Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)

Remind me to put a copy of <insert horrible title> on your book shelves next time you leave the door open. It's not a crime, but it is annoying.

I expect a bit better from Apple. After all, you pay a ton of cash for their hardware. It just shows that the corporate culture at Apple is moving further and further away from computing and more towards low cost media sales and commission on payments. Too bad, cause I really like OSX.

I agree. However, the nice thing about keeping the data live is that it will benefit from any upgrades you do over the years... what seems like a lot of storage today will be trivial in the future. And you can piggyback on your video storage backup for all of your backup needs. But yeah, the simplest thing to do is copy to a pair of drives and put them in a safe deposit box. From past experience, I would probably add a drive full of parity data as well :)

I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.

Let's not fight over technicalities of law. You and I appear to be on the same side and want the same thing. The people in charge are wrong whether it is technically legal or not.

Thank you. This point is the only really important one. What they were doing may not have even been illegal, which is the whole problem. A rogue agency would have been easy to correct in comparison to an entire government which had overstepped it's bounds.

Weird Al has a whole song about just this very thing.

Assume Ebola goes airborne and hits all. Once it is through the population, it is done. OTOH, radiation is an environmental issue that would continue for centuries. Biological death is far better than nukes.

You did not understand what i meant.

If something is inside the universe we can interact with it. If we cant interact with something, then it is outside our space-time.

I dont waste my time thinking about untestable things.

So in KDEs terms that would be 1 year?

we have no idea what is outside our universe. we can only test theories inside the universe.

making testable predictions is the realm of science.

making untestable predictions is the realm of religion.

the hypothesis that there is no god/higher force outside the universe is as untestable as the hypothesis that ther is any kind of god outside the universe.

as a physicist I therefore am agnostic, buy I expect religions not to make any conclusions which affect my life by conclusions from unproven fairytales

The truth is, that whenever the world has mass die offs due to nature, we do not get wars.
Right now, we have massive numbers of small wars popping up. This has gotten old. In addition, it could lead to a real war with nukes.

But, if the world takes a massive loss of life due to say Ebola going airborne, it would lower the likelihood of a nuke war.