Yeah, that is true. The only way to be completely sure would be to do some serious damage to the platters and scatter their remains in various places.

But also, with modern drives it would probably be much harder to recover data after a major catastrophe like that. I remember reading that article about them eventually finding the hard drive from the shuttle- it was an old Seagate made way before 2000. I was pretty amazed that it survived, but I do believe that the density difference in storage nowdays would have made it very very difficult if not impossible to recover any large amount of the data off a newer drive under similar circumstances.

Modern drives are not made a durable as those older drives were, and, they are packed far more dense-- the first 1TB drives were using 5 platters, nowdays I believe the latest Samsung Spinpoint F3 only uses 2 platters -- that's 500GB per platter-- Thats a huge jump. I am almost positive that the Seagate drive from the shuttle disaster was less 1GB, probably 500MB, and probably had at least 3 platters- the difference in density is massive.

Nevertheless that is amazing that they were able to recover the data. I think it would be rad (albeit probably very tedious) to work in a clean room doing serious data recovery. I wonder how much that data recovery ended up costing them? Almost certainly over 10k

That is a really persistent myth (that magnets will erase/corrupt data on a modern hard disk drive).

Inside of all harddrives for the last 10 or so years are multiple, very powerful neodymium iron boron magnets that move the actuator arm over the surface of the discs. If magnets outside of your drive would erase data, then surely these intensely powerful magnets inside would do the same, no?

The most conclusive testing I've seen done on this was several years ago. A guy had stacks of dead hard drives, and he decided to harvest the magnets from them. He had a stack of 50+ very powerful NIB magnets. He then took a working HDD, full to capacity, and covered the entire hard drive in them- front and back, with layer upon layer of magnets. Then he set the drive in a desk drawer for a few weeks, after which he plugged the drive up, and all of his data was still completely intact. Not 1 file was corrupted in any way.

Now, if you put a .40 or .45-caliber round through a platter, you can be certain the data is unrecoverable. Last time I checked, HDD platters are made out of some sort of silicon composite, so a bullet should shatter the entire plater (or at least half of it) into tiny fragments.

There are some things that paper has that digital copies can never replace.

Many people feel that some pieces of sensitive information are safer on a piece of paper in a locked desk than they are on a drive on your network.

The feel of assurance one gets from a physical, actual, handwritten signature (sad to say but even a generic 'rubber stamped' signature has a better "feel" to it than receiving a generic pdf form regardless of what new digital cert/signature accompanies the pdf.)

If you graduated from a nice college, how would you feel if they just emailed you a PDF of your diploma? It wouldn't 'feel' the same printing it out and hanging it on the wall, for whatever reason. (I'd say it goes deeper than that, though. 1s and 0s aren't directly tangible in and of themselves. Since they are so easy to reproduce copies of them, there really isn't the same type of sentimental value. If you 'lost' a PDF book your girlfriend gave you, for example, you could redownload the exact same copy of the file over again-- and you would experience no sense of loss... However, if your girlfriend bought you a physical copy of the book, and you lost it, even if you went to the store and repurchased an exact same copy of the same printing of the same book-- it wouldn't be the same 'book'. There is something empty about the 1's and 0's, and, though I love the possibilities that technology makes available to us, I hope that never changes.)

Physical placement of actual papers registers in the mind. If you have a collage of papers above your desk with various phone numbers, IPs, or whatever, your mind usually connects with that easier than 'what file/folder is that in?', and it's easier to look up than it is to click through multiple folders. (It's less steps to look up, than it is to sift through).

I think that paper and digital copies compliment eachother. They each have certain advantages over the other, but they can never fully replace one another.

There is a well done documentary on archive.org

The guy interviewed Vinton Cerf and Philip J. Kaplan for it, amongst others you will likely recognize.

http://www.archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary

iirc, part 5 was all about the ascii art scene.

Here are some pics of some of Googles hardware. These are a few years old. The power interface is entirely foreign to me.
When I uploaded them to photobucket they were resized and I've since lost the originals, but, if you zoom in close enough you can see that the powersupply has a part number printed on it that includes the word 'GOOGLE', and, the ram also has chips that are individually labeled Google.
Does anyone care to explain to me how it is possible that doing such a thing is more cost effective than just purchasing stuff already on the market in bulk? I've been wondering it for years after seeing this.
http://s38.photobucket.com/albums/e149/drcollinsakatheman/randomjunk/1.jpg http://s38.photobucket.com/albums/e149/drcollinsakatheman/randomjunk/2.jpg http://s38.photobucket.com/albums/e149/drcollinsakatheman/randomjunk/3.jpg