Based on previous examples, what seems to work well for American's to really get it together tech wise is to have a president outline a grand, almost impossible plan then shoot them. Worked for Kennedy/Apollo and Reagan/Star Wars although obviously Ronnie got better.

Anyone agree with me here?

Not really, hobbyist isn't a synonym for bad.

Plus everythng I write is commented to death with notes about how something works, why it was done like that, things to watch for if changing it later etc.

Which is why you give a programming test onsite.

Any number of which I'd probably fail as pulling random function names/jargon out the air isn't my forte. OTOH, I've been coding for 35 years, know where to find the answers to anything I need to know and can crank out pretty much bug free code until the cows come home. As an e.g., last task I was given was to monitor an IBM MQ for SWIFT payments, parse them, pull out the good stuff, validate it and put it in an oracle DB. Wrote it in ProC. Never used ProC (had used C though), Oracle or MQ before yet amazingly it went through testing with only one minor bug and that was a problem with the spec rather than the code. I even threw in diagnostic modes you could select with switches at run time to give verbose logging. Last count I've used 20+ languages from Assembler to 4GLs, across various Unix, DOS, Windows and VMS. As I said though, I'd be amazed if I could answer more than a handful of questions on the spot even though I was (so long ago..) a MCSD or whatever the MS dev training used to be called.

Buses have gps trackers, internal cameras recording all journeys to hard disk, recorders on the vehicle management systems etc. They can replay who got on/off and every press of the brake/accelerator the driver makes. The latter is used for insurance purposes to prove how the driver responded to accidents etc.

You decided to vote for the Tories

To be fair, labour were just as bad - a lot of the survelience law was passed by them. The only real difference between the left/right in the UK is which way they shaft you. they both shaft you though.

Modded down for a joke? Man you guys are up tight.

As an extreme case, the BBC has reported on scrolls from Pompeii and Herculaneum that were 'destroyed' by Vesuvius are now starting to reveal their secrets using some pretty impressive techniques. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25106956

(yes, i am Greek... but don't hate me, i love 'Murica!)

Are you sure you're European?

That's still 100 years which is a lot better than the data being talked about here.

There was a documentry on the radio this week about the loss of letter writing as a form and how alarmed biographers were getting because it's getting very hard to trace someone's life, thoughts, actions etc without a paper trail as stuff like emails, digital photos etc generally get lost when someone dies.

Personally, I find the increasing rate of loss quite alarming - so much of our lives are digital and so little is properly curated with a view to future access. We know so much about the past from old documents, often hundreds if not thousands of years old but these days we're hard pushed to find something published ten years ago.

Are there cloud storage providers that can do this for the above example of an approx. 2 TB data set, and provide complete security?

Cloud and complete security together is an oxymoron.

I remember thinking WTF but to be fair, it was a huge hit and they sold a ton to small/medium businesses and non gamers at home.

I'm amazed at the hostility here towards anyone who suggests self control and healthy eating and the amount of comments suggesting if you can't get time to excercise, popping a pill to offset your overeating is good. Seriously? You guys are all in denial. really. In the UK there's a TV show called 'Secret Eaters'. Each week they get some fat people who are mystified as to why they can't lose weight. They get them to record what they eat for a week and film them for a week. They then compare what they said/thought they ate compared to what they really ate. In almost every case they were scarfing more than twice the calories they claimed. One guy was going on about his healthy eating, breakfast cereals, healthy option for lunch sandwich, home cooked evening meal full of vegetables. He reckoned he got through 1800 calories a day so why wasn't he losing weight? The film of him showed he was actually getting through 4-5000 a day and on Sunday, 9000. One thing that really surprised him was a cheese sauce that he put on his vegetables (yeah, I know) that ended up as being 1500 cals on its own.

This. There is absolutely no point taking medication (FFS) to control your bad habits. As soon as you stop taking them, you'll revert back. It's not difficult. Eat less, move more. The only caveat being there is some some recent evidence that some people do genuinely have more trouble with this than others but it doesn't make the advice any different. Grow a pair, stop blaming other people for your own bad eating habits, take control of your life and stop being conned by all the faddy diets aimed at quick fixes. There are no quick fixes, just good, healthy ways to eat.

More info on 850 boot process here http://www.atarimania.com/faq-atari-400-800-xl-xe-what-is-the-atari-850-interface-module_38.htmlSpecifically, if no response from drive 1, the 850 responds as if it was a disk drive.