The fact that the group of people I hung around with when "Darmok" first aired used language similarly may be why we enjoyed it so much. For example, late at night, someone would point at themselves and say "Bonzo", which indicated they were going to bed.

Of course, we might also have just been drunk out of our minds, as we watched TNG and played a drinking game where one of the rules was if any character spoke the episode title, it was two drinks. With this rule, "Darmok" and "The Pegasus" lead to alcohol poisoning.

Take a look at the quality of output from:

x264 --preset slower --tune film --crf 20

You'd be amazed at how many of the bits on the average Blu-Ray are wasted. What's especially noticeable is that most Blu-Ray encodes are essentially fixed bitrate...it's not unusual to see credits running at 20Mbps. OTOH, there are movies like Lord of the Rings or The Rock, where 4GB/hour is required to keep up the quality due to the amount of action. Or, there are grainy movies, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or 300. All of these automatically get the bitrate they need because of the "crf" option. These are balanced by movies like The Sixth Sense, with minutes long scenes where nothing moves but the actor's mouth.

OP said "ripped from media and compressed", which is exactly what I do with my Blu-Ray disks. I'm pretty picky about video quality, and I leave sound intact, and I average around 2GB/hour on my 600 movies. I don't expect most people would use a lot more bits per second than I do.

So, for 25000GB at 2GB/hour with an average movie being 2 hours long, you get around 6000 movies. Pretty easy math.

You can argue about my assumptions, but even at 4GB/hour (which is insane overkill if you use a good encoder like x264), that's about 3000 movies.

With scales, the only easy fraud is produce and the in-store bakery. Anything with a bar code is much harder, requiring a scan of a cheaper but same-weight code.

I suppose you could cut the bar code off of a box of pasta (often on sale for around $1/box) and palm it to scan for cookies, crackers, etc., of the same weight that sell for $3-4/box. Maybe the biggest overall gain would be something like a 1lb container of crab meat scanned as margarine/sour cream/etc., which would net you around $10/lb savings. Of course, if you are a saffron nut, you could scan pretty much any other spice and make out like a bandit.

Although some of the self-checkouts I see use the same area as a regular lane due to having the large collection area, the vast majority are 2:1 in terms of space, since they are half-length.

Even the Sam's Club (not a Costco member) that put in self-checkout did it this way. They can get away with it because most people who self-check have a smallish number of items. One of the local grocery stores made all their self-checkouts full length, but I suspect that's because they had about 15 total before the conversion of 6 of them to self.

The huge advantage of self-checkout is that you can absorb some rush without having to add another human cashier, especially if most of the use is "express". I always go to the self-checkout if I can (no alcohol or peel-off price reduction stickers) because I am faster than 75% of humans. I scan with two hands (one picks up item and scans it, pass to other hand which places on belt/output while first hand picks up another), and have found that the scales are fast enough that they can keep up with me. And, you don't have to wait for spoken prices on most...just keep scanning. The other day I had nearly 30 buffered speeches (two forms of price reduction on individual bagels when I bought a dozen..that's 36 bits of speech) that just stopped when I swiped my credit card.

How is adjusting the odds as people bet to keep the money on both sides as close as possible "doing math better"?

Essentially, it doesn't matter what the starting odds/spread/etc. are...the only thing that matters is adjusting the number as bets are placed so that bets are about even on both sides. Legitimate sports books don't make money by "winning" the bets...they make money by keeping a percentage of every bet, so their goals are to increase the total amount of money bet, while keeping the amount bet on each side about the same (assuming 1:1 payout...with different payout, then they would move the odds based on keeping the total expected payout the same as total intake).

You misread a comma as a decimal. With filled-out slots, the library can hold 2,100PB, or 2.1 exabyte. Or, the equivalent of over half a million 4TB hard drives.

>We have two of these at work, and with just 3000 slots each and not the biggest tape drives, they can each store around 15PB.

Unless you aren't compressing very much from the original source, this means you have about 6,000 movies (2GB/hour, with an average movie being 2 hours).

With 6,000 movies, your "few bins" would be a cube about 8 feet on each side, assuming standard DVD cases. And, it would also mean that you would spend over $3,000/year on movies (figuring $10/movie, and assuming you've been collecting since DVDs first came out). If you have been collecting for less time, or buy more expensive movies (Blu-Ray, special editions, at first release, etc.), then it would be closer to $5,000/year. Do you seriously spend $400/month on purchasing media?

This is absolutely the best statement of this ever. Everyone who claims that tape is the One True Backup doesn't factor in the startup cost of $2-4K for a tape drive that can handle reasonably large capacity tapes, the hardware to connect it to a computer (many of these tape drives have fiber-channel as the only option), and then the cost of some kind of changer if you want any amount of automation.

For home use, hard drives are by far the cheapest and most convenient method, as long as you are in the less than 50TB world. If you aren't satisfied with hard drive reliability, back up your data twice, to two different drives. With 4TB drives selling for around $170, and backing up twice as I suggested, you don't reach the break-even point with tape (single backup) until you need to back up 15TB. With single backup to disk, the break-even is around 45TB.

Sure, it's easy to have 20TB of usable disk space (I've got forty 2TB drives spread among 5 servers at my house), but 20TB of "must be backed up because that's the only copy" is a little unbelievable for a home user.

For example, I have 700 Blu-Ray movies that have been ripped and re-encoded to take about 2TB of disk space. If I had 30-40TB available, I might store the raw Blu-Ray images, but then I don't need backup, as the data is easy to re-create. So, I'm a little skeptical that the "friend" in TFS had 20TB data that he can't re-create by going back to original sources.

Why is it that vegetarians go to such lengths to procure food that tastes like meat but doesn't actually contain meat? If a vegetarian diet is so great, they wouldn't try to make their food taste like meat.

You don't see the rest of the population whining because their steak doesn't taste like tofu.

I don't know what tool you are using, but nothing I run in Cygwin requires a "special environment". All the standard utilities (grep, awk, sed, perl, ssh, git, etc.) work just as you'd expect. The X server also "just works". The tools also interface nicely with 4NT/Take Command, so I can sort the Windows clipboard with:

sort < clip: > clip:

Now, I'm sure if I tried to use things like cron or the SysV init scripts, then I'd have to do some tinkering, but the whole point of those is to run a complete Unix environment.

Google seems to be pretty good at handling databases for other data...I think they could handle this.

I do exactly this same thing with a database for my home mail server. Every site I deal with gets a different e-mail address, so I know who sells their lists. There have been one or two sites that have had the alias deleted because they didn't pay attention to whatever opt-out method they claimed would stop the e-mail.

This technique also protects me from phishing, as an e-mail that isn't addressed to mybankalias@mydomain.com can't possibly be from my bank.

Of course, if this really takes off, then no one will be able to drive the group to lunch, as they are all waiting for a package to be delivered to their car.

Seriously, though, if they can deliver to my car parked outside of my office, why don't I just have them deliver to the office? There is no real value in this service unless it does track the car's movements.

Not really, since the OP was essentially talking about the effective wage after taxes. You can live quite nicely any place in the US for $60K take-home. Sure, you can't have the very best of everything, but it's way more than a living wage.

Although I don't like that the OP seems to be talking about a hard cap, this sort of thing would go a long way towards making the gap between top and bottom much more reasonable. There still should be a gap, as that makes people strive to improve, but the problem with people who have tens (or hundreds) of millions per year of discretionary spending is that it causes many things to become impossible for poorer people to ever consider buying. For example, real estate, goods, and services near any place that has become popular with the "wealthy" is no longer available to average people. As an example, see Park City, UT, where the median income is over $65K, yet the average (mean) was only around $45K, and 10% are under the poverty line.