time. This borders on sociopathic.

Neither device is really suitable for archiving. The magnetic bits on an HDD decay also due to superparamagnetism. This wasn't an issue when drives were less dense. Indeed, a 20MB drive from the 1980s would probably still be readable in a century. I wouldn't bet on one of today's drives being...

Safer for the occupants doesn't translate into safer overall. Suppose hypothetically you have a collision between two vehicles of the same mass and 1 person dies in each vehicle. That's 2 deaths. Now let's say you do the same collision but one vehicle is much more massive. Nobody dies in vehicle...

Maybe I need to clarify things a bit. HDDs are inherently unreliable simply because they're mechanical devices. You can make reliability acceptable for relatively low cost. Let's call a 5-year median lifespan "acceptable" for the sake of argument. If you make them too cheap, they're unacceptably...

Some food for thought. ~10% of traffic deaths involve large trucks. Autonomous driving will be the single biggest safety feature ever once it's in use. At that point, crash protection is pretty much moot.

I live in NYC, home of the maniac driver. ;) Note here since we were talking about cities when we got on the topic of bikes and electric buses that buses and trains have plenty of shoulder room compared to any car. If someone doesn't care to ride a bike, then public transit is the second best...

See my TCO analysis in my last post. Also, no mention of a warranty. 3 years? 5 years? 1 year? Anything in that size with a 5-year warranty seems to cost $120 and up.

Well, I've little doubt battery tech will soon make range anxiety mostly moot. Add to this the development of on-the-fly recharging and the need for a small gas engine vanishes. Any particular reason you need a 5000 pound SUV? Carrying a lot of gear? Driving off-road a lot? If it's just you a...

Warranty periods went down to a year on a lot of the cheaper drives. Standard for consumer drives a few years back was 3 years. Enterprise SSDs are typically faster, not necessarily more robust. It's a fair comparison using enterprise HDDs and decent consumer SSDs like Samsung. Both have a...

Yep. I get it that buying automobiles is associated with prosperity and conspicuous consumption but really bikes work much better in cities. That includes large American and European cities as well.

Sort of how I feel but nowadays integrated graphics are fine for the vast majority of users. I would imagine if we designed cases and motherboards so the heat-generating components could be connected to a huge, passive heat sink on back of the case we wouldn't need fans.

You could try replacing the switch with something like this. I can see how this could be a problem if you and your machine are sitting in close proximity. My case actually has a recessed switch. I'm guessing you're not the only one who ever had this problem.

Fortunately it's looking more like it's just a blocked salivary gland which somehow became mildly infected. If it doesn't clear up on its own I'll make an appointment with my dentist. I've heard we're spraying mosquitoes here on account of the Zika virus. Don't know if it made its way this far...

If things got really bad I could call an ambulance. The fever actually dropped. I think I might have a blocked salivary gland. One of the home remedies, believe it or not, is sucking on lemons. Just don't call me a sour puss! ;) Sad to say, nobody. I'm running myself into the ground doing this...

Agreed. And eventually their EV cars will make it to our shores as well. China really has little choice here. Their cities make the air in places like LA look pristine. They need to move to electric vehicles in a big way, or face bankruptcy of their socialized health care system once large...

Are those things going to be reliable for those prices? I can believe we can make reliable 7200 RPM enterprise drives at high capacities for maybe $200 and up but I can't help but believe these $50 drives cut everything to the bone. They probably use components really only suitable for 5400 RPM...

Right. I've read some of the opinions singing the praises of 7200 RPM and they border on a Sunday sermon. One which really cracked me up is someone who said 7200 RPM drives are as fast as SSDs. Coug was right. It's like religion. People are stupid (not referring to you Coug but to average people...

Coug, Believe whatever it is you want to believe. I probably forgot more about electronics, reliability, and failure rates than you'll ever know. Just because 7200RPM seem to work OK for what you use them for at work doesn't prove anything except they're adequate for that particular task...

I have my important data on 2 SSDs, 1 HDD, and a few USB drives. I'd feel better though if I had it on something portable besides the USB drives. Long term a portable SSD is in my plans. It's only recently that SSDs in the 1 to 2 TB class have started to get semi-affordable. Remember until I...

I nearly passed out from the heat just bringing in the garbage pails. Walking around looking for a doctor is a non-starter. Can't leave my mom alone for that long anyway. I'll just have to deal with it as best I can. The swelling gets somewhat better if I don't eat.

I have terrible swelling on the left side of my face since dinner last night and a fever. I noticed a few mosquito bites the day before. I hope it's not Zika.

http://disq.us/p/18bpeih http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/ http://www.waterworld.com/articles/print/volume-24/issue-4/departments/pump-tips-techniques/operating-pumps-at-slower-speeds-increases-reliability.html...

I don't think hard drives were particularly reliable 30 years ago. They were a relatively new product. It took a while to get it right. I want to say hard drive reliability probably peaked before hard drives became commodity items, say in the late 1990s. However, reliability didn't degrade...

Congratulations Howell and Bozo! Not sure I'd make it with someone for 4 days, let alone 4 years or 45 years.

But if they standardize on 7200RPM those won't be available, correct? As it is the pickings for 5400 RPM are pretty slim if you stick to decent brand HDDs like HGST, Toshiba, or Samsung. Seagate and WD are crap as far as I'm concerned and Backblaze's tests seem to bear this out. I'll just wait...

The only reason to buy HDD over SSD nowadays is lower cost per TB. Much of that advantage disappears when you look at enterprise drives. And then if use RAID1 the price advantage gets cut in half. Using Coug's quote for the 10TB drive and buying a pair to use in RAID1 gives you $1320US for 10TB...