This is a phenomenon known as "bitrot." It is for this reason tape drive backups are still around but since SATA allows hotplugging and there are SATA docks now some people just buy hard drives and use those for long term storage. Hard drives as a backup medium I imagine would work pretty good as long as you keep them in a dark, dry and cool place mostly safe from any shock like drops or heavy vibrations. In fact I had a computer from the mid-80's once and its hard drive, file system and data was still intact.

I've always wanted to try tape drives mostly for the novelty but they're excessively expensive which is why I think hard drives as a long term storage medium have started to take off but ultimately I don't think they'll displace tapes for storage meant to last a magnitude of half a century or longer.

I suppose if you're daring enough you could try paper as a backup medium.

Pretty much this.

I'm probably going to start a riot by saying this but I think KDE stands as the best candidate for a "standardized" desktop environment; it's all very well built and all its components are well integrated into the KDE framework and the environment itself will probably feel the most comfortable for Windows users. Of course everyone is entitled to their preferences (the beauty of the GNU/Linux platform) but I honestly believe KDE is an outstanding environment for general desktop usage.

I used to use GNOME2 but after the Gnome Project went full retard with mobilitis in Gnome 3 going the same direction as Unity and Windows 8 I decided to go back to KDE.

I'll also throw a shoutout here and say that I think Kubuntu is an excellent distro based on Debian but with the community and frequent updates of Ubuntu, however unlike Ubuntu it doesn't get much attention unfortunately.

I have hundreds of VHS movies and I still have a VCR.

I don't think we'll have quiet the same problem with optical media for time to come though because unlike VHS; which was an analog based format designed when computers where in their infancy, DVD's are digital and can be directly read by a common desktop PC and for the foreseeable future we'll only see optical based formats advance further. Just to prove my point how long digital formats live on its still possible to read 3.5" floppy discs if one is determined enough.

I suppose you could run into a problem in 20 years with being able to read a DVD still but you can always run Windows XP in a VM or use one of hundreds of Linux distributions with libdvdcss installed. There are also plenty of other free tools for preserving and converting DVD's Hollywood isn't too fond of that I would imagine will still be around for some time to come.

I'm the complete opposite. I have some digital stuff but otherwise I continue to collect physical media whenever I can because I'll always have access to it and some big company won't be able to pull the licensing agreement and suddenly the movie/show/game is gone from my collection on Amazon or something because the big company wants more money from Amazon for their 20 year old movie.

When it comes to physical media the first sale doctrine is king so in addition to the already mentioned benefits of always having my media I can also sell or lend my media without interference or limitation.

Mass Effect says otherwise I think.

Those Minis with 32-bit CPUs you can pop open and install an ordinary 64-bit Core 2 Duo from a "PC" into the Mini. The only thing is that the OS X installer for newer versions of OS X will read the model number of your mainboard and tell you they you're obsolete (regardless of the CPU installed) and that you'll need to purchase a new Mac but that can be fixed by unpackaging the installer, removing the check from the install scripts and repackaging it all back together.

My "obsolete" circa 2006 Mac Mini I bought used is actually running OS X Lion now and it works just fine whereas I would've had to have spent $900 to buy a new Mac Mini from Apple. Unfortunately all the iOS dev tools for iOS 7, among other things, have been locked to Mavericks by Apple so I'll need to figure out how to get Mavericks on it if it will even run on the older hardware due to the old video chipset.

Unfortunately you can't do this with newer Mac Minis because apparently Apple caught on to this and soldered everything to the mainboard.

The BATFEB; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Bitcoin? I wonder how many letters the ATF will eventually accumulate when everything is said and done.

The Apple iEnvelope will also have exclusive patented round corners.

Any chance you could look up your equivalent of Wikipedia or some kind of newspaper archive in 20,001 and tell me what the winning lottery numbers are in 2014?

Ha! My IT department where I work (I shall not disclose whom I work for) requires that all passwords have a minimum of 14 characters and the password is required to be changed on a regular interval in a mandatory basis. There is a policy in place against passwords; on post-it notes, in notebooks and so forth so it's really frustrating and really easy to forget if you're not careful.

I've lost a lot of trust for the police. I still respect them and the law they're supposed to uphold but that doesn't mean I trust them.

Unfortunately I've had some negative encounters with police like this one particular state trooper who threatened to arrest me and steal my camera. I took a picture of a wrecker pulling a car out of a ditch from my porch and when the trooper saw I had a camera he walked across my lawn onto my porch and started yelling at me that he was going to have to take my camera or arrest me so I asked him under what statute at which point he straightened his posture, raised his voice and said "WHAT STATUTE?!" and then he proceeded to tell me that I was illegally taking pictures of a crime scene and that doing so is indecent and if I didn't delete the pictures he'd have to confiscate the camera and arrest me.

I later consulted an attorney was told that the officer was likely in the wrong but it probably wasn't worth pursuing.

I wish drive-in movie theaters were still a thing but it never occurred to me to drive into a theater.

Yeah, well, that might be true until the government mandates that everyone upgrade their old cars at their own expense or face a stiff penalty at which point the Supreme Court will uphold the penalty as a tax, meanwhile the politicians will be telling everyone; "you can keep your old car!"

It's not a fantasy. I had someone try to break into my house once. I have a friend who hid in a broom closet with a her mother and they armed themselves with a broom for a weapon because there was a rapist outside the window watching them while doing nasty things to himself and on another occasion I have a friend who was home alone when two thieves broke into the house and confronted her.

Mind you I live in a rural mountain community and not a crime ridden suburb with bars on the windows.

It. Is. Not. A. Fantasy.

Well when you try regulating a class of weapon out of existence then another class will takes its place.
Regulate machine guns? Semi-automatics take the place.
Regulate semi-automatics? Revolvers and bolt guns take its place.
Regulate those? People will be killing each other with percussion and bladed instruments again.

This escalating regulation has gotten so bad overseas that in England just having a pocket knife makes you an instant terrorist in the eyes of the government. In fact there is a group over there calling for the complete ban of knives with pointed tips because of "knife crime."

Semi-automatics do their job very well, perhaps better than machine guns, in combat and the amount of them in circulation I think makes it convenient for criminal organizations to just not bother with fully automatic weapons which is why I think you only see full autos in very small percentage of crime and usually only in the heaviest of cartels. If you ban semi-automatics somehow I doubt criminals would be satisfied with weapons from the turn of the century as opposed to when full autos were practically banned a semi-automatic would do the job just as well.

Ultimately I think regulating something that is supposed to be protected into oblivion is just cough medicine; it makes you feel good but all it does is treat the symptom and not the underlying cause. Violence will continue and with the amount of money in illegal weaponry I suspect they would just continue to flow, like drugs, into the country to be sold out of a trunk in L.A. meanwhile the citizenry would be defenseless against a relatively heavily armed criminal element.