I'm guessing that once the thing gets popular your browser will have built-in decoding capabilities, written and optimized in something more advanced than JS.

Pot-kettle much ?

I think sexconkor is pretty spot on regarding Joe-average usage of storage and what goes on it.
I'm not saying that you are 'lying', it's just that you probably move in 'media-heavy-circles' and reality might look a bit distorted to you.

Simply address 10 people in a 'random' location that is based on something different than your choice. If you have kids, simply address some of the parents of kids in your children's class and ask them about their computer habits. You might be surprised to learn that
* a big part of them don't give shit about computers; they have their phones and tablets and an SD card of 64Gb to store their photos is the ultimate Valhalla for them
* a big part, when asked about 'the internet' will tell you that 'the internet' is that thing that comes with Facebook
* a MINORITY will know the actual difference between OS's (not just windows = work + ios = shiny + linux = hackers); heck, I have had to learn to restrain myself form getting upset when they show a total ignorance when it comes to the difference between RAM and disk. ("My computer said out of memory but I still had 298Gb free ?! I didn't know what to do so deleted some pictures and after that it worked again." ...aarrrgg...
* a few might in fact be using the computer for all kinds of things : gaming, accounting, creativity, ... Often those are either hobbyists on computer related stuff or people that use the computer heavily at work and simply see it as a tool for their needs at home.
* some of the (usually) younger WILL be hoarding movies/music/etc.. and yes, they do spent quite a bit of money on storage, usually adding external disks etc as time goes by. Portability is important for them; and Gb/$. Speed is way down the requirements list, as is reliability. If the drive fails they can simply copy it again from a friend. IMHO, for most of them this is a phase that will pass as they grow up (**)
* and maybe, just maybe, you'll find 1 or 2 that actually take up 'storage' serious and have pretty decent setups at home.

But in general, the GP is right and people don't link the /concept/ of video (or music) with their computer. To them it makes more sense to watch video and photo's on their TV (at home) and/or their phones (on the move). I'll admit that it is "wasted potential", but it is the way it is and who am I to fault them?

(**: FYI: I amassed a shit-load of cd-roms full of MP3 music when I was young(ish); threw them all away last time I moved; never listened to them... I've heard similar stories from friends)

I agree, if he had really been broke, he'd certainly would have proclaimed it MEGA-BROKE !

Do I understand this correctly ? You're willing to fork out quite a bit of money to have 'a proper desktop/NAS setup'; you 'like having the highest quality copies available' but when it comes down to it you'll stick to "(re-)DL everything".

Can't say I blame the producers for not investing in a HD version of B5.

Talking to a supermarket employee a while back (Delhaize,Belgium) it seems that ever since they introduced the self-scanning system (which is voluntarily btw, you can still use the 'normal' cashiers if you prefer) the internal stock is much more consistent. Or in other words, a lot less gets stolen ever since.
She couldn't quite explain why this was but it was remarkable. We kind of agreed that it might be because thieves will avoid these shops because they fear there must now be a a lot more (hidden) cameras, security tags, etc around the shop to stop people from cheating, but apparently in reality no such changes were introduced.

Personally I like using the self-scanning because the scanner will display me the price of things, 'warn' me if there are special offers ("buy 2 get 3"), shows the total price, etc... That said, it does bring a bit of extra stress along, especially when you get one of those random checks and somehow you automatically fear you must have missed something and will get caught! It only happened to me once and I was actually quite embarrassed about it although it had been an honest mistake. As a result, whenever I think I screwed up nowadays and it's simply too much work to start verifying the number of items in my cart vs the number indicated on the scanner I'll simply go via the normal cashier and have them (re)scan it for me.

PS: They tried to introduce the single-queue to many cashiers thing a while back in some Carrefours here but people simply didn't like it. I'm guessing it works best if the shop has some kind of big lane that fans out at the end?! In my case people were gathered in a central spot and then had to go to whatever mini-queue they got assigned. It simply didn't feel efficient even though it might have been. Luckily the self-scanning queue wasn't involved in the experiment =)

Interesting line of thought and kind of true: water gets more dense as you go deeper.
But what if there is a barrier preventing the rock to sink all the way to its neutral buoyancy level ? Call it, I don't know... "the bottom" or something...

Well, my energy bill is probably 80% in heating, 20% electricity... so regardless of the device we're talking about I'd love to have something in my basement that can 'sufficiently fast' heat water to say 75C, assuming I'd be able to regulate it based on actual usage (think summer vs winter + I don't mind installing a big buffer, but e.g when I go on holiday simply throwing out all unused energy seems wasteful).
And it'd need to be safe and economically viable too off course.

I had to power-cycle my C= 64 ...

It all depends on your application off course, but I'm going to be dare-devil and claim that the GUI is at most half the program.
So, even though you may need to convert the GUI from 'PC' to 'Tablet'; if things are decently written you can still re-use quite a bit of the underlying code/layers and it all is handled nicely in the same dev. environment you're already used to. I do think it has a lot of things going for it.

If I remember correctly, there used to be pneumatic tube-systems in bigger cities in the past; but they got out of fashion. Wikipedia has some interesting bits on it.

Might trigger a whole new arms-race where Amazon will add surveillance/guardian drones etc ... before you know it the sky will be full with things whizzing up and down, firing blue and red lasers at each other =)

Somehow makes me think of https://www.goodreads.com/book...

I've had goods delivered worth hundreds and not even have to sign off for it. (not that those scribbles are worth much IMHO, I've never understood why they don't require a picture of the person accepting the goods... heck, have them hold the package with the label clearly visible, should make denial-ability (sp?) much more cumbersome than it is now)
I've also had goods delivered worth peanuts that required showing my ID and the person in charge copying the number on some form and then me having to sign it.

Courier services are weird at that sometimes... I'm guessing it has to do with the type of insurance that comes with the company/package/...

Weird this got modded 'Interesting'.

Sure, we pay people to have those goods delivered to our door; it's called a service and the people providing it need to feed their families too. That said, if you eliminate those costs by 'automating delivery by way of drones', you'll add the price for buying/training/maintaining these and the whole infrastructure that comes with it; hence, you eliminate known costs by adding new guesstimated (bigger?) costs. TCO is mostly a buzzword in my vocabulary, but in this case it probably is worth having a look at. On top of that you'll probably need to keep a backup 'manual service' at hand anyway because these things won't be able to do their job when it rains/snows/storms/... heck, a bit of wind and you're finished. Nobody cares if the postman wears shorts or a scarf, we 'know' he'll come through.

Also, you may consider bicycle couriers a nuisance, having these things whizz around everywhere sounds (!) much more annoying to me. Might look 'cool' in Sci-Fi movies, it would get on my nerves quite fast in reality I think.

The part I'm I think will be the big show-stopper is the likelihood of people 'catching goodies from the sky'. Given the technical restrictions of these drones it seems fair to assume they'll be used mostly for 'small but expensive' goods. What's to stop people from building a microwave-gun to fry the electronics and run of with the cargo ? Heck, a decent slingshot could probably bring them down. I realize one could rob any courier service, but with drones it's going to be dead-simple unless they start building in all kinds of security measures but thus limiting the capacity/range/... of the machine.

Although I think you severely overestimate the value of your pr0n-collection, I'd simply would like to point out that while you were spending all your time securing your networks and data it seems your homepage was reduced to 404's... which in a way is more secure too off course.

Experience shows differently : SSD works perfect day 1, isn't SEEN any more by the BIOS the day after. Tried on different machines afterwards. And no, nothing special happened to the laptop in the time between. Simply went to the hotel and back to the client the day after.
(And no, it wasn't an OCZ but for the love of god don't remember if it was a Samsung or Crucial)

I've never had that happen to a HDD. That doesn't mean I've never had spinning platters fail on me; but usually things there start by either
* SMART reporting non-recoverable errors
* major slow-down of the entire system for no apparent good reason, usually accompanied by a HDD-LED that simply simply keeps on all the time.
In all cases I was able to recover 99% of the data on there. In one case I had to put the disk in the freezer (USB enclosure) as it would only work when the temperature was _very_ low. Sure it always took a long time to do and was a PITA, but I still prefer that to the failing SSD.

I've heard the theory over and over again that an SSD that runs out of writes will settle as a read-only disk so you might not be able to run an OS from it any more, but surely can mount it as a data-drive to recover all your info.... In practice all I've heard/read/experienced is that things look A-OK for one moment and go poof the next.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Samsung EVO and I've revived my dad's pc with my old Intel SSD; but making sure to backup things on a regular basis is absolutely crucial.