Google’s engineers can do some pretty incredible things with the consumer technology it has developed—from “dreaming” neural networks based on computer vision to an algorithm that can create video from Street View images.

Samsung today announced what it is calling the first multi-terabyte consumer solid-state drive (SSD), which will offer 2TB of capacity in a 2.5-in. form factor for laptops and desktops. The new 850 Pro and 850 EVO SSDs double the maximum capacity of their predecessors.

Is there any harm to be incurred by just pulling a flash drive out? Why do we need safe removal at all? Historically, Operating Systems treat disks as objects that can be trusted not to change state suddenly. When reading or writing files, the OS expects the files to remain accessible and not suddenly disappear in mid-read or mid-write.

Over the past several months, many of the world’s most famous scientists and engineers — including Stephen Hawking — have said that one of the biggest threats to humanity is an artificial superintelligence. But Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of open source operating system Linux, says their fears are idiotic.