If it were just KB, that would only be somewhat annoying and confusing, like US vs imperial pints.

But when you introduce binary MB and GB they all have to be mixed, and it becomes absolutely infuriating. It makes doing the math to figure out how much stuff will fit on a drive almost as hard as using Roman numerals.

You're basically changing the radix of your numbers depending on their magnitude, for no good reason. (Disk drives have never had any capacity factor physically based on any power of two.) That's just stupid.

I can't fathom why some people get so angry because they think that drive manufacturers are trying to cheat them out of a couple of percent capacity, when it's been common knowledge for decades. But for some reason these same people don't mind having to break out a calculator to help them do what would often otherwise be trivial mental arithmetic.

Do you mean floppy disk manufacturers, who thought that a megabyte = 1000*1024?

I fondly remember my collection of concrete records. They had a uniquely gravelly sound that can't be duplicated by any digital technology. Sadly, I eventually got rid of them all because they were just too damned heavy to lug around.

Please keep reading past just the first five words of my original post and then try again.

A. Probably not. I'll bet that cave men burned coal or bitumen when they could find it.

B. Hydro power is not "green" at all. Most dams are small ecological disasters.

I said grubbing it and burning it.

If you were trying to make any kind of demonstration of reading comprehension, that wasn't it.

And you can make all the false choice assertions you want. It doesn't mean that we can't work to pull ourselves out of the dark ages and stop burning dirt and spewing its byproducts into the air.

I have been limiting my use. So it looks like I'm justified in telling you that you ought to be working towards getting a better source of power, not just spouting off about the status quo being inevitable.

Grubbing dirt out of the ground and burning it is a "dark ages" thing.

On the bright side, my math indicates that 8e13 paper chads would take up about 20 thousand cubic meters of space. That would probably be enough free fuel to heat your home for a lifetime.

Hard sectored or soft sectored?

It would be best to decide up front before putting in the order for 80 million disks.

Only if one of the financial crises that happens every couple of decades doesn't wipe you out.

The main problems are:
A: Most people don't save money without being forced.
B: Most people don't know how to invest.
C: Even if you know how to invest, you can still lose your shirt.
D: Irrespective of the above intractable problems, saving money and investments means nothing more than shifting bit patterns on some hard drives. It doesn't in any way solve the problem of supporting an millions of idle and ailing retirees over ever-expanding lifetimes. Any saved "assets" will get devalued in the markets to reflect that reality.

So your scenario does not do anything at all to address the problem of what to do with retirees in the real world, other than let a good fraction of them die in a gutter.

If the government is going to force me to spend money, I'd just as soon have them handle it directly, instead of making me hand it over to be skimmed by profiteering middlemen. (Who will probably eventually need to be bailed out with taxpayer money anyway).

See: Obamacare.

Yeah, that would be better handled by outfits like AIG and Lehman Brothers.

Just imagine how much junk mail it would take to raise enough charity funds to replace every government assistance program. The USPS would be profitable again after only a few days!

By adding extra useless variables, as I originally pointed out. And introducing a sea of "&&"s. I guess at least it looks more like a bowl of pretzels than a dish of spaghetti.

In a language like C++, unless there's a "try" block within the function, they are exactly the same as a "return" as far as that function is concerned, and can be invoked from the same places. I don't see why you think that that's acceptable if return isn't.

If you look at the FAQs for the Go language, the designers explain why they think exceptions suck in general, and why they largely replaced them with multiple return values. So not everyone shares your enthusiasm for exceptions, which are really just a kind of "return" statement on steroids.

It's for the same reason that the murder rate inside Disney World is very low.