By the end of October (when Sandy happened) much of the vegetation in NY is going dormant (you know, the whole 'fall foliage' thing) and is not taking up much water. Could have had a very different impact if that flooding occurred in Spring.

True, and in this case the 'safe' is the server, and the 'lock on the door' is the user's password. The problem then is you are basically saying 'I have a really crappy safe (server security), so I will make up for that by making you carry a 20-lb key around'. Fix the damn safe, and leave the keys alone!

If you are talking about 'inside jobs' and 'impossible', then why not just assume that the 'inside' person has installed malicious software that captures all the plaintext passwords and writes them somewhere? Doesn't matter how strong the passwords are then, does it? So the real concern here is not inside jobs so much as accidental leaks.

So the question is: why is the password file (not the passwords themselves) an unecrypted plain-text file? Encrypt the thing! Have all handling of passwords done by a special hardware module that accepts the key (with different portions of the key entered by different people) and the encrypted file, and returns simple 'yes' or 'no' responses to password requests (it would also handle password changes, etc). Now there is nothing to accidentally leak.

Once that is done, a simple 'passwords can't be tested more than once every two seconds' pretty much eliminates on-line brute force attacks, and offline attacks are impossible. Then the only password rules should be very simple, like no 'obvious' passwords (such as password).

Forcing all these stupid rules on users is just a way to shift the blame away from the real problem, which is poor security on the server.

Estimates are that between 50 and 80% of the worlds data is on tape. If you have not heard of it, that is your problem.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Most tapes are not written by people and put on a shelf. Most tapes are automatically managed by a tape library, such as this one (note that thing can store up to 900PB.) Read failures do not happen, because the library and host software together automatically count cycles and copy to a different tape when the cycles get too high, as well as detecting corrected errors and signalling when there is a problem with a tape.

z/OS, for instance, has a hierarchical storage manager where, by policy, data that is not accessed in certain period of time is moved first to slower (cheaper) disk, then to tape. Where I work, the 'to tape' time is about a month. In over 30 years of using such systems I have seen the 'DFHSM is recalling from tape' message many thousands of times, and I have never once encountered a situation where the recall failed or the data was corrupted. And the recall typically takes less than a minute.

It seems that most people on here only have experience with crappy home tape systems.

So let's do your contrasting with HDDs. That library holds up to 900PB, and uses 1.6kVA of power. It takes up 163 square feet of floor space. By my calculation, that would take over 1 million 1TB HDDs in a RAID array. How much floor space would that take? How much power would it use? How much heat would be generated?

If you have a lot of data, and do not need all of the data 'right this second', and (most importantly) have a system that can manage the data without causing the user to jump through hoops, tape makes an excellent solution. And that describes most large companies.

I didn't say 'they were already there'. I said 'they were getting paid anyway'. It is a quite simple math problem. Let's say that the investigators were paid (by the taxpayers) a total of $5000 for the three days of investigation. How much would they have been paid (by the taxpayers) if they were NOT doing that investigation? The answer is $5000. Now, quick, how much is $5000 - $5000?

Of course there is a cost to having a police force. Trying to assign those costs to individual cases is meaningless, unless the cases have specific costs over and above the usual (such as requiring overtime).

Your landscaping example is stupid. YOU are not paying the landscapers to work somewhere else.

Where did you get that 'statistic'?

Should it be illegal to conduct business while you are driving? Yes.

According to TFA, it took 3 days to find the guy. And the people that did the investigation were getting paid anyway (you don't think they went out and hired extra investigators for this, do you). The 'cost' was $0.

Evidence? Seems to me that it is more likely he could have caused accidents, because now the idiot who was going to make a call (or was in the middle of a call) is going to be looking at his phone to check signal strength, redialing, getting frustated, etc.

No, it is not anything like security through obscurity. It is more like security through the-only-way-you're-getting-near-the-thing-is-by-getting-past-heavily-armed-military-personnel.

Exactly this. The last time there was one of these articles some guy was claiming that stores would no longer carry manufactured goods, they would print them on demand. The impact of this was to be so great as to cause the collapse of the shipping industry. So I took a quick walk around my house to get an inventory of what would be printable. And what I found was: a few kitchen utensils and some toiletry items (hair brushes, etc). Everything else is wood, glass, polished chrome or brass, electronics, plant or animal based cloth/textiles, food, etc.

Yes, you have valid uses. But those uses all fall under the hobbyist or creator category. Nobody is saying there is no use in those markets. The article and discussion is about consumer use of 3d printing, and so far there is no use case for that at all. Yes, it would be nice to replace a broken battery cover for a remote, but not at the cost of 3D printer, the associated materials, and most importantly, a place for it.

Or, you could just continue doing what people do today: tape it back on. Total expense, tenth of a cent. Total time spent, 15 seconds.

If those kinds of things are what people are hanging their visions on, forget it.

Of course a 3.5" floppy drive can damage a disk. The head is in contact with moving media. Should it damage the disk? No. CAN it damage the disk? Certainly.