...when I was a kid were "The Runaway Robot" by Lester del Rey and "Secret Under the Sea" by Robert Silverberg. I think I still have them in a box somewhere.

I get my kicks ABOVE the shell, sunshine!

Viagra.

Russia still hasn't managed to do what the US did in 1969 (43 years ago). When they actually land a human on another celestial body then they will have cred.

L. Sprague de Camp - "Lest Darkness Fall" ...Probably my all-time favorite. Andre Norton - "Daybreak 2250 AD" or "Star-Man's Son" ...I had a thing for post-apocalyptic stuff when I was a kid. i secretly hoped for a nuclear war so I could live in such a world! Brian Aldiss - "Starship" Eric Frank Russell - "Wasp" ....someone mentioned this one earlier. Also "Men, Martians, and Machines" Niven and Pournell - "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" Larry Niven - "The Integral Trees" and "The Smoke Ring". Also all of the "Ringworld" books. Harlan Ellison - "Phoenix Without Ashes" ...they made a really BAD TV series (The Starlost) based on this book. Too bad, because the book was really good. Steven Gould - "Wildside" Kenneth Bulmer - "Keys to the Dimension" series. E. C. Tubb - The "Dumarest" series.

I read a couple of his books and was not impressed. "Battlefield Earth" was outright crap.

This was one of the earliest non-juvenile SciFi book I ever read back in the 60s and I have read it several times since. I think it holds up well.

Robert Silverberg, "Time of the Great Freeze".

That's what I though when I first saw it too! Does that make us bad?

Whoa! Nuclear powered windshield wipers! How cool is that?

I had a server that had been running for 8 years on the same mirrored desktop-quality 40GB drives, 24/7, without a hiccup. I replaced the power supply and fans more than once during that period, but the drives never failed. Finally replaced the server with new hardware and virtualized the old server on it. The point is that you never can tell with hard drives. I've had them fail soon after installation, and I've had them last for years. I do tend to always use enterprise-rated drives now in servers, but it's no guarantee they'll last longer.

Backups!

Uh... he DID confess to the crime AND lead the cops to his wife's body. I know...sarcasm, right?

20 disks seems like overkill for your storage needs. Seems like the more disks you use the greater the risk of failure of one or more of them. Also, your electricity bill must be through the roof. I have 4 3TB drives with a 3Ware controller in RAID5 array which gives me the same storage capacity with 1/5th the drives Aren't you making this more complicated than it needs to be? ...Maybe that's the point?

Jim Jones had the cure... too bad they missed that boat!