We recently bought for our group a NAS server with ~200Tb of raw storage (175Tb after RAID6 with a good card). And this is NFS mounted to other servers. It is pretty easy to use and configure and quite cheap (20k UK pounds). Regarding the backup, I would probably just buy a second server. (maybe with cheaper confiuration, worse raid card, etc.)

Will now every second article on slashdot be about Samsung ?

The paper on which the space.com article is based is almost year old. It appeared in February 2014. Why is this piece of old news here ?

The author of this piece clearly have never done actual science, as confirmed by his resume, and his opinions on what science is and that somehow some observational sciences are "soft" are very questionable at best.

I think the main reason for the problem is not the companies per se (because I still believe that it's up to the company to setup the prices for the products), but the problem is with the absence of the market of computer programs and music, so you cannot resell them easily. Because if you could, naturally companies would appear who would buy in US and resell them in Australia, with smaller markup then Adobe/MS etc. That would balance the prices everywhere. So I'd say that making the trading/reselling of computer programs possible could be the solution..

Being an astrophysicist (and not american), I'm entirely pro-science, and would support spending more on NASA vs say on war. But for some reason, the video by Tyson make the case that spending on science (and particularly big PR projects like flying to Mars) is the solution to all problems. I don't think it is. I think spending a good chunk of GDP on science is very productive way to incurage innovation etc., but it is not a panacea. Furthermore, I'm a bit skeptical about projects like flying to Mars, which are good PR, probably very good for engineering and technology, but not that exciting from scientific prospective.

It is probably more effective to have many instruments instead of duplicating each one. Because if you have 10 instruments and 1 doesn't work, you still have 9 left, but if you have 5 pairs of instruments, and only one fails, what's the point of having 4 pairs of identical working instruments ? I think redundancy only make sense when you are talking about instruments which are absolutely crucial for the mission success. Otherwise it is better to just have more different instruments

My guess is that there are two main reasons for the decline from linux users -- one is that the old projects are already in distrib's repositories, while new projects don't really go to sourceforge, because of its insfrastructure. For the project admins code.google.com, github and etc. are way easier to manage comparing to sourceforge (I'm speaking as owner of a few projects on sf.net, code.google and github).