Depends on the trouble. I have about 30 GB of data that I 'need' - tax stuff, professional documentation, etc. I have a couple of terabytes of stuff that I like to keep around - mostly my pictures / videos and family stuff. If I lost it all I'd be sad but in no way financially or legally discomforted. And it really isn't hard to backup terabytes of stuff these days.

Totally amazing when you think about it. I recall the first 5 MEGABYTE hard disk that I saw. You could see all those files scrolling down the 80 x 25 CP/M screen. We were just floored. Five entire megabytes.....

That is one major advantage to OS X. You can make a drive image and boot off of it. Helps for migration testing and backups. It really frosts me that Microsoft hasn't figured out how to do that yet. I can keep a 128 GB flash drive in my bike bag and restore my laptop anywhere in the world I can get a new HD. Pretty damned convenient.

This. Other than a brief bit of annoyance and the fact that I would have to take my attention off the latest Slashdot thread, I don't really care what any individual hard drive is doing. And if I'm worrying about the primary data drive, the NAS, the external off site hard drives AND Dropbox going out, well, sucks to be me.

OK, hundreds of hard drives.

And a couple dozen DVD writers. Slashdotters hate change.

"Sorry honey, I can't make it over to dinner at your folks house tonight. Hard drive failed."

Clouds and silver lining sort of thing....

Maybe start a Kickstarter program to get all of you folks on 12 inch 80 x 25 monitors on to something more current?

Yes, I think putting the ambiguous icon on the right hand side of the screen is dumb, but I can read the entire headline (and the summary and, if the editor provides a link, TFA but that's only for special occasions).

Do you program at all?

I think you missed the funny. Of course, your post might be subtly sarcastic in which case I missed the funny.

Life is so complicated in ASCII....

You'd better not move into management. Backups are expensive. Expensive is bad (unless it refers to something on management's expense account). Let's get with the program. As I mentioned earlier, money is management. And management needs the money. You don't.

Money (or lack of it) IS a management issue....

But how hard is it to automate a process that says, in effect, "if no data is going in or out of this server, shut it down"? I suspect that there is a more nefarious purpose here and I propose a corollary to Hanlon's (Heinlein's) Razor:

This is the 21st Century - "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from villainy". Incompetence is for the proletariat - we're the NSA. You're toast.

Then you should be looking on some audiophile / high definition music sites where people actually understand this rather than a site that also sells plastic spoons.

Indeed (Purefinder - a person who picks up dog feces to sell to a tannery, 18th Century Europe)

On Slashdot? The unsocial network?

Goodluckwiththat.

No they aren't. Fingerprint readers don't work like that. You get a hash function that is related to ridge pattern (or whatever they happen to be scanning). You can't print out an FBI approved thumb to share with anyone else.

And yes, they don't need to use the thumb, you could well do the same thing with a mag stripe card. Except that the junior bozo would have to remember to bring the card with them. The thumb, not so much.

The kid is getting an entire lunch. They aren't scanning junior's thumbprint for each bag of Fritos that he grabs off the cart. He's going to get whatever the US Department of Agriculture has found sitting in a warehouse until just before the product's third expiration date (the one that they really mean).

This info is going to be pretty much useless to anybody except some flunky in the School Lunch administration.

Geez you guys. What the hell did they feed you all in school? Methamphetamine laced Doritos?

You don't know much about Macs - my 2008 MacPro is running 10.10.3 (Yosemite) and according to Apple, should run the next iteration (El Capitan). The only thing I had to do is replace the video card (who runs 7 year old video cards on anything?). My wife has a 2010 MacBook Pro which also will run 10.11.

Yes, there are Linux distros out there that will boot off an 8 inch floppy. That's impressive, but it's not Apple's MO.

And you can use command line programs to manipulate Airports. Even the old ones. Now that is pretty edge case and not well documented but a brief search shows you what you need to know.