Life does tend to imitate art, although the cycles are a few decades out of sync.

Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending. The magazine of fantasy and science fiction was full of depressing dystopian stories. Dangerous Visions, Last Days of Man on Earth, Driftglass... The book stands were loaded with depressing scifi. It wasn't a particularly uplifting time. I remember wondering at the time whether the industry go through cycles, where to differentiate yourself you have to write depressing fiction, and then everyone follows along, and then to differentiate yourself you have to go with, I dunno, a happy ending, and everyone follows suit, back and forth. Or whether literature and media tend to track some manic-depressive cycle of society. Or drives it.

In my experience, even blu-ray isn't big enough. And it's really slow. Raw hard drives are cheap enough that it makes sense to use them as backup media. (Just don't drop one.)

Agreed. Mirroring is not a backup either, because data corruption or erroneous deletion happens on both drives.

A true backup goes to media (which could be another drive) which is then disconnected from the computer and stored somewhere else. The further away (within reason) the better.

A good plan might be to cultivate a friend who also has data he doesn't want to lose, and store each other's backups, thus protecting both of you from local disaster (like a house fire).

Are you speaking from experience?

As a photographer with over 100k clicks on three bodies, I have just over 2 TB of my own photos on a dedicated drive. I have a two step backup system:

1) With a USB "drive toaster", perodically back up my files to a raw drive, mark it with a sharpie, and put it on the shelf in a different part of the house.

2) About twice a year, ghost my primary storage to a brand new drive, install the new drive in place of the old drive, mark the old drive with a sharpie, drive it over to a friend's house and put it in his fire safe. This serves as my hardware refresh and disaster recovery.

The older drives from previous backups in his safe are repurposed for music/movie storage, or used to rebuild PCs for other family members.

Were I really serious, I'd also mirror my primary storage, but at some point you have to say "this is good enough". Besides, any photos I've published exist on various websites, and I can always fetch copies from there in an emergency.

I suppose that's true, but to foil the "go home" you'd have to jam GPS as well as control signals. And the obvious counter to that is inertial guidance.

So has the iphone. It's just an iphone. Other than color, all iterations of a model are, and must always be, exactly the same. I guess there's a lesson for kids in there somewhere.

You're right. And as I said in another response, I'm thinking that media drones will also get a legal pass, as long as they're not used to embarrass the police, by, you know, exposing their misuse of surplus military equipment, as just one example.

I don't think private individuals using drones to be a peeping tom is a serious problem, but assuming for the sake of argument it is, consider that drones are cheap and getting cheaper, so losing a few may not be a problem. Also, they're hard to see at night, which is when all the cool stuff is happening. And you know, right, that modern drone camera systems downlink to a base station for a live feed? So dropping the drone doesn't destroy the video.

Jamming the drone may give you some temporary relief, but even that won't actually cause the drone to crash, as modern drones have a "go home" failsafe if they lose signal.

On the other hand, touching off a firearm in the city limits under circumstances not considered life-or-death is generally frowned upon by the local constabulary. Likewise, but much less serious, jamming in general is frowned upon by those same agencies.

But again, I doubt that individuals using drones for some purile neighbor spying will become a thing. Much more likely would be drones deployed by the media, which may get a legal pass as long as they're not embarrassing the police, private security entities, and of course, any local or national government agency.

The impression I got was that she was more against private ownership of camera-equipped drones. I'm guessing that this argument will be used to put limits on individually owned drones, not on government owned drones.

My daughter has been out of high school for a couple years, but during her junior and senior years, she said that kids tended to prefer android over the iphone because you could change the look and feel of the phone by customizing the desktop or substituting a completely different desktop, which they referred to as "bling", whereas every iphone was like every other iphone. Individuality was important, and the iphone was considered generic and boring.

Of course, it was an art magnet school, and kids tended to be more quirky and individual than your standard public school student in America.

For awhile she was in a retro phase. We found a "geek junk store" that had a bunch of older Blackberrys for something like five bucks apiece. She had a collection of different models and would swap the sim card back and forth depending on her mood that day.

I appreciate that the above describes a market segment that Apple has no interest in pursuing.

At least, that's what apple tells them.

We're reaching the flat end of the curve. It'll all be marketing from here on out.

> The judges sharply criticised the practice of selling PCs only together with a non-free operating system as "a commercial policy of forced distribution".

All together now... YA THINK??