SomeoneSomewhere

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families' reliability isn't worth it if you're dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a 'good' price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

I don't remember if they fully closed the loopholes, but there are inputs that programs cannot catch unless you actually replace the OS.

Livestock aren't an efficient use of land in the first place, and you can absolutely graze around turbines, at least according to this: https://www.windenergy.org.nz/resources/for-developers-and-landowners/how-to-host-a-windfarm

It appears there are even advantages to crop farming under turbines: https://agupdate.com/agriview/news/crop/wind-farms-impact-crops/article_bb057e6c-e58b-5990-b4d5-62640803121f.html

Obviously can't do any aerial crop dusting around turbines.

Here in NZ they do a factory reset on your calculator at the start of every exam.

Exercising eminent domain can mean a long and expensive legal and media process. I'm not sure about Texas (or the rest of the US, for that matter), but many projects in the first world do everything possible to avoid using it.

Yes. But my point is that the IRS has a process for declaring and paying tax on income that you got illegally, whether it's from being a mobster or working without the right visa.

Capone didn't follow that process, so got done for tax evasion.

These illegal immigrants are paying their taxes, and therefore a) they aren't exposed to prosecution for tax evasion, and b) the IRS won't rat them out to ICE.

Boeing doesn't make many of the parts in the aircraft, especially things like pressurization controllers. Those come from contractors like Honeywell.

What they do is design the systems around the parts, including selecting the desired level of redundancy, and commission the custom parts needed.

The 737 is still mostly a 1960s design built mostly to 1960s rules. There have been plenty of improvements but that's not the same as a clean sheet design built to be entirely automatic even when stuff breaks.

When you download a torrent, you're downloading it from someone else's computer. That 'someone else' is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It's a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.

While immigrants in the country without authorization do not have Social Security numbers, they can file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN.

Reports about 3m people file using an ITIN each year, and the number of people expected to legally use them is very small.

Also says they see about $12B more paid into social security by illegals than paid out.

As Al Capone found, the government is would rather you pay tax on illegally earned money.

I didn't notice until now that your characters sometimes slightly cover the text boxes! Very cool.

Even 95% is on the low side. Most residential-grade PV grid-tie inverters are listed as something like 97.5%. Higher voltage versions tend to do better.

Yeah, filters essentially store power during one part of the cycle and release it during another. Net power lost is fairly minimal, though not zero. DC needs filtering too: all those switchmode power supplies are very choppy.

Oh, indeed. I'm just pointing out that terrible & illegal DRM is hardly a new practice.