But like you said that is totally dwarfed by SSD.

I do not believe that "bork" is a legal term with any validity.

Umm... It sounds funny, because it's Latin. Lawyers just *love* Latin words.

quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

Those regulations were instituted because taxi drivers and taxi companies were doing incredibly unethical things that were causing damage to both people and to the economy.

But that doesn't stop them, or later politicians, from abusing the power they've given themselves, to start squeezing every dollar they can get out of it, and/or to raise huge barriers to entry to keep out competitors and give their buddies a practical monopoly in the industry.

For example, NYC strictly limiting the number of medallions they sell, until they're valued at over $1 million each, paid for by the hacks who might pull in a whopping $50k/year working long hours, in dangerous conditions, in the highest cost-of-living city in the US. Or mandating a single, specific model of vehicle for all cabs, with their own customizations that drive the prices into the stratosphere. etc.

If the drive is huge and making a backup takes forever, you might be less inclined to keep a backup and more inclined to hope it doesn't fail.

Long gone are the days when you had to sit back and not do anything on your system, waiting patiently while the data was backed up, so as make sure everything would keep up, and not to interrupt the tape/CD-R/etc.

When my system is being rsync'd to the backup drive, the only thing I notice is a small lag when I click on a file, and a HDD LED that's blinking like it's trying to signal me that the Russians are invading.

Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails.

Buy two.

If you're worried about the drive failing, a RAID-1 setup will take care of it, while doubling read speeds and halving seek times.

If you're worried about user error or other accidents, have one offline in an external caddy, and just periodically power it up and rsync all the new data to it.

I've been doing the later religiously for the past 10 years, upgrading my external drive every time I upgrade my internal drives. In all that time, not one hard drive has suddenly failed on me, instead bigger drives drop in price and become too tempting to ignore, so old drives go in the trash. But besides being insurance that my many years of acquiring content won't poof into smoke and leave me at square one, feeling like a crippled baby learning how to walk again, the external drive has been extremely useful in making my hard drive upgrades, and OS upgrades, a much simpler operation.

It's just so damn incredibly cheap and easy to keep a reasonably up-to-date backup of EVERYTHING you have, that I can't believe people would choose not to do so. The prices on "cloud" storage are astronomical by comparison.

Time-cube meets ancient Egypt...

It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.

More technology can dramatically reduces the time and manpower needed. With the technology they had, it's hard to figure out how they made the huge structures they did, with the numbers of people they had, in the time-frame they had to do it.

The Egyptian pyramids are a much harder problem than something small like stone-henge. It's the difference between someone building a wagon in their garage, and an assembly line turning out automobiles. There are strict limits on how much time they had, how many people could possibly have been on-site, and with the limited technology they had, the numbers just don't seem to add-up to make what they did, possible.

the effects on the environment are a side-effect, and comparatively small. If we decide to intentionally target the global environment, the effects could be much bigger.

We can only hope, but I find that extremely unlikely. How many dollars have been spent on dredging up carbon and dispersing it into the atmosphere in the last 200 years? The US spends a trillion dollars per year on gasoline alone, and the US is about 1/4 of world oil consumption (less by now). Global coal consumption is over 7 billion tons per year. That is a ton of coal for every man, woman, and child on earth, per year, every year, for decades on end.

What this means is even if we find some means of restoration that is 100 times as potent at cooling the planet as CO2 is in warming it, the task is incomprehensibly huge.

Check out the sweet GPS Nav unit at 4:08 also.

Let's put this in geek terms:

You're using "free" in the RMS sense, where the market itself is liberated. You and I agree on this. A free market is one that has been liberated from monopolists and others who want to lock it down for their own benefit.

The Koch brothers want a free-as-in-BSD market where they are free to manipulate it as they see fit without allowing others to benefit.

Which freedom is more important - that of the market or that of the actors in the market? I suppose the answer boils down to your demographic. If you're one of the billionaires who doesn't want to work for a living, you probably want the latter version so that you can run roughshod over rules meant to keep one person from screwing it up for everyone. If you are literally anyone else on the entire planet, you should probably prefer the first definition.

I'm smart enough to know it, but dumb enough not to bother. I'm not an extensive UI customizer (outside of when using Linux and a tiling window manager) - you dance with the date you brought. If I'm on a Mac, I use it like a Mac because that's how all apps, settings, and utilities expect you to use it. Why fight against the current? I'll use the keyboard prefs to put the control key in the right place, but other than that, OK, today I'm a Mac user.

Same with Windows. Sure, I could install a shell that works the way I'm used to everywhere else. But that's struggling against The One True (Terrible) Way and seems futile. Worse, it means I'll only be proficient on that one particular computer, and somewhat lost when using someone else's. When in Windows, I do as the Windows does.

You can know all about the alternative interfaces and still not choose to use them. Personally, I just adopted the approach of not using Windows at all, ever, unless I absolutely have to. It's served me pretty well so far.