Thanks for the imagery... I'm now thinking of Anonymous Cowards running around killing people (and elephants) with electric chairs....

That misses the bit where I mentioned quarterly drive rotation, precisely for this reason.

A parity drive is also a good idea of course, but it will likely result in fewer rotations due to the extra hassle.

Using my method, I've moved over the years from storing 128MB of data in a box to 2GB -- and I'm likely just about to do another round of replacements in my backup drives as my 1TB are getting a bit long in the tooth.

I think you missed my point -- I'm not debating whether pollution harms (negatively affects) our current environmental balance from the perspective of humanity -- that's pretty much the definition. The fact is that "the environment" is much too loosely defined in this debate on AGW, and just throwing around terms without carefully defining what you're talking about and then stating that debate has ended, well, you can see that the debate rages on; mostly because people aren't working off the same word definitions.

Your clarifications definitely narrow down what is being debated from your perspective, and I agree with your conclusions, but unless we want more annoying "is not!" responses (which are not debate, it's true), we need to apply scientific rigour to the terms we're using, recognizing when others are abusing words and clarifying our own use of said words, or else we haven't really progressed the overlying debate(s) at all.

There was a good comment on some /. thread last week, talking about finding the balance between proving scientific theories and repeatedly disproving the same fallacious data.

The issue here is that of confusing scientific research and politics/religion. AGW crosses the line quite often, but opponents to AGW spend most of their time across the line. Actual discussion can start once these two are separated, and they can both be presented for what they are, instead of studies being presented as proof for a political agenda, and politics prompting scientists with finite resources to "run the numbers again".

Is there a website dedicated to Gore misquotes? There should be, but I can't find it with Google.

The GW one didn't even make it on Snopes.

Sure he can. Whether he'd be right is up for debate.

"Pollution AFFECTS the environment" is something that is pretty much a fact. It could even affect it by destroying all human beings -- but the environment itself will likely self-correct (possibly by destroying all human beings).

The only problem with punch tapes is that we've ALREADY lost the readers for them, without even having a minor apocalypse. I guess if people kept backing up to punchtape though, we'd still have workable units that could plug into this decade's computing devices.

A few years ago, someone came up with a FUSE plugin called SlashdotFS -- it encoded your data into slashdot posts, with redundancy.

From the number of unreadable posts I see viewing at -1, it appears some people are still using it for backup purposes.

Because video isn't data in motion (most of the time), you can just get a safe deposit box and keep a drive there, cycling it semi-regularly to prevent against bitrot/drive failure. I just keep one backup hooked up locally, and one in storage, and rotate them quarterly. Some stuff I also have backed up to data DVD locally, but if all three hard drives fail at the same time, my DVDs probably won't fare much better.

Then again, I did my VHS -> Digital backup around 15 years ago, and burned everything to video DVD back then. I've since re-ripped from DVD and done the MPEG-2->h.264 conversion, but I still have the DVDs (including their campy menu screens).

Yeah; I didn't add that bit to my post as it didn't really add anything to the discussion and would have confused some people -> TL;DR.

But yeah; I see MS doing something similar with ANY game they buy; Xbox platform first, then Windows, then everyone else, by which point the game isn't what it was originally intended to be.

Remember when Microsoft bought Bungie?

Bungie was a developer for the Mac platform that brought us many excellent games, such as Marathon and Myth in the 90's. It was working on a game called Halo, that was supposed to leverage all the Mac features to create a hugely amazing game.

In 2000, Microsoft bought Bungie, and the delivery date for Halo slipped. Turned out that the reason for the slip was that all dev work on the Mac version halted, and MS put all Bungie's efforts into porting it to XBOX. It then came out as an XBOX exclusive title (the launch title).

Eventually, Bungie left MS in 2007, but had to leave the Halo franchise behind.

This is pretty much what I expect to happen 14 years later with Minecraft, with the exception that Minecraft already exists (like Myth II did at the time of the Bungie buyout) and so isn't likely to be the killer app at the center of the deal.

I still see The Joshua Tree as one of their best albums, and when people are asked to name a U2 song, they invariably name one that's on that album. In fact, after listening to the new album, I much prefer The Joshua Tree; the new one has a similar feel at times, but doesn't hold together as well as a unit, and feels a bit tired.

I bet the free album got a lot of people under the age of 25 who didn't hear the 1987 album when it came out looking at their earlier work though.

I think I would have written in to complain about the entire show; the "wardrobe malfunction" wouldn't really have played into the complaint at all. But then, I didn't watch the superbowl that year, and so didn't have to put up with the sensationalist half time show.

I'm sure that companies like Nestle could get behind that argument... wait; they already did!