R. Pirsig wrote a paper on the philosophical and mental challenges in defining "quality". I suggest reading it.

That's a stupendous way to end software development overnight. Yes, Apple had a bug. All software has bugs. They clearly intended for a different outcome and surely never expected Google to actively attack it.

Of the two, Apple made a mistake but acted with good intentions (at least on the surface, but there's no point going full tinfoil because then there's no point having a conversation about it). Google acted maliciously, and if someone's going to be held accountable for this then it should be them.

In before "lol fanboy": I would say exactly the opposite if, say, iCloud.com exploited a bug (not a feature: a bug) in Chrome to do the same thing. In this specific case, Apple seems to have acted honorably and Google unhonorably.

My guess is that it's only a serious issue for people with specific IP knowledge, like higher-end people in pharma, chemicals, semiconductors, some kinds of software -- the kinds of skills with very limited places to use them, most with direct competitors.

For other jobs, like mostly generic IT work, I just can't see my boss bothering to spend the money to figure out where I might have moved to, provided I keep a low-ish profile about it.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?

I'd say the number of non-threats who were actively and vigorously blackballed might call into question as to where the boundary between legitimate fear and paranoia fear is on this topic.

Probably no one single answer. I don't think the early years of Viet Nam faced that much ideological opposition. I do think that the political-based mismanagement of the war led to "conventional" opposition to it. Then add in civil rights discontent, the exemptions that made it a "poor man's war" and the general social upheaval of the 1960s, shake well and pour over ice.

No airline takeover/sabotage attempt that passengers could reach has succeeded since 911 (the most recent just a week or two ago when some idiot ran down the isles towards the cockpit door screaming - was tackled and pressed).

Stop locking the door altogether. If there's a problem, you'll have a line of people waiting to destroy whoever tries to take over a cockpit now. Threaten to hurt someone with a box cutter? Whatever damage you can do to one person is outweighed by every other person on that plane wanting to live.

Locking the cockpit doors has, to date, only brought disaster. You have to think that had the airplane that vanished had open cockpit access passengers could have got in there over the many hours the thing was off course (there are a lot of people that monitor aircraft position during flight).

It was vastly different political era.

There was a lot of paranoia about Communist conspiracies. The Rosenberg trials. Joe McCarthy was making headlines "exposing" Communists. In some sense, there was some legitimate fear of Communist actions -- the Soviets had blockaded West Berlin, leading to the Berlin airlift in 1948.

Not only was the political climate dangerous for anyone opposing fighting Communist expansion in Korea, it wasn't irrational to believe that expansionist communism was a real threat, especially after recently fighting a war against two nations who started wars of imperial expansion, at least one of whom did so under the guise of a totalitarian political philosophy.

No, I think the ISP's will only keep it for two years - but that is gauranteed.

Right now in the U.S. everyone blindly assumes the data is kept for NO years, and we aren't even given an imaginary date when it might be deleted.

The Australians are at least all aware for sure the data is being kept, in the U.S. it's still possible to imagine it is not... That's my point.

Sure, and I could also hotplug USB3 disks and cut even more power/space/complexity if I wanted to futz with turning it on and off.

Power cycling a NAS may be worthwhile if it's some kind of archive you don't use often but it doesn't make a ton of sense if you want it online more than offline.

The electricity cost is what's so painful. I have an old Intel Q6600 system with 4x1TB disks. Power consumption is something like 110 watts, or $11/month.

I could swap the drives out and keep power about the same, but at some point it becomes kind of expensive to keep spinning disks.

That's no surprising. While I enjoy looking at the booth babes, I tend to avoid them whenever possible since I know that they'll just subject me to obviously artificial flirtation while attempting to repeat marketing gibberish which they don't actually understand. I'd much rather speak to a sweaty bearded guy in a tracksuit who can actually explain the product and tell me how it can help my business.

Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.

If the customer (the U.S. government) wants its auditors to be able to question individual employees, that should be clearly stipulated in the contract, and then the contractor should have no qualms about meeting the terms of that stipulation.

Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

Voting for the other corporate-controlled, militaristic party doesn't seem like a viable plan for getting out of this mess.

We already tried that a few times; voting in Democrats does not help.

Republicans are only into conflicts they can win and stop fighting; Democrats are the ones who like to cause endless conflicts they can pour money and people into. Under Bush we helped turn Iraq into democracy; under Obama we abandoned them to be consumed by ISIS, at least to the point we get to go over and fight for the same land all over again.

I think major leaps of density will eliminate platters. Why bother with them at all with their ridiculously slow seek times, heat, power consumption? At high capacities they're more of a risk to data integrity due to slow array rebuild times and it takes dozens of them to equal the IOPS of flash. Even now platters are either useful for their high density as Tier 3 in a SAN or in large numbers to get IOPS.

If there was a huge leap in flash densities I think they would get cheap enough that no one would bother, even if they were "unreliable" consumer MLC technology. Vendors could just double the extra flash used for recovery of bad cells and increase the endurance.

Isn't it better for people in Australia to know their network data will be retained for two years, than for the people in the U.S. to be unaware data is being retained, but then in actuality have it retained forever by the NSA?