A PVR drive could easily see 17TB of writes during a year and that's just a very conservative estimate based on a small number of tuners and broadcast content.

Most people need to be kept busy or they will end up causing trouble. They will start causing trouble simply out of boredom.

Plus there's just the issue of atrophy. Both the body and mind need to be kept distracted or they degrade.

This just goes to show that "shredding the Constitution" has been going on for a very long time. The feds pretty much started as soon as they possibly could.

There's always some idiot that thinks a small dose of tyranny will be OK.

I really have no desire to do nothing but sit in meetings all day.

That's what's meant by a position that's not a "dead end". You get promoted up into management where you no longer do technical work anymore. You need those "social skills" because those are the only skills you end up using.

My first tech manager quit his manager position in order to move on to a purely tech position.

There are so many candidates that have such an obvious lack of any technical skill or talent, that companies really can't turn away people that are actually able to do the work. Perhaps this is part of the perception that there is some sort of "shortage". They want an ideal perfect fit but that simply doesn't exist.

If I could "do it all" I would not let someone else exploit my labor. I would work for myself and keep most of the value of my skill for myself instead of letting someone else take it.

As a freak, I have always found it much easier to fit in with the small companies. It's the larger companies with all of the political nonsense and high degree of specialization that push your tech skills to the back burner.

Smaller companies have fewer of the kind of people that require better social skills to deal with.

There's no need to re-invent anything.

We just need to prevent bored children from ripping apart what's already working perfectly well. They can even be free to create something that's a more primitive sort of throwback.

Sabotaging what already works really isn't necessary.

Some features are all about usability.

This is how Macs in 2014 trying to mock features of X window managers manage to screw things up relative to a 20 year old copy of twm.

They confuse eye candy (or even crippling) with usability.

My local PD publishes incident numbers and a vague description of what the incident was about. There is no identifiable information disclosed. If you want identifiable information, you have to go through the whole rigamarole of a "freedom of information" request.

They don't just "let it all hang out" or anything remotely close to that.

Age has nothing to do with being unable to deal with technology. Some people are just idiots or choose to be helpless. This cuts across all age groups. So you can have some ancient person pushing 100 that's better able to adapt to new tech than one of her children or even one of her grandchildren.

A lot of the people that can handle new things could always handle new things and will be able to handle new things when they're past 90.

Regulating in this case is stupid. There is no natural physical monopoly in search to make it comparable to a railroad. There isn't any vendor lock problem to make it comparable to Windows or IE.

Search is a commodity like orange juice concentrate. Anyone can do it and the cost to switch from one provider to another is ZERO.

The question of "why can't the OS monopoly get ahead in search" is an interesting one but not one that by default justifies the kind of breakup that should have happened to Microsoft but no one had the balls for.

"Crimes" usually have "elements" that you have to prove.

70G is less space than I have on my phone.

A 70G tape seems silly in an age of cheap 64G thumb drives.

> For $150 you can get a SSD with plenty of space for the vast majority of desktop roles,

Bullshit.

A $150 SSD will only be good enough for a machine you are using like a terminal. Anything beyond that and you will need more space.

I want more storage in my PHONE than that.

Exactly. RAID prevents a drive failure from being an immediate data loss.

Plus, RAID allows me to keep all of my bulk storage online while I am replacing a drive. That portion of my data hoard is not completely unavailable to me while I am copying data to the replacement drive.

Of course you want at least 2 copies of your data.

This is where the relative cheapness of HDD wins the day. You don't just need 1x of what you think you need but at least 2x.

Yes. Take that large number associated with SSD tech and DOUBLE it.

It's not disingenuous at all. It merely demonstrates the primary problem here, namely the price gap. Larger SSD drives are low capacity and expensive. They are priced outside the range of most consumers while also being inferior in terms of bulk storage. A larger SSD is less able to justify it's price premium than a larger HDD.

Even if SSD prices get less ridiculous, chances are that HDD prices/capacity will keep pace and continue to keep HDDs relevant.