If you buy used at least. I bought a 16 tape LTO3 library and 20 LTO 3 tapes for around $500 used on ebay about a year ago. It might be even cheaper now. And if you don't mind changing tapes every hour or so, LTO3 stand alone drive can be had for $200. Also, if you're only going to deal with only 1TB worth of data for a while, LTO2 is more than enough, and a used LTO2 autoloader can be had for under $200. Hard drives are never a proper backup solution. The data can be lost(without paying a few thousands for recovery at least) any time you plug in the hard drive. The tape solution is just so much more stable as a data storage platform, I'd say you look into getting used LTO2 autoloader at least. They really shouldn't cost more than a couple of hard drives.

I imagine solar storm of similar magnitudes as the on in 1859 would be recorded in history around the world as it would be a visibly noticeable event around the globe. Has solar storm of similar magnitude ever been noted in the history past couple thousand years, i.e. record of observable Aurorae near equator, bright night skys, etc? Just being curious.

Actually, these are exactly the type of products that typify AMD's struggle against Intel. Something like i3-2100 is simply much more powerful AND draws less power. Of course, i3+cheap mobo cost about $50 more, and more SATA III ports and GPU performance are nice. The problem is that for general users, Intel platform just makes more sense, and AMD is forced to cater to niche markets. In fact, Sandy Bridges are so good with power draw, I recently upgraded one of my home servers from Athlon II x2 to Xeon e3-1240, and I actually almost halved the idle power draw from around 40W to 22W. The most was more than double, but it was worth it for me with the added capability and the power saving. AMD is going to have to tread very carefully in setting up their CPU/APU road map. HD4000 graphics on Ivy bridge and whatever Intel would put in Haswell can make AMD's niche even smaller.

I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying generally, but Amtrak's problem is completely different from that of USPS. Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now. Amtrak needs a sizable influx of capital to ever hope to compete with other transportation services, and it likely won't get it as a government owned entity. I really do wish there could be a viable passenger rail system in US, but unless something like Union Pacific buys out Amtrak, I doubt it happens.

I'm guessing you're just being sarcastic as I find sifting through reviews on Amazon (whom I think has one of the better customer review system) annoying enough. I do wonder if these spam reviewers target websites in other major languages also. I mean it's fairly easy to find someone to write English semi-competently pretty much any where in the world. I'm not sure if that's true for even for a language such as Spanish.

Up to mid to late 90's, most of the internet users were mostly confined to members of academia, and the language used in internet forums were mostly kept as a particular vernacular used for net separate from their written or spoken language. Now, the internet use is ubiquitous, and I do believe there definitely is a blurring of written and spoken language especially for the younger population. Obviously, it's only natural for a language to change especially in the face of entirely new medium of communication that's used by the population at large, and I do find it fairly interesting to see the new form of written language developing from verbal language. As a personal rant, I find it a bit annoying that more and more people are completely disregarding spelling and grammar altogether. For a lot of people, texting and messaging are only forms of writing they do, and I kind of wish people put a bit more thought into their inputs at least in the internet forums. After all, writing in the internet forums is still a form of public speaking, and there should be some value in trying to accurately represent what you're trying to communicate. In that sense, I do miss the usenet of old. In a any given group, there were fairly informed representative of the topic, and the exchanges were usually thoughtful and relatively noise free. Even the flame wars were mostly entertaining. Of course, there's definite value in the sheer increase in the number of inputs, and I do think the changes in internet culture is mostly better and entirely inevitable. Still, porn just isn't the same without TIN and uudecode. I had to do a little work to see some boobies. Damn kids nowadays...

But then shouldn't you live without petroleum, cars, electricity, banking, mortgage, and so forth?

Every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and at the end of the day, familiarity wins out for the most. You can do most common tasks in any environment of your choice if you put in enough effort. And I believe the main reason MS Windows environment is the most widely used is because it usually takes the least amount of effort for the most people to do the task they require. You can knock MS Windows for all the deficiencies it has, but the ubiquity and the huge user base of the environment is one advantage the other environments can hope to match up in a near future.

Here's a case in point with my experience as an example. I decided to centralize my home network a couple years ago, and I delved into setting up small active directory server for the first time in my life. I pretty much got everything set up in a couple of hours, and I didn't have to refer to any internet resources. All the set up tools and administration tools were where I expected, and a couple things I wasn't sure about were cleared up from the built in help files. Of course, I've been using Windows for just about 30 Years now, and I've had enough general knowledge about AD from being around in school and work environments. On the contrary, when I incorporated a Solaris server and an Ubuntu desktop into the network, it took me pretty much the whole day to get everything up and running, because I had to look up everything even doing something as simple as biding an address to an NIC. Of course, I haven't used Unix environment regularly since the 90's when I was in school, and most of the knowledge from back then were either forgotten or no longer applicable. Familiarity goes a long way to usability.

I want to make a couple comments regarding various OS choices though. As I mentioned, every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and when a strength of one platform becomes compelling enough, a user will make necessary effort to learn the platform. For example, software RAID5 is just horrible under Windows, and since I didn't want to go with H/W RAID solution, I decided I would use Solaris for my file server. It was the first time I ever used Solaris since '95 in one of my CS classes fro one semester. I remember it being different from even Unix back then, and I came to find it's still different, in a different sort of way from back then. I still made an effort to learn it, and I'm still learning it because I really like ZFS. That said, I'm not sure if there's a compelling reason for most people to switch away from MS Windows. I couldn't get my wife to use the Ubuntu desktop much because she just doesn't see the point of learning it. And I can't really consider installing a Linux distro on my parents computer since I live some distance away from them and can't give the support they would invariably need. Of course, there's the cost consideration, and it would be a compelling reason for a lot of people once PC manufacturers sell PCs with open source OSes at a price point that would give considerable advantage over the ones with MS Windows. I think that is the only way open source OSes can make inroads to general users.

Finally, I just don't get the love affair some people have with Mac OS. I understand it's an OS with a lot of merits, but there seems to be more than a few people that just believes in vast superiority of OS X over everything else, especially MS Windows. I've had a few friends with MacBooks, and when I played with it for the first time back in 2006, I was impressed and actually recommended few people into buying Macbooks as I still do for right situations. Still, OS X still has its own problems, and I just don't see it as the second coming some people see it as.