When did Google ever start forcing users to sign up just to search? I'm pretty sure that's not a thing. Just like banks don't force you to have savings accounts and credit cards with them in order to have a mortgage with them, Google doesn't force you to sign up for anything to either search, or to show up as #1 in search. For the latter, all you've got to do is be the most popular thing for that search query on the internet.

If you want to show up in a prominent place on the search page for a particular query, even though you aren't #1 (or even #10, or whatever) on the internet for that query, well, that's going to cost you.

For Google's services, I don't see what search has to do with any of it. Is Google artificially bumping themselves in the rankings? I'm not sure if the EU is aware, but Google is absurdly popular. I'd be shocked if Gmail didn't come up #1 in a search for email, and low and behold it does. #1 on Google and #2 on Bing, somehow Yahoo comes up first on Bing, while MS takes up #2 and #3 on Google. However, Google's cloud service comes up #4 on their own engine and #7 on Bing. iCloud is the first commercial service on both (actually #1 and #3 on Bing).

So pretty similar results, and MS certainly isn't going to fix Google results in Bing. The EU is full of shit. Bundling isn't harmful unless it is exploited, period. It often leads to a greater overall benefit, as products are more likely to be able to interconnect. If there is evidence of exploitation, that's different, and the EU should drop the hammer on them. But there isn't any evidence that that is going on here that I've seen, so this is almost certainly just politicians being dickweeds at the behest of people who paid them a lot of money.

I kind of wonder if something like this causes Apple to reconsider partnerships with vendors and play somewhat less hardball. It's obviously in Apple's best interest to have GT succeed -- the loan gets remade, they get a new gee-whiz screen material that no one else has or can even make (an established Apple strategy of cornering supplies of new technologies) and GT gets to make money, too, which can be invested in even better sapphire for the iPhone 7.

Squeeze your vendors too hard, there are fuckups and you've wasted millions of dollars and possibly put much more at risk and you don't gain the new magical feature advantage you wanted.

What kind of surprises me is that Apple doesn't have their own skunkworks R&D for coming up with new technologies like sapphire screens or other key components. They could work out what they wanted and then farm it out to someone who can mass produce it. Sort of like the Bell Labs or IBM labs.

FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.

Archiving in a compressed format is for idiots who don't understand coding quantization noise. Have fun re-ripping again in a few years.

Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.

Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.

Yes, and the three countries in the worst shape (as it relates to the spread of Ebola) all have a miserable record of taking lots of external support that could be educating their people, bolstering their healthcare systems, and generally improving the lives of everyone in those countries. But because of cultural inertia and rampant corruption (you know, the people who feel entitled to skim the support cash/material personally and not do things like march out into the rougher parts of their own country to explain to the rural population that they're killing themselves with primitive rituals), those are places that can't shake off the problem.

Do you want to know who is a smug western douche? You are. "Africa" isn't a place you can talk about in sweeping terms like you just have. Your dim, uninformed vision of it as a single, monocultural place with a common level of education and sophistication is absurd (and incredibly condescending, Mr. Holier Than Thou). "The entire continent" isn't the same. Countries like Nigeria have seen cases in this outbreak, but have headed it off at the pass because the population, culture, and approach to things like this are very different there than they are in, say, Liberia.

I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death. It's the 21st century. Billions and billions of dollars in aid flows into the countries most vulnerable to issues like this, and it gets squandered, diverted, or mis-applied because of toxic levels of corruption by comparatively educated people. They want to have a piece of that foreign aid action while also having the lazy inertia of backwards cultures that can't cope with this much human density. That sense of entitlement to both a primitive past and a piece of the largess of other countries that have moved on - it's unmistakable.

No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.

I don't see the problem here.

Unwanted to take advantage of this,

Now *that's* a freudian slip typo if I ever saw one!

No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.

What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.

Median energy density in waves is too low in most places. You need way too large machines to extract useful amounts of power. The few times you get sufficiently powerful waves they tend to rip your equipment to bits.

Wave energy is one of those ideas which seem really obvious from a distance, so the fact that project after project fails does not seem to dissuade anyone. They were obviously just doing it wrong.

I really hope that I am wrong and this turns out to be a great success, but I am not holding my breath.

70G is less space than I have on my phone.

A 70G tape seems silly in an age of cheap 64G thumb drives.

I've seen the same thing, but I think the entire backup process is something of a kabuki dance because just seeing "Job success" is a false sense of security in and of itself.

Do you know if the media is usable to restore from? Do you know if the data backed up is capable of actually being used to restore to function whatever system was backed up?

I think most places fall down on these two items. Where I work we are told to do restores from backup media to validate usability -- but just very partial restores, a handful of random files, which really only validates simple to verify data (a common file, small executable, etc). I've seen plenty of instances where the tapes (even LTO) stumbles further into the media -- is it the drive? The specific bit of media?

But almost nobody does a real restore, where they attempt to restore an entire system from backup (which almost always means multiple servers).

Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.

The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.

You just doubt that the grand jurors listened to eye witness testimony from the half dozen in question (out of the 60 witnesses they heard from) that actually told them what they needed to hear. Yes, they heard from LOTS of other witnesses who had anything from minor variations to outright debunked fabrications to share, but - as the prosecutor seeking charges against Wilson said - they heard from a consistent, corroborated core of media-averse African American witnesses who told the tale you don't want to hear.

Why are you focusing on the known liars? What's the point? We all know that dozens of people reported pure BS in order to get attention or while grinding some I-hate-police axe or the like. I'm not mentioning those people because, just like the grand jury concluded, their testimony was anywhere from muddle-headed to outright fiction-for-malice's sake. You're the only one who cares what the liars had to say. But they're irrelevant. It's the physical evidence and the credible witnesses that it corroborates that count. And speaking of counting, you're still not finding it comfortable enough to count all fingers on one hand, and move on to the next hand? Really? Or should we just right back to your opening complaint, the implication of doubt and dismissal about their testimony because you hadn't bothered to read it?

So you would pay $1200 for a hard drive "without hesitation"?

100% Yes for that storage space that ran at Samsung's claimed 1.6GB/s speed...

It would make a huge difference for image management where I'm often loading many 60MB TIFF files in the course of looking over processed images.

Now mind you I'd be backing that up on the cheaper "real" hard drives, but for working with that speed would be fantastic and easily worth the money in terms of saved time and frustration over the life of the drive.

The thing is, that drive will probably be more like $5k which is a much harder amount to take... probably $2k is the edge for my own use.