As long as we are being literal, why should I trust the word of a demon?;)
But anyways, who's to say the Universe uses our pedantic definition of "zero"? Perhaps the beginning of the Universe can be best described with an extension of the real number line where "zero" can be positive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero
No. Even with a finite age, there's absolutely no need for a beginning. Just like the positive reals have no first element (for each positive real, there's a smaller positive real; note that 0 is not a positive real), there need not be an earliest point in time.
I meant that the CURRENT age of the universe is finite. And any point in the future, the age will be finite (although it will be arbitrarily old the more arbitrarily further in the future you pick).
You misunderstood my comment.
One of the main ideas (before the Big Bang theory was proposed) used to be that the universe had always existed. So, in that context, the second law (and the Big Bang theory) sides with the creationists, who propose that the universe currently has a finite age.
If you really want to change a creationist's mind, you must first convince them that modern, mainstream science is sometimes on their side, and then they stop fighting and you have an ally for science, instead of a foe. Science is agnostic (because it deals with the natural, not with any kind of potential "supernatural"), yet atheists make enemies of science when they pit science against religion (which is more important than rational thought to very many people--they will defend it at all costs).
If atheists really care about advancing science in the public's view, they will stop picking fights with everyone's grandmother and start just advocating science (and letting science stand for itself).
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.
Thrust can be calculated by the power and the ISP: I think it's something like this: Thrust=Power*2/(effective velocity) or Thrust=Power*2/(ISP*9.81m/s^2)
So, if the power is 200kW and ISP= ~3000s (assuming 100% efficiency, where efficiency is probably more like 65%): 400,000W/(30,000 m/s)=13 Newtons
So, a thrust of 13 Newtons is possible at the low end of ISP. And, actually, thrust decreases with ISP, so ten times higher ISP (30,000s) would be about 1 Newton of thrust at 200kW.
Well, I don't know the whole setup, just that it was about 10 drives (15k) SCSI (not SAS) in a RAID 5. I don't know how much cache. It was a Clarion unit. But, the customer thinks, "Wow, your little box that I've never heard of has just beaten EMC." They don't get into the technical details when they make that sort of decision.
I used pre-production versions of these. I tested them with Terabytes of test data in random write tests. They are amazing, and can saturate a 1Gb FC connection with random writes. They are very resilient. We put these in my company's demo boxes to show that our architecture can compete with EMC. Kind of cheating, but we told them that it was a special drive that enables us to show the limits of our storage management architecture in a small, 1U box, instead of just showing you the limits of physical hard drives.
We beat their 8Us of EMC hard drives by 34% with just one of these 2.5" drives, and we had bottlenecks all over the place in our small demo box. And they did the testing, not us.
The thing about these drives is that they are more expensive ($/GB) even than registered ECC DDR2/3 RAM, which obviously is going to be even faster.
The deep space option where you learn to visit and land on Near Earth Objects (and perhaps later the moons of Mars and asteroids in the asteroid belt) is more interesting, because it allows you to reuse your exploration infrastructure. With the Moon and Mars, you leave much of your equipment at the bottom of a deep gravity well instead of bringing it back to Earth orbit to reuse it. Also, this is absolutely NECESSARY for the survival of human beings on Earth, since you learn how to work on and around potentially-killer-space-rocks. This is what makes us better than the dinosaurs, otherwise we'll die.
Also, the Deep Space option allows progressive increases in capabilities, without a decade of nothing interesting going on. Deep Space infrastructure could evolve all the way to a manned mission on Titan: 1)Characterize radiation environment and shield (passive or active) or otherwise protect (anti-radiation pills? Pick people from Iran or India with innate genetic resistance to radiation?) your astronauts, if necessary. Do this while you are doing other interesting missions (checking out NEOs, etc) in Deep Space that are shorter than a trip to Mars. 2)Characterize whether artificial gravity is needed or not (as opposed to just exercise). 3)Experiment with fuel depots in orbit. This is helpful, but necessary for Deep Space. This is where commercial launch providers can compete and shine. 4)Add electric-propulsion (like VASIMR) at your leisure, without needing them to work before you start doing interesting missions. Fuel Depots are a backup plan in case this doesn't work. 5)For electric-propulsion, you can start out immediately with solar power (which has a LOT of growth potential in Power per kg) in the inner solar system and upgrade to Nuclear reactors for missions further out in the solar system. 6)Develop increasingly closed-loop life support systems to reduce consumeables on long trips. 7)Flyby and orbital missions to Mars would allow teleoperated rovers, which would be much more productive than autonomous rovers. 8)Develop and test a small lander for short stays on the Lunar surface. 9)Make the lander's tanks bigger and send it to Mars with your now-mature Deep-Space orbital mission package. You spend most of the time in orbit around Mars but make a short trip to the surface before returning to orbit.
Now, you've made boot prints on Mars. This time, don't let your human spaceflight infrastructure rot and make you spend 40 years more stuck in LEO. Take the momentum and go with it:
Really awesome options: 10)Develop ISRU on Phobos, if you find water-ice or other volatiles. This would enable refueling of Mars craft, which greatly reduces mission costs and risks and also will allow reuseable Single-stage-to-martian-orbit Mars Descent/Ascent craft (notice, this isn't really possible on Earth, but it is on Mars because of the lower delta-v).
11)Take your ISRU technology already used on Phobos (Martian moon) and perhaps the Earth's moon (if there's ice in the craters) and use it on Mars to support longer stays and a base.
12)The Final Exam on this whole thing would be a mission to Titan. You'd need nuclear power, Electric (or nuclear thermal rocket) propulsion, ISRU, closed-loop life support, mature lander technology, and long-term radiation-mitigation technology. And gonads.
13)After you've gone to Titan, sit back and reap the benefits of your human spaceflight infrastructure: launch costs cheap enough to make space-based solar power viable, mining of the asteroids has already begun (Phobos was once an asteroid), and you probably already have a permanent base on Mars that could someday grow into a colony.
Notice, this doesn't require space elevators (although I'm a fan of them).
There's enough thorium in the top 2 km of the Earth's crust to last for a billion years: Thorium is about 6 ppm of the Earth's crust (plus 2 ppm for Uranium):
1km*5*10^8 km^2*(6/1000000)*5000kg/m^3*10^7 kWh/day in kWh= 1.5 × 10^23 kilowatt hours
(depthofmining)*(earth's surface area)*(parts per million of thorium)*(density of the Earth)*(estimate of energy production of Thorium per kg in an efficient reactor)
Mankind currently uses about 12TW on average of energy: 1.5*10^23 kWh/(12TW)>1 billion years.
The energy density of coal is about 6.7 kWh/kg, while the energy density of Earth's crust is: 6*10^-6*10^7 kWh/kg=60kWh/kg. So, there's more energy density in the thorium in a random rock from the Earth's crust than there is in a chunk of coal! So, it's likely that you could extract this energy if you had to.
In other words, there's a billion years of energy in the top 1km of the Earth's crust. That's about as renewable as solar!
So, we are most definitely NOT going to run out of fission fuel. There is NO "Peak Uranium," until you get to around a few hundred million years!
The biggest reason Nukes cost so much is that they take a long time to complete from initial capital investment to first production of electricity. If this takes a decade, then you just doubled your opportunity costs compared to something that can be completed in a year (assuming 8% interest). This wasn't always the way for nukes. We used to be able to build them in 2-3 years. That alone would decrease the cost of nuclear by almost half (since you are mostly paying for capital costs, not fuel costs). And it doesn't require new technology, and it will allow nuclear power to take over from coal much faster.
The biggest reason they have taken so long to build is that the safety regulations changed [i]while the plants were being built[/i], so it slowed down the construction to a stand-still. We shouldn't have this problem today. And, we can build plants even faster if we can get nuke-plant-assemblylines going, which would allow greater quality control measures (and therefore safety) and decrease the costs per power plant. This is how we can cleanly and cheaply and quickly and safely power the future.
File size doesn't tell you everything about quality.
For instance, if you save an image as a JPEG vs. first saving as a dithered GIF and _then_ saving as JPEG, then the second one will have much worse actual quality, even if it has the same filesize (it may well have worse quality AND have a larger file size).
... Even then, I've never had a job that made me want to smile in the morning. Work is work, it's not to be freakin' enjoyed.
I prefer that work ethic. I don't need shiny happy people asking how they can help me. I need someone to answer my question correctly in only as many works as required....
I went in a store today to buy cigarettes. There's a really cute girl working the counter. Eye candy goes a long way.:)... If I want a girl to flirt with me and blow smoke up my ass, I'd go see an escort. I'd say my wife, but any married man knows, once the ring goes on the finger, friendliness and complements are gone, unless she wants something. The friendlier she is, the more expensive the thing she wants.
Are you kidding me? An orgasm is the only thing that'll make you smile in the morning? I'm sorry to say, but you sound like a horrible person who mostly hates his life. I've had plenty of jobs which make me want to smile in the morning. No offense, but maybe if you didn't come off as a heartless bastard you'd get a job that you'd enjoy! Hell, even stacking boxes can be enjoyable if you have happy coworkers.
As far as your wife, well if you would give your wife something or do something special for her just randomly or even just compliment her (without her asking), then maybe you wouldn't have this contract-based relationship that's basically the same as being roommates with a prostitute. Women, even more than men, need to be loved without the love being directly and immediately attached to putting out. Having a jaded perspective on everything will lead to a miserable life and an early death. If you want to live a long life, well, you had better start loving life.
Re:If you need more than ten disks, go for cheap S
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Best eSATA JBOD?
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· Score: 1
ZFS won't give you good performance for a large array because your random read speed is basically limited to the equivalent of one drive per raid set. That is unacceptable if you need performance:
Re:If you need more than ten disks, go for cheap S
on
Best eSATA JBOD?
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· Score: 1
BTW, you can use SATA disks with this SAS setup. Also, this is hot-swap.
If you need more than ten disks, go for cheap SAS
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Best eSATA JBOD?
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· Score: 4, Informative
You can get an external (4-port, but acts like one big 1.2 GiByte/s pipe) SAS RAID card for less than $500 that will allow you to make multiple RAID sets of up to 32-disks in a set using true hardware RAID 5,6,10, etc. You can even get a battery backup unit for the RAID card cache for $100 (priceless on critical DB systems).
An external SAS card allows you to connect over a hundred drives through one connection using SAS expanders (some cards support up to 256 devices). Some external SAS RAID/JBOD cards have two SFF-8088 connections, for eight SAS lanes total. That's 2.4 Gigabytes/sec raw. At that rate, it's your PCI-e bus that's usually the bottleneck.
A lot of SAS expanders are expensive, but Chenbro has some ones for $300 that spread one x4 lane SAS cable into 24 or 32 cables, plus they can be daisy-chained for more storage. Then, buy a nice 24-slot Supermicro 4U chassis with dual-redundant power. That's a little less than $1000. All you need is the Chenbro expander in the chassis, no need for a motherboard.
If you're really cheap, you can use a cheaper $150 external SAS JBOD-only card, but hardware raid really is a must if you have a lot of storage. Plus, a hardware raid can use write-back cache, since it has effectively non-volatile RAM using the battery backup unit. And no, a UPS is NOT a replacement for NVRAM... Has your system ever crashed for any reason or hung for any reason? I've never had a RAID card hang or crash.
So, basically, besides the external SAS card, you have:
24-slot chassis with redundant power: $1000 chenbro SAS expander: $300 cables: depends
That's about $60/slot, plus you have redundant power (and an upgrade route to dual-redundant controllers). You can scale this to hundreds of terabytes, too. Over a petabyte if you have multiple controllers (with raid array rebuilding on one card not affecting rebuilding on another).
When I was discussing whether or not Islam was peaceful, a Muslim friend of mine explained to me that Islam is a religion of peace during a time of peace and a religion of war during a time of war. That seems a lot more realistic than politically-motivated rhetoric that you hear people say.
According to the Quran, Mohammad was both a reformer and a general. According to the Bible, Jesus was also a reformer but ultimately let himself be killed when confronted with violence (which is why some Christians, like the Quakers, are pacifists).
Even the best consumer-level SSDs like the Intel x-25m/e use a volatile RAM cache to speed up the writes. In fact, with the cache disabled, random write IOPS drops to about 1200, which is only about three or four times as good as a 15k 2.5" drive. The more expensive truly-enterprise SSD drives which don't need a volatile write cache cost at LEAST $20/GB, so the $/(safe random write iop) ratio is actually still pretty close, and cheap SATA drives may actually be even on that metric as the fast enterprise SSDs. Granted, this shouldn't be the case in a year, but that's where it is right now. (Also, the performance-per-slot is a lot higher for SSDs, which can translate into different $ and power and space savings.)
One interesting thing about Gliese 581 d not being made of rock is that it might have almost the same surface gravity as Earth:
Volume of a sphere=(4/3)*pi*radius^3 radius of sphere=((.75/pi)*volume)^(1/3) volume=mass/density radius=((.75/pi)*mass/density)^(1/3) mass=7.5*mass of earth density=2kg/liter (twice that of water)
acceleration due to gravity=Gravitational constant*Mass of planet/(radius)^2
thus, plug this into google= (Gravitational constant)*(7.5*mass of the earth)/((7.5*mass of the earth)/(2kg/liter)*.75/pi)^(2/3)
google gives us: 9.7764354 m / s^2
Yay! Now, we just need a breathable atmosphere! And light-speed spaceships (or faster)!
Reality doesn't work like that. Science is not some sort of alchemy where any "good" that you do has to be balanced with "bad" done elsewhere. Sure, entropy always increases, but that doesn't mean that lessening the impact of a natural disaster means you're upsetting some karmic balance. Every day without a hurricane does not increase the intensity of the next hurricane. Hurricanes are only one way that heat can be transported from the ocean's surface to elsewhere.
Is this really discredited? I did a little web research and didn't see anything that directly contradicted radon detection prediction methods. In fact, I found some information to support it: "Increased levels of radon gas (222Rn) in wells is a precursor of earthquakes recognized by the IASPEI." http://www.fujitaresearch.com/reports/earthquakes.html
website of IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior): http://www.iaspei.org/
It seems that radon levels don't always come BEFORE a quake, but extreme changes in radon levels can be used to predict some quakes:
Case Study Three: Kobe Earthquake, Japan (7)
Over the last twenty years the University of Tokyo and the Geological Society in Japan have monitored radon levels in groundwater in an effort to predict earthquakes in eastern Japan. One such well is located in the southern part of Nishinomiya city, about 30 km NE of the epicenter of the M=7.2 Kobe earthquake of 17 Jan 1995. The well was first monitored between 26 Nov and 02 Dec 1993, with continual monitoring starting on 27 Oct 1994.
During the 1993 observation period, concentrations of radon were stable at 20Bq/l. By the end of Nov 1994 levels had increased to 60Bq/l. On 7 Jan 1995 a huge increase in radon concentration was observed (to ca. 250Bq/l). These high levels dropped suddenly on 10 Jan, one week before the earthquake. By the time of the earthquake levels had returned to about 30 Bq/l, levels confirmed when the station came back on-line on 22 Jan (monitoring equipment had been damaged by the main shock). The researchers have examined other possible reasons for the observed increase in Radon levels, but no satisfactory alternate explanation could be found. Over the period of well-monitoring ground water temperature remained almost constant (±0.2C), and there was no significant rainfall which might have affected the aquifer. Atmospheric pressure is known to have little effect on radon concentrations, so meteorological explanations were also unlikely.
They use argon or xenon (on the expensive ones) to insulate double (or triple) pane windows. I know this because I was a door-to-door almost-salesman for a summer. Worst. Job. Evar.
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As long as we are being literal, why should I trust the word of a demon? ;)
But anyways, who's to say the Universe uses our pedantic definition of "zero"? Perhaps the beginning of the Universe can be best described with an extension of the real number line where "zero" can be positive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero
Your argument is equivalent to Zeno's Paradox.
I meant that the CURRENT age of the universe is finite. And any point in the future, the age will be finite (although it will be arbitrarily old the more arbitrarily further in the future you pick).
You misunderstood my comment.
One of the main ideas (before the Big Bang theory was proposed) used to be that the universe had always existed. So, in that context, the second law (and the Big Bang theory) sides with the creationists, who propose that the universe currently has a finite age.
If you really want to change a creationist's mind, you must first convince them that modern, mainstream science is sometimes on their side, and then they stop fighting and you have an ally for science, instead of a foe. Science is agnostic (because it deals with the natural, not with any kind of potential "supernatural"), yet atheists make enemies of science when they pit science against religion (which is more important than rational thought to very many people--they will defend it at all costs).
If atheists really care about advancing science in the public's view, they will stop picking fights with everyone's grandmother and start just advocating science (and letting science stand for itself).
I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.
Thrust can be calculated by the power and the ISP:
I think it's something like this:
Thrust=Power*2/(effective velocity)
or
Thrust=Power*2/(ISP*9.81m/s^2)
So, if the power is 200kW and ISP= ~3000s (assuming 100% efficiency, where efficiency is probably more like 65%):
400,000W/(30,000 m/s)=13 Newtons
So, a thrust of 13 Newtons is possible at the low end of ISP. And, actually, thrust decreases with ISP, so ten times higher ISP (30,000s) would be about 1 Newton of thrust at 200kW.
Well, I don't know the whole setup, just that it was about 10 drives (15k) SCSI (not SAS) in a RAID 5. I don't know how much cache. It was a Clarion unit. But, the customer thinks, "Wow, your little box that I've never heard of has just beaten EMC." They don't get into the technical details when they make that sort of decision.
I used pre-production versions of these. I tested them with Terabytes of test data in random write tests. They are amazing, and can saturate a 1Gb FC connection with random writes. They are very resilient. We put these in my company's demo boxes to show that our architecture can compete with EMC. Kind of cheating, but we told them that it was a special drive that enables us to show the limits of our storage management architecture in a small, 1U box, instead of just showing you the limits of physical hard drives.
We beat their 8Us of EMC hard drives by 34% with just one of these 2.5" drives, and we had bottlenecks all over the place in our small demo box. And they did the testing, not us.
The thing about these drives is that they are more expensive ($/GB) even than registered ECC DDR2/3 RAM, which obviously is going to be even faster.
The deep space option where you learn to visit and land on Near Earth Objects (and perhaps later the moons of Mars and asteroids in the asteroid belt) is more interesting, because it allows you to reuse your exploration infrastructure. With the Moon and Mars, you leave much of your equipment at the bottom of a deep gravity well instead of bringing it back to Earth orbit to reuse it. Also, this is absolutely NECESSARY for the survival of human beings on Earth, since you learn how to work on and around potentially-killer-space-rocks. This is what makes us better than the dinosaurs, otherwise we'll die.
Also, the Deep Space option allows progressive increases in capabilities, without a decade of nothing interesting going on. Deep Space infrastructure could evolve all the way to a manned mission on Titan:
1)Characterize radiation environment and shield (passive or active) or otherwise protect (anti-radiation pills? Pick people from Iran or India with innate genetic resistance to radiation?) your astronauts, if necessary. Do this while you are doing other interesting missions (checking out NEOs, etc) in Deep Space that are shorter than a trip to Mars.
2)Characterize whether artificial gravity is needed or not (as opposed to just exercise).
3)Experiment with fuel depots in orbit. This is helpful, but necessary for Deep Space. This is where commercial launch providers can compete and shine.
4)Add electric-propulsion (like VASIMR) at your leisure, without needing them to work before you start doing interesting missions. Fuel Depots are a backup plan in case this doesn't work.
5)For electric-propulsion, you can start out immediately with solar power (which has a LOT of growth potential in Power per kg) in the inner solar system and upgrade to Nuclear reactors for missions further out in the solar system.
6)Develop increasingly closed-loop life support systems to reduce consumeables on long trips.
7)Flyby and orbital missions to Mars would allow teleoperated rovers, which would be much more productive than autonomous rovers.
8)Develop and test a small lander for short stays on the Lunar surface.
9)Make the lander's tanks bigger and send it to Mars with your now-mature Deep-Space orbital mission package. You spend most of the time in orbit around Mars but make a short trip to the surface before returning to orbit.
Now, you've made boot prints on Mars. This time, don't let your human spaceflight infrastructure rot and make you spend 40 years more stuck in LEO. Take the momentum and go with it:
Really awesome options:
10)Develop ISRU on Phobos, if you find water-ice or other volatiles. This would enable refueling of Mars craft, which greatly reduces mission costs and risks and also will allow reuseable Single-stage-to-martian-orbit Mars Descent/Ascent craft (notice, this isn't really possible on Earth, but it is on Mars because of the lower delta-v).
11)Take your ISRU technology already used on Phobos (Martian moon) and perhaps the Earth's moon (if there's ice in the craters) and use it on Mars to support longer stays and a base.
12)The Final Exam on this whole thing would be a mission to Titan. You'd need nuclear power, Electric (or nuclear thermal rocket) propulsion, ISRU, closed-loop life support, mature lander technology, and long-term radiation-mitigation technology. And gonads.
13)After you've gone to Titan, sit back and reap the benefits of your human spaceflight infrastructure: launch costs cheap enough to make space-based solar power viable, mining of the asteroids has already begun (Phobos was once an asteroid), and you probably already have a permanent base on Mars that could someday grow into a colony.
Notice, this doesn't require space elevators (although I'm a fan of them).
There's enough thorium in the top 2 km of the Earth's crust to last for a billion years: Thorium is about 6 ppm of the Earth's crust (plus 2 ppm for Uranium):
1km*5*10^8 km^2*(6/1000000)*5000kg/m^3*10^7 kWh/day in kWh= 1.5 × 10^23 kilowatt hours
(depthofmining)*(earth's surface area)*(parts per million of thorium)*(density of the Earth)*(estimate of energy production of Thorium per kg in an efficient reactor)
Mankind currently uses about 12TW on average of energy:
1.5*10^23 kWh/(12TW)>1 billion years.
The energy density of coal is about 6.7 kWh/kg, while the energy density of Earth's crust is: 6*10^-6*10^7 kWh/kg=60kWh/kg. So, there's more energy density in the thorium in a random rock from the Earth's crust than there is in a chunk of coal! So, it's likely that you could extract this energy if you had to.
In other words, there's a billion years of energy in the top 1km of the Earth's crust. That's about as renewable as solar!
So, we are most definitely NOT going to run out of fission fuel. There is NO "Peak Uranium," until you get to around a few hundred million years!
You can make memory out of NAND gates, since there is always a finited delay.
The biggest reason Nukes cost so much is that they take a long time to complete from initial capital investment to first production of electricity. If this takes a decade, then you just doubled your opportunity costs compared to something that can be completed in a year (assuming 8% interest). This wasn't always the way for nukes. We used to be able to build them in 2-3 years. That alone would decrease the cost of nuclear by almost half (since you are mostly paying for capital costs, not fuel costs). And it doesn't require new technology, and it will allow nuclear power to take over from coal much faster.
The biggest reason they have taken so long to build is that the safety regulations changed [i]while the plants were being built[/i], so it slowed down the construction to a stand-still. We shouldn't have this problem today. And, we can build plants even faster if we can get nuke-plant-assemblylines going, which would allow greater quality control measures (and therefore safety) and decrease the costs per power plant. This is how we can cleanly and cheaply and quickly and safely power the future.
You need to be able to make NAND or NOR gates to make a computer, so until they also produce a NOT gate, this won't be a full computer.
File size doesn't tell you everything about quality.
For instance, if you save an image as a JPEG vs. first saving as a dithered GIF and _then_ saving as JPEG, then the second one will have much worse actual quality, even if it has the same filesize (it may well have worse quality AND have a larger file size).
How about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?
https://www.mturk.com/
Are you kidding me? An orgasm is the only thing that'll make you smile in the morning? I'm sorry to say, but you sound like a horrible person who mostly hates his life. I've had plenty of jobs which make me want to smile in the morning. No offense, but maybe if you didn't come off as a heartless bastard you'd get a job that you'd enjoy! Hell, even stacking boxes can be enjoyable if you have happy coworkers.
As far as your wife, well if you would give your wife something or do something special for her just randomly or even just compliment her (without her asking), then maybe you wouldn't have this contract-based relationship that's basically the same as being roommates with a prostitute. Women, even more than men, need to be loved without the love being directly and immediately attached to putting out. Having a jaded perspective on everything will lead to a miserable life and an early death. If you want to live a long life, well, you had better start loving life.
ZFS won't give you good performance for a large array because your random read speed is basically limited to the equivalent of one drive per raid set. That is unacceptable if you need performance:
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSRaidzReadPerformance
"...adding more disks to a ZFS raidz pool does not increase how many random reads you can do per second."
BTW, you can use SATA disks with this SAS setup. Also, this is hot-swap.
You can get an external (4-port, but acts like one big 1.2 GiByte/s pipe) SAS RAID card for less than $500 that will allow you to make multiple RAID sets of up to 32-disks in a set using true hardware RAID 5,6,10, etc. You can even get a battery backup unit for the RAID card cache for $100 (priceless on critical DB systems).
An external SAS card allows you to connect over a hundred drives through one connection using SAS expanders (some cards support up to 256 devices). Some external SAS RAID/JBOD cards have two SFF-8088 connections, for eight SAS lanes total. That's 2.4 Gigabytes/sec raw. At that rate, it's your PCI-e bus that's usually the bottleneck.
A lot of SAS expanders are expensive, but Chenbro has some ones for $300 that spread one x4 lane SAS cable into 24 or 32 cables, plus they can be daisy-chained for more storage. Then, buy a nice 24-slot Supermicro 4U chassis with dual-redundant power. That's a little less than $1000. All you need is the Chenbro expander in the chassis, no need for a motherboard.
If you're really cheap, you can use a cheaper $150 external SAS JBOD-only card, but hardware raid really is a must if you have a lot of storage. Plus, a hardware raid can use write-back cache, since it has effectively non-volatile RAM using the battery backup unit. And no, a UPS is NOT a replacement for NVRAM... Has your system ever crashed for any reason or hung for any reason? I've never had a RAID card hang or crash.
So, basically, besides the external SAS card, you have:
24-slot chassis with redundant power: $1000
chenbro SAS expander: $300
cables: depends
That's about $60/slot, plus you have redundant power (and an upgrade route to dual-redundant controllers). You can scale this to hundreds of terabytes, too. Over a petabyte if you have multiple controllers (with raid array rebuilding on one card not affecting rebuilding on another).
When I was discussing whether or not Islam was peaceful, a Muslim friend of mine explained to me that Islam is a religion of peace during a time of peace and a religion of war during a time of war. That seems a lot more realistic than politically-motivated rhetoric that you hear people say.
According to the Quran, Mohammad was both a reformer and a general. According to the Bible, Jesus was also a reformer but ultimately let himself be killed when confronted with violence (which is why some Christians, like the Quakers, are pacifists).
Even the best consumer-level SSDs like the Intel x-25m/e use a volatile RAM cache to speed up the writes. In fact, with the cache disabled, random write IOPS drops to about 1200, which is only about three or four times as good as a 15k 2.5" drive. The more expensive truly-enterprise SSD drives which don't need a volatile write cache cost at LEAST $20/GB, so the $/(safe random write iop) ratio is actually still pretty close, and cheap SATA drives may actually be even on that metric as the fast enterprise SSDs. Granted, this shouldn't be the case in a year, but that's where it is right now. (Also, the performance-per-slot is a lot higher for SSDs, which can translate into different $ and power and space savings.)
One interesting thing about Gliese 581 d not being made of rock is that it might have almost the same surface gravity as Earth:
Volume of a sphere=(4/3)*pi*radius^3
radius of sphere=((.75/pi)*volume)^(1/3)
volume=mass/density
radius=((.75/pi)*mass/density)^(1/3)
mass=7.5*mass of earth
density=2kg/liter (twice that of water)
acceleration due to gravity=Gravitational constant*Mass of planet/(radius)^2
thus, plug this into google=
(Gravitational constant)*(7.5*mass of the earth)/((7.5*mass of the earth)/(2kg/liter)*.75/pi)^(2/3)
google gives us: 9.7764354 m / s^2
Yay!
Now, we just need a breathable atmosphere! And light-speed spaceships (or faster)!
Reality doesn't work like that. Science is not some sort of alchemy where any "good" that you do has to be balanced with "bad" done elsewhere. Sure, entropy always increases, but that doesn't mean that lessening the impact of a natural disaster means you're upsetting some karmic balance. Every day without a hurricane does not increase the intensity of the next hurricane. Hurricanes are only one way that heat can be transported from the ocean's surface to elsewhere.
Why doesn't anyone tag this as "failwhale"? Is it because of the technicality that dolphins aren't whales? Still, it's such a good opportunity!
Is this really discredited? I did a little web research and didn't see anything that directly contradicted radon detection prediction methods. In fact, I found some information to support it:
"Increased levels of radon gas (222Rn) in wells is a precursor of earthquakes recognized by the IASPEI."
http://www.fujitaresearch.com/reports/earthquakes.html
website of IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior):
http://www.iaspei.org/
It seems that radon levels don't always come BEFORE a quake, but extreme changes in radon levels can be used to predict some quakes:
http://www.fujitaresearch.com/reports/earthquakes.html
They use argon or xenon (on the expensive ones) to insulate double (or triple) pane windows. I know this because I was a door-to-door almost-salesman for a summer. Worst. Job. Evar.