You said it "over 100 miles from Vegas" so...

Unfortunately we didn't have this debate when they installed a vast network of cameras with automatic number-plate recognition and a huge back-end database to handle the data. The police are never going to give up their grip on that particular tool willingly, so we are stuck with it.

We actually tried that in the UK, at places like Sellafield, and it didn't work out very well. Stuff started to grow in the ponds, rain water mixed in, birds picked it up and flew off with it, it evaporated into rainwater...

These days average is watching hours of streaming video from Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu and all the others.

Reminds me of conversations I used to have with people buying 160GB hard drives. Does ATT consider 1KB = 2^10 or 10^3 bytes?

The US isn't the only country with nuclear power. Some like China and India have been pushing it hard and investing vast amounts of money in developing it, yet have still failed to deal with this problem.

Also, nit-picking perhaps but "several decades" implies nuclear was being blocked back in the 50s, which clearly it wasn't.

It's pretty pathetic that the pro-nuclear crowd have to blame unnamed eco-hippies for all their woes. A bunch of apparently quite dumb, reactionary and fearful people somehow dictate policy for multi billion dollar industry with armies of lawyers and wads of cash to throw at lobbying.

The simple reality is that all this wonderful new technology just isn't economically viable. The cost of development and the risk that after spending tens of billions it won't work or make any money is just too high. There are too many unknowns and uncertainties, and a general reluctance to invest in a technology that takes decades to pay off when alternatives are growing so rapidly.

Just look at how hard energy companies are fighting the future to preserve their current revenue streams. Considering how scared they are of what seems inevitable, would you want want to give them money?

Tragically Flash support still seems to be working. I was hoping that moving to 64 bit would break it.

Neither do I, but fortunately my neighbour does.

Fortunately your internet connection speed is (hopefully) increasing too, so the time to restore all that data from your widely distributed off-site "backup" is decreasing in proportion.

These days probably 60-70% of the data on my drives is basically an caching the internet.

The drives used in external enclosures are sub-standard. Since the whole package only comes with a minimal one or two year warranty and they can easily point to any slight mark on the case as signs of abuse they put the weakest, borderline drives in them.

Many people don't realized that drives are binned that way at the factory. All drives have a certain number of bad blocks from new. Those that have very few become server grade drives, the majority become standard internal consumer drives and those with very many surface errors get turned into external drives. The number of errors the drive starts out with affects the number of available spare blocks and the time before it develops further errors.

Anyone else remember when 1MB was 2^20 bytes? Well, for me and anyone using the JEDEC standard it still is...

Apparently even the Amish lifestyle is changing to have less exercise now. For example they are not allowed to drive, but they can accept lifts in cars driven by non-Amish.

Only if you discount all the damage they do, paid for by private health insurance and by people cleaning up the soot from cars that ends up in their homes.