Dropping hard drives tends to destroy them too, but that doesn't rule them out. Basically if you fling tapes around, you're doing it wrong. Have a care.

"Always" is a fighting word :-)

I was there for the touted Exabyte revolution. 2 GB on a digital-8 cartridge sounds puny now but it was revolutionary then. Except for one thing. The reliability and lifetime of the drives was piss poor. OK, two things. The recorded data on tape was very marginal as well.

Tape is still critically important. Admit it, though. Even LTO6 looks like a sad sack of shit compared to the capacity of this drive. No chance in hell tape can keep up the game much longer.

Between PVR, data mining markets, virtual machines, backup data, servers, and etc. At 12TB I still don't have enough space.

12 TB, snort. I've got over 100 TB worth of 2 and 3 TB drives on-line or on-call a boot away. The most critical part is mirrored RAID-Z2 (4 drives' worth of redundancy per data item), and most of the rest is ad hoc replicated via rsync, some of it several times, so there is nowhere near 100 TB of data stored, but there is a lot.

I would definitely be happy with 64 of these 8 TB. At least for a while.

They just lifted them into place. The big ones might have taken two to four people. If you hadn't noticed that each generation has gotten weaker, lazier, and more morally depraved than the last, ask your parents and/or grandparents -- reserve the afternoon. Thus, by extension, back in ancient times, people had strength, stamina, and willpower that we attribute only to supernatural beings today.

I would MUCH, MUCH rather have half speed double capacity. Just about all my storage comes much closer to write once, read mostly.

Do you even know what you are talking about?

What he mentioned about google fiber is the epitome of free market.

Lambdas. Ha. Lambdas are older than I am, and they think they discovered them. Garbage collection, too. Yeah, we know, functional programming and garbage collection will save the day and no one will ever have to write a loop, mutate an object, or allocate memory again. How many years have they been saying that? Probably longer than they've been saying RISC will kick CISCs butt, and ... oh, hell, the young'ns don't even know what that is, do they.

I'm fascinated by this concept of "magazine" to which you refer. Do you have a newsletter I might subscribe to that explains it in more detail?

In other words, you pay for a phone line that you can't use because the guy hung up thirty minutes ago and you haven't gotten back to hang yours up yet.

Just like the majority of aircraft incidents are caused by "pilot error" because, well, there was a pilot on board and he didn't stop whatever bad thing it was from happening. Autopilot went south, drove the elevator trim full nose up, and the pilot couldn't get the nose back down before the plane went into a stall/spin/crash/die? That was his error. Or he failed to cancel his flight because he didn't detect the problem before taking off. That's "pilot error", too, just worded as "improper preflight".

So from what you say, as a potential driver of an autonomous vehicle, whenever it barfs and tries to hand control over to me, I should refuse. Otherwise, when I can't fix whatever situation the car has gotten me into it will be my fault ("accidents happen just after the driver takes control"). To keep from being sued for the accident, I'll have to take the position that "hey, I was never in control, it was Google that failed, sue them."

Of COURSE a large number, even majority, of accidents in autonomous vehicles will happen "just after" the vehicle has bailed out on the driver and said "tag, you're it". Especially to those drivers who want to abandon their responsibility for their own safety and sleep instead of drive. "I said WAKE UP human, I can't deal with thi.... (sound of bending metal) oh never mind."

She explained that since they called her it seemed legitimate.

Isn't that reverse logic? Anyone can call anyone. If some guy walks up to me on the street and offers to sell me a watch, does that seem safer than going to a jeweler's shop?

Which includes profit for lawyers, because you can take it as a fact that there will be lawsuits every time an autonomous vehicle kills or injures someone. That's a natural side-effect of outrageous promises that would be called "false advertising" were the same kind of claims applied to a toaster or television.

or even transport children with no adult in the car.

Not in this nanny world! People don't let their kids play in the yard anymore, for fear a roving priest might molest them.

Yes, there is. It is humans themselves. Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that. Premies get intensive care, diabetics get insulin, and there are any number of other juvenile (and adult) diseases that don't "cull the herd" anymore. And even before modern medical miracles, humans went out of their way to deal with childhood diseases as an intelligent process. It has been a very long time since the wolves or other predators were allowed to pick off the weakest humans in the pack.

Diabetes, cancers, gastric disorders (Celiac, e.g.), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and any number of other increasingly common disorders would contradict that. Even the now almost ubiquitous eye glasses show a declining trend in physical abilities. The increase in IVF for women who are otherwise unable to have children naturally only tends to continue the genes that create that problem.

Of course there are, and you know what I meant was not "misbehaving" or any other sentient meaning to "bad", I meant genes that were involved in genetic disorders. Whether that's a gene that results in sickle cell or juvenile diabetes or whatever, that's what I mean by a "bad gene".

Not all traits are trade-offs. Tell a child with leukemia or diabetes that his "trait" is actually beneficial in some way. Tell someone who is badly nearsighted and can't see anything without glasses that his trait is beneficial in some way. Tell the child who is born with a cleft palate that you aren't going to do cosmetic surgery because his trait is actually beneficial. Let the Down Syndrome kids use their beneficial trait to make good lives on their own.

You're bending so far over backwards to be politically correct that you're making ridiculous statements.

I really don't care what name you want to apply to it, when you remove natural selection from the process of evolution, evolution no longer works. Humans have not been subject to natural selection for most negative traits for a very long time. No, we haven't managed to remove it completely and there is still infant mortality, but we're working as hard as we can to keep natural selection, and thus evolution, from working for us. By keeping natural selection from working for us, we're being "compassionate" and "social" and all those good things, but we're also allowing the non-beneficial changes to propagate and reducing the benefit from the beneficial ones.

I really have to figure out how the human fossil record gives you that information. No, I really don't care, because that's so far in the past that it was before existing civilizations and thus before current efforts to defeat natural selection that it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.