Many installations are realizing that they don't need that all that and less "capable" Linux and/or x86 systems are just fine - for many things.
Are they? Or are they just realizing that a cluster of redundant, possibly virtualized, machines is just as reliable even if each single machine is not? Two linux boxes with 99% uptime each running the same service redundantly is equivalent to one machine with 99.99% uptime but I bet the linux boxes are cheaper.
This is why (in the USA) we have a Bill of Rights - to limit the damage made possible by democracy, aka mob rule.
This results in rich corporations being able to overturn laws they don't like which seems to be far worse. The best system I have seen so far is Canada's "not withstanding" clause. This lets the government pass any law it pleases, even if it might be in contravention of the charter of rights and freedoms, so long as it gets a two thirds majority and renews the law every 5 years. While this does severely limit the government's power it also hugely reduces the incentive for any rich corporation, particularly foreign US ones, from employing lawyers to overturn popular laws because parliament will likely overturn the court's decision and the company will be left with a large lawyer bill and zero results. It also means that any less popular, restrictive law that is initially deemed necessary in the aftermath of some disaster will have to be looked at every 5 years and will require support from multiple parties to pass.
All in all it seems to provide the right check on government power while still leaving the power in the hands of the people and not rich, corporate interests. At least it's the best system at doing I've seen so far but really, for any system to work, you need an engaged public to really keep a government in check. Unfortunately it seems to me that in the US people have largely disengaged and I can't blame them too much: even when they vote for someone who won a Nobel peace prize for not being like the previous person they end up with the same thing.
In the government's defence though privacy is a little insane in Canada. My wife tried to pay our phone bill when I was away on business one time without internet access and, because I had not listed her on the account, they refused to let her pay it over the phone despite the fact that she knew the amount and was calling from the very phone associated with the account. When I got back I explained to them that whenever ANYONE calls up and wants to pay off any part of my phone bill that they should please let them!
If a law can be abused, it will be abused. No exceptions.
True, but as you say that is true for all laws and we certainly cannot have a society without laws so this is a problem we will always have to deal with. So this is not something stupid: this is the first signs of the system hopefully working as it should. An abuse of the law has been brought to light and now those responsible need to be held to account for it with appropriate sanctions, i.e. not just a slap on the knuckles for something as serious as this appears to be. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that the system works.
No, not "land of the free". This happened in the UK, not the US and so far we haven't been quite so out of touch with reality to call the UK the "land of the free" - that seems to be a peculiarly american delusion. That being said I really hope that there are some mitigating facts that will come to light because, as it stands now, it is extremely concerning to see such an obvious and open abuse of power. If they are wiling to do this in plain sight what are they willing to do (or already doing) behind the scenes?
The question is, does the employer have the right to invade the employee's privacy for any reason.
When that employee has chosen to take them to court and the information they request could be extremely relevant to their defence then yes, that employer does have a right to the information. It is the company being sued here and whether they behaved well or not they have a right to the information they need to defend themselves. If she did not want to reveal this information then she should not have sued them or, in fact, but it on a public website like Facebook.
That's too simplistic a model. Think something like the bacteria in your gut. We need bacteria there to help our body digest food. However, if you get too many of the wrong sort (lets call these "greedy" bacteria) or they get out of your gut and into other parts of your body then they can make you really ill or even kill you. In the same way our financial markets and services are needed to make our economy work well. However get too many greedy financial people or have them start infecting other areas of our society - like, say, government - and just like our bodies our society will get very ill.
The longest we've got is about 400 million years or so before the Sun starts making it impossible to live on the planet.
I think the figure you are looking for is more like 4 billion years although if in 400 million years time there are still humans as we know them around I would be amazed - there are very few (any?) complex organisms which have survived for that length of time.
Maxwell's equations, in the known form, do not allow for magnetic monopoles.
Adding the possibility for a non-zero magnetic charge into Maxwell's equations does not stop them being Maxwell's equations anymore than changing the value of the permittivity of free space due to a more accurate measurement would stop them being Maxwell's equations. The zero in 'div B = 0' is an experimentally observed number and not fundamental to the theory in the same way that the CP violating term in QCD is experimentally observed to be zero or the right handed coupling of the weak force is observed to be zero.
None of these are fundamental to the respective models they are determined to be zero be experimental observation...which actually raises the question why are these numbers exactly zero if nothing seems to require it in the model? Indeed the clearest indication of monopoles being naturally part of Maxwell's equations this is that Maxwell's equations directly resulted in the suggestion that monopoles might exist!
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
Exactly. Clearly the NSA should be part of this scheme and provide popups to let you know when you are engaging in behaviour they deem questionable. So next time you click on an https connection to a non-US company you can get a helpful popup: "Using encrypted internet connections to foreign entities puts you on an NSA watch list, are you sure you wish to continue? If you so have you considered using an NSA-approved proxy server that will ensure we can protect your connection - available for free at: https://notthekgb.gov/".
To be fair to those US citizens I imagine it is hard to vote for someone who would not do this when it seems to be supported by both their political parties and their system, unlike most (any?) other modern democracy, has those two parties 'baked in' so setting up a third alternative is less of a viable alternative. A duopoly is really not much better than a monopoly.
Pierre Curie pointed out the possibility of magnetic monopoles in 1894 based solely on Maxwell's equations which was close to a century before Superstring theory was on the scene. In fact in 1931 Dirac showed they could be used to quantize charge using nothing but relativistic quantum mechanics and Maxwell's equations. So monopoles actually only require Maxwell's equations and would lead to an explanation of why charge is quantized. It may come as a shock but the real world does not play like Alpha Centauri (and considering what happened to Earth in that game that's a good thing!).
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
...because there is no constraint on their mass. They could be anywhere up to the Planck scale which is 15 orders of magnitude higher in energy than the LHC. To have a hope of seeing anything at that scale you have to look for processes which the new physics allows but which current physics forbids so you have a chance to see virtual particle exchange but the energy is so staggeringly high that even this is unlikely.
For example proton decay might be possible through hypothesized X and Y bosons which have masses around 100 times less than the Planck scale (so-called GUT scale). The current limit on the proton lifetime is 6.6e33 years (for reference the age of the universe is 1.3e10 years i.e. 23 orders of magnitude less) and it is only possible to get such limits because of the huge numbers of protons we have available (hydrogen nuclei in water). So to really probe monopoles you would need to have a process which is forbidden by Standard Model physics but which is allowed by monopoles and which you can easily search for with a very low background and which has lots of possibilities for it to occur because, if it occurs at all, it will be an incredibly rare process!
Magnetic monopoles could be the mechanism by which charge is quantized. Dirac showed in 1931 that if monopoles exist then charge, quite naturally becomes quantized through the fact that angular momentum is quantized. Unfortunately Dirac's mechanism puts no mass limits on real monopoles (i.e. not the condensed matter faked kind) but there is an experiment (MoEDAL) being run by a colleague of mine which is searching for evidence of monopole production at the LHC. However, if they exist, they could lie anywhere up to the planck scale which is about a quadrillion [10^15] times higher in energy than the LHC so it is probably unlikely that they will find them but if they do it would be an incredible discovery and it was a very cheap experiment to build (if you exclude the cost of the LHC itself!).
If you don't have knowledge on the topic to contribute, why post at all?
I have considerable experience with developing low latency systems as I briefly mentioned in the article. I have no experience with Java development but I do have experience with the 'fruits' of such development and, for the most part, they are appallingly bad. These are not just browser applets but java programs ranging from physics demonstrations and programs for drawing Feynman diagrams to video conferencing and learning management solutions. Based on those experiences the only conclusion I can reach is that either the Java platform is incredibly slow and buggy or that Java developers are somehow far below the standard of developers for other languages.
Since I can see no reason why the latter would be the case my assumption is that the platform is the cause. However I can honestly say that my experience with using Java programs has been so bad that nowadays I will avoid it like the plague if there is any alternative (which thankfully there often is). I suppose it is possible that things have improved but I have not heard of any reason why I would expect them to.
I should also add that this is not just my experience but that of my colleagues as well - several times I have been in meetings where some bright spark has suggested implementing some solution in Java and it routinely gets shot down by multiple people in the meeting citing the same issues (slow, buggy etc.). So, given this experience, the suggestion of trying to do low latency programming (which I have done in C/C++ with hardware-level knowledge) in Java sounds extremely surprising. I would not even attempt it in python but I can at least see how it might be achieved.
If I want to write a program quickly, I write it in Python even though I know the program will run quite slowly.
Which is what I do too knowing that if I need to speed up the code I can rewrite parts in C/C++ and compile them and then call them from Python. This, as far as I understand, is simply not possibly in Java. So if you code in Java there is no way to compile parts of it to get a needed speed boost.
In addition, while anecdotal, by experience with Java apps is that they are incredibly slow, rather unresponsive and crash often. No clue whether that is the programmers fault or Java's but it seems a common 'feature' of many java apps I've seen on the web. So I really am completely amazed that anyone would consider this for a low latency system given the speed and reliability issues that seem to abound with apps written in the language. The last time I coded a low latency system (in C++) we disabled timer interrupts to the Linux OS to prevent the process getting swapped out - somehow I cannot imagine there is a way to do this in Java!
In 2013 a crack intelligence operative was sent to prison by a military court for a crime he didn't commit. This man promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, he survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have something you need leaked, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire: THE B-TEAM.
I'm sure Julian Assange could do double duty as 'Face' and 'Howling mad Murdoch';-)
The OP obviously didn't buy DVDs with Taiyo Yuden dye - or is simply LYING.
Well since I have no idea who "Taiyo Yuden Dye" is (I don't know many welshmen) and I have certainly never bought any DVDs with him you have clearly caught me out and I must be lying. In my own defence I do think that including a link to the US national archives where they made this claim was a particularly clever ruse but I'm sure they based this number on a few DVDs they had lying around the office until someone sat on one of them as their lifetime estimate and not on rigorous scientific tests.
I'm particularly appreciative of the data you provide on not just thousands, but THOUSANDS, of DVDs. It must have been a lot of work to painstakingly check the billions, sorry BILLIONS, of bytes of data they contained for errors so you really should not belittle your effort by calling it rubbish, it's a valuable addition to the scientific performance studies of DVDs.
Anecdotal evidence like this is extremely important. Only the other day my son was throwing a ball in the garden while standing under a tree and the ball did not come down. He searched all over for it but it clearly had not come down as required by the laws of gravity. I was all set to write a paper of the partial non-existence of gravity under trees but there was a storm that night and the following day I found the ball while mowing the lawn so clearly he had missed it in the fading light and long grass the day before. Still I believe that story clearly illustrates just how import anecdotal evidence could be.
If a drive in a RAID fails, the others are probably close to failure. Plus, they have to work harder to make up for the bad one until it's replaced.
When one drive fails it has no implications for the others - drives fail at random times. As the drive ages failures become more frequent at some point but one failure does not imply that the disk next to it is about to die as well. Plus there is no write overhead increase per disk for operating in fail mode and, unless you have a mirrored RAID configuration, practically no increase in read overhead.
The reason RAID is a not backup solution is because there is no "oops I should not have deleted those files" protection i.e. there is no history of changes. However if you just need reliable storage there is nothing wrong with a RAID for that.
I've heard that "2-5 year" nonsense before. I've got discs much older than that, that still read fine.
Anecdotes are not evidence. I also have disks older than that which read fine...but I also have a few which do not. Given that a backup medium has to be extremely reliable I am sure that the 2-5 year limit quoted is probably based on something like a 95+% probability of recovering your data. This means that the large majority of disks will probably be fine after 5 years. However suppose you used those disks to backup your family photos. After 10 years there may be a 10% chance that some, or all, are gone - do you want to take that risk?
We simply reproduce too much currently for this to continue to function once fossil fuels run out (i.e. fertilizer and medicine derived from oil goes away, the fuel isn't the issue).
Actually fuel is the only issue. We produce fertilizer from fixing nitrogen via the Bosch-Haber process to make ammonia. While this currently uses hydrocarbons for hydrogen this can also be obtained via electrolysis from water or potentially even from the hydrocarbons in plant life which is where medicines will come from if we ever run out of oil and gas entirely.
Of course such solutions require more energy (and there may be better, more energy efficient ones than those above) but, if that is available, it will work so the limited factor is simply energy. As a whole we are still well below the total energy budget we get daily from the sun and, if we can harness fusion power, we will have essentially limitless energy resources - although certainly not for 'free' - at current consumption rates.
Well they have virtualized the physics. Despite the claims on their website cyclotrons oscillate at a fixed frequency because the path length for each semi-circle increases in direct proportion to the velocity i.e. the time to turn through 180 degrees remains fixed. In fact this was why cyclotrons could only be used for heavy particles like protons and atomic nuclei - put an electron in there and it would become ultra-relativistic and so the half-period would increase because the velocity was essentially fixed at ~c and the path length would grow with energy. This is what lead to machines which the synchronized the magnetic field to the beam energy, so-called synchrotrons, like the LHC.
Worse though is that they repeatedly refer to the frequency increasing in their mechanical device despite the clear video evidence that, like a cyclotron, it operates at a fixed frequency. So while they have a neat idea, they clearly do not understand the basic, newtonian physics behind their machine which means they are unlikely to be able to make it work properly when they try to go from fun toy to something useful.
Nothing more parasitic than a songwriter getting paid for the public performance of their work... shame on those people... shame.
That's not the issue - the issue is that they should get the same payment regardless of the broadcast medium. Why should an artist get more (or less) money when I listen to their work over an EM transmission through the air as opposed to through a cable? This makes as much sense as basing the royalty rate on the transmission frequency of the radio station.
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Many installations are realizing that they don't need that all that and less "capable" Linux and/or x86 systems are just fine - for many things.
Are they? Or are they just realizing that a cluster of redundant, possibly virtualized, machines is just as reliable even if each single machine is not? Two linux boxes with 99% uptime each running the same service redundantly is equivalent to one machine with 99.99% uptime but I bet the linux boxes are cheaper.
This is why (in the USA) we have a Bill of Rights - to limit the damage made possible by democracy, aka mob rule.
This results in rich corporations being able to overturn laws they don't like which seems to be far worse. The best system I have seen so far is Canada's "not withstanding" clause. This lets the government pass any law it pleases, even if it might be in contravention of the charter of rights and freedoms, so long as it gets a two thirds majority and renews the law every 5 years. While this does severely limit the government's power it also hugely reduces the incentive for any rich corporation, particularly foreign US ones, from employing lawyers to overturn popular laws because parliament will likely overturn the court's decision and the company will be left with a large lawyer bill and zero results. It also means that any less popular, restrictive law that is initially deemed necessary in the aftermath of some disaster will have to be looked at every 5 years and will require support from multiple parties to pass.
All in all it seems to provide the right check on government power while still leaving the power in the hands of the people and not rich, corporate interests. At least it's the best system at doing I've seen so far but really, for any system to work, you need an engaged public to really keep a government in check. Unfortunately it seems to me that in the US people have largely disengaged and I can't blame them too much: even when they vote for someone who won a Nobel peace prize for not being like the previous person they end up with the same thing.
In the government's defence though privacy is a little insane in Canada. My wife tried to pay our phone bill when I was away on business one time without internet access and, because I had not listed her on the account, they refused to let her pay it over the phone despite the fact that she knew the amount and was calling from the very phone associated with the account. When I got back I explained to them that whenever ANYONE calls up and wants to pay off any part of my phone bill that they should please let them!
If a law can be abused, it will be abused. No exceptions.
True, but as you say that is true for all laws and we certainly cannot have a society without laws so this is a problem we will always have to deal with. So this is not something stupid: this is the first signs of the system hopefully working as it should. An abuse of the law has been brought to light and now those responsible need to be held to account for it with appropriate sanctions, i.e. not just a slap on the knuckles for something as serious as this appears to be. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that the system works.
No, not "land of the free". This happened in the UK, not the US and so far we haven't been quite so out of touch with reality to call the UK the "land of the free" - that seems to be a peculiarly american delusion. That being said I really hope that there are some mitigating facts that will come to light because, as it stands now, it is extremely concerning to see such an obvious and open abuse of power. If they are wiling to do this in plain sight what are they willing to do (or already doing) behind the scenes?
The question is, does the employer have the right to invade the employee's privacy for any reason.
When that employee has chosen to take them to court and the information they request could be extremely relevant to their defence then yes, that employer does have a right to the information. It is the company being sued here and whether they behaved well or not they have a right to the information they need to defend themselves. If she did not want to reveal this information then she should not have sued them or, in fact, but it on a public website like Facebook.
That's too simplistic a model. Think something like the bacteria in your gut. We need bacteria there to help our body digest food. However, if you get too many of the wrong sort (lets call these "greedy" bacteria) or they get out of your gut and into other parts of your body then they can make you really ill or even kill you. In the same way our financial markets and services are needed to make our economy work well. However get too many greedy financial people or have them start infecting other areas of our society - like, say, government - and just like our bodies our society will get very ill.
Not only that but you still need to secure your message otherwise you'll have a problem with pigeon droppings.
The longest we've got is about 400 million years or so before the Sun starts making it impossible to live on the planet.
I think the figure you are looking for is more like 4 billion years although if in 400 million years time there are still humans as we know them around I would be amazed - there are very few (any?) complex organisms which have survived for that length of time.
Maxwell's equations, in the known form, do not allow for magnetic monopoles.
Adding the possibility for a non-zero magnetic charge into Maxwell's equations does not stop them being Maxwell's equations anymore than changing the value of the permittivity of free space due to a more accurate measurement would stop them being Maxwell's equations. The zero in 'div B = 0' is an experimentally observed number and not fundamental to the theory in the same way that the CP violating term in QCD is experimentally observed to be zero or the right handed coupling of the weak force is observed to be zero.
None of these are fundamental to the respective models they are determined to be zero be experimental observation...which actually raises the question why are these numbers exactly zero if nothing seems to require it in the model? Indeed the clearest indication of monopoles being naturally part of Maxwell's equations this is that Maxwell's equations directly resulted in the suggestion that monopoles might exist!
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
Exactly. Clearly the NSA should be part of this scheme and provide popups to let you know when you are engaging in behaviour they deem questionable. So next time you click on an https connection to a non-US company you can get a helpful popup: "Using encrypted internet connections to foreign entities puts you on an NSA watch list, are you sure you wish to continue? If you so have you considered using an NSA-approved proxy server that will ensure we can protect your connection - available for free at: https://notthekgb.gov/".
To be fair to those US citizens I imagine it is hard to vote for someone who would not do this when it seems to be supported by both their political parties and their system, unlike most (any?) other modern democracy, has those two parties 'baked in' so setting up a third alternative is less of a viable alternative. A duopoly is really not much better than a monopoly.
Pierre Curie pointed out the possibility of magnetic monopoles in 1894 based solely on Maxwell's equations which was close to a century before Superstring theory was on the scene. In fact in 1931 Dirac showed they could be used to quantize charge using nothing but relativistic quantum mechanics and Maxwell's equations. So monopoles actually only require Maxwell's equations and would lead to an explanation of why charge is quantized. It may come as a shock but the real world does not play like Alpha Centauri (and considering what happened to Earth in that game that's a good thing!).
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
For example proton decay might be possible through hypothesized X and Y bosons which have masses around 100 times less than the Planck scale (so-called GUT scale). The current limit on the proton lifetime is 6.6e33 years (for reference the age of the universe is 1.3e10 years i.e. 23 orders of magnitude less) and it is only possible to get such limits because of the huge numbers of protons we have available (hydrogen nuclei in water). So to really probe monopoles you would need to have a process which is forbidden by Standard Model physics but which is allowed by monopoles and which you can easily search for with a very low background and which has lots of possibilities for it to occur because, if it occurs at all, it will be an incredibly rare process!
How do magnetic monopoles fit into this?
Magnetic monopoles could be the mechanism by which charge is quantized. Dirac showed in 1931 that if monopoles exist then charge, quite naturally becomes quantized through the fact that angular momentum is quantized. Unfortunately Dirac's mechanism puts no mass limits on real monopoles (i.e. not the condensed matter faked kind) but there is an experiment (MoEDAL) being run by a colleague of mine which is searching for evidence of monopole production at the LHC. However, if they exist, they could lie anywhere up to the planck scale which is about a quadrillion [10^15] times higher in energy than the LHC so it is probably unlikely that they will find them but if they do it would be an incredible discovery and it was a very cheap experiment to build (if you exclude the cost of the LHC itself!).
If you don't have knowledge on the topic to contribute, why post at all?
I have considerable experience with developing low latency systems as I briefly mentioned in the article. I have no experience with Java development but I do have experience with the 'fruits' of such development and, for the most part, they are appallingly bad. These are not just browser applets but java programs ranging from physics demonstrations and programs for drawing Feynman diagrams to video conferencing and learning management solutions. Based on those experiences the only conclusion I can reach is that either the Java platform is incredibly slow and buggy or that Java developers are somehow far below the standard of developers for other languages.
Since I can see no reason why the latter would be the case my assumption is that the platform is the cause. However I can honestly say that my experience with using Java programs has been so bad that nowadays I will avoid it like the plague if there is any alternative (which thankfully there often is). I suppose it is possible that things have improved but I have not heard of any reason why I would expect them to.
I should also add that this is not just my experience but that of my colleagues as well - several times I have been in meetings where some bright spark has suggested implementing some solution in Java and it routinely gets shot down by multiple people in the meeting citing the same issues (slow, buggy etc.). So, given this experience, the suggestion of trying to do low latency programming (which I have done in C/C++ with hardware-level knowledge) in Java sounds extremely surprising. I would not even attempt it in python but I can at least see how it might be achieved.
If I want to write a program quickly, I write it in Python even though I know the program will run quite slowly.
Which is what I do too knowing that if I need to speed up the code I can rewrite parts in C/C++ and compile them and then call them from Python. This, as far as I understand, is simply not possibly in Java. So if you code in Java there is no way to compile parts of it to get a needed speed boost.
In addition, while anecdotal, by experience with Java apps is that they are incredibly slow, rather unresponsive and crash often. No clue whether that is the programmers fault or Java's but it seems a common 'feature' of many java apps I've seen on the web. So I really am completely amazed that anyone would consider this for a low latency system given the speed and reliability issues that seem to abound with apps written in the language. The last time I coded a low latency system (in C++) we disabled timer interrupts to the Linux OS to prevent the process getting swapped out - somehow I cannot imagine there is a way to do this in Java!
The taxi drivers assert that this is a safety matter.
They are correct - it is a matter of keeping their jobs safe.
In 2013 a crack intelligence operative was sent to prison by a military court for a crime he didn't commit. This man promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, he survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have something you need leaked, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire: THE B-TEAM.
;-)
I'm sure Julian Assange could do double duty as 'Face' and 'Howling mad Murdoch'
The plants can kill us off now, watch our for your cucumbers and geraniums.
It's the triffids you really need to be careful of.
The OP obviously didn't buy DVDs with Taiyo Yuden dye - or is simply LYING.
Well since I have no idea who "Taiyo Yuden Dye" is (I don't know many welshmen) and I have certainly never bought any DVDs with him you have clearly caught me out and I must be lying. In my own defence I do think that including a link to the US national archives where they made this claim was a particularly clever ruse but I'm sure they based this number on a few DVDs they had lying around the office until someone sat on one of them as their lifetime estimate and not on rigorous scientific tests.
I'm particularly appreciative of the data you provide on not just thousands, but THOUSANDS, of DVDs. It must have been a lot of work to painstakingly check the billions, sorry BILLIONS, of bytes of data they contained for errors so you really should not belittle your effort by calling it rubbish, it's a valuable addition to the scientific performance studies of DVDs.
Anecdotal evidence like this is extremely important. Only the other day my son was throwing a ball in the garden while standing under a tree and the ball did not come down. He searched all over for it but it clearly had not come down as required by the laws of gravity. I was all set to write a paper of the partial non-existence of gravity under trees but there was a storm that night and the following day I found the ball while mowing the lawn so clearly he had missed it in the fading light and long grass the day before. Still I believe that story clearly illustrates just how import anecdotal evidence could be.
If a drive in a RAID fails, the others are probably close to failure. Plus, they have to work harder to make up for the bad one until it's replaced.
When one drive fails it has no implications for the others - drives fail at random times. As the drive ages failures become more frequent at some point but one failure does not imply that the disk next to it is about to die as well. Plus there is no write overhead increase per disk for operating in fail mode and, unless you have a mirrored RAID configuration, practically no increase in read overhead.
The reason RAID is a not backup solution is because there is no "oops I should not have deleted those files" protection i.e. there is no history of changes. However if you just need reliable storage there is nothing wrong with a RAID for that.
I've heard that "2-5 year" nonsense before. I've got discs much older than that, that still read fine.
Anecdotes are not evidence. I also have disks older than that which read fine...but I also have a few which do not. Given that a backup medium has to be extremely reliable I am sure that the 2-5 year limit quoted is probably based on something like a 95+% probability of recovering your data. This means that the large majority of disks will probably be fine after 5 years. However suppose you used those disks to backup your family photos. After 10 years there may be a 10% chance that some, or all, are gone - do you want to take that risk?
We simply reproduce too much currently for this to continue to function once fossil fuels run out (i.e. fertilizer and medicine derived from oil goes away, the fuel isn't the issue).
Actually fuel is the only issue. We produce fertilizer from fixing nitrogen via the Bosch-Haber process to make ammonia. While this currently uses hydrocarbons for hydrogen this can also be obtained via electrolysis from water or potentially even from the hydrocarbons in plant life which is where medicines will come from if we ever run out of oil and gas entirely.
Of course such solutions require more energy (and there may be better, more energy efficient ones than those above) but, if that is available, it will work so the limited factor is simply energy. As a whole we are still well below the total energy budget we get daily from the sun and, if we can harness fusion power, we will have essentially limitless energy resources - although certainly not for 'free' - at current consumption rates.
Well they have virtualized the physics. Despite the claims on their website cyclotrons oscillate at a fixed frequency because the path length for each semi-circle increases in direct proportion to the velocity i.e. the time to turn through 180 degrees remains fixed. In fact this was why cyclotrons could only be used for heavy particles like protons and atomic nuclei - put an electron in there and it would become ultra-relativistic and so the half-period would increase because the velocity was essentially fixed at ~c and the path length would grow with energy. This is what lead to machines which the synchronized the magnetic field to the beam energy, so-called synchrotrons, like the LHC.
Worse though is that they repeatedly refer to the frequency increasing in their mechanical device despite the clear video evidence that, like a cyclotron, it operates at a fixed frequency. So while they have a neat idea, they clearly do not understand the basic, newtonian physics behind their machine which means they are unlikely to be able to make it work properly when they try to go from fun toy to something useful.
Nothing more parasitic than a songwriter getting paid for the public performance of their work... shame on those people... shame.
That's not the issue - the issue is that they should get the same payment regardless of the broadcast medium. Why should an artist get more (or less) money when I listen to their work over an EM transmission through the air as opposed to through a cable? This makes as much sense as basing the royalty rate on the transmission frequency of the radio station.