Interesting. I could swear I remembered reading a similar article where it was specifically Seagate that was called out, but I guess memory is an imperfect thing.

On another note, I like your handle!

I was working on a project with a large bank, and during one of my calls, the bank's project manager told me a comical story about their back-up procedures. They had switched from tapes to hard drives, and every day, when the truck drove up for that office's data back-ups (not actual banking data, but backups of all the administrative systems in that office), due to contracts which were still in force after years, it was a huge trailer truck with nothing to put into it but a single 3.5" hard drive. The contracts apparently specified a vehicle that could handle peak data activity with old-school tapes, and hadn't been amended.

Beyond cost, it just amazed me that they were putting a huge empty truck on the streets of Manhattan every day, and I wondered how many times that got repeated each day.

Or one seagate and a subscription to Backblaze!

Note: I subscribe to Backblaze, having had two back-up drives fail for me in the last two years. Luckily, it was just the back-up drives...

I'm just kind of amazed that Seagate is still around. I remember some years back, there was a huge fraud scandal where they were claiming huge volumes of unsold inventory to be sold in order to keep their stock price up. They were storing the drives in 18-wheelers and, at night, they were backing the trucks up against each other so that if an investigator wanted to break in, they had to physically move the truck, giving them time to respond. It was crazy.

Cue the paranoid right wing "Obama wants to take your Bitcoins" brigade.

They do call it "scuttled" if the vessel had been taken over and was under full control of the people who sank it. It was not sunk in battle, but after a surrender.

I saw a pretty cool show about these subs. They tooled around to multiple targets, only to be called to the next just as the current target was removed from their objectives. Not a single attack was launched from these amazing machines. If the timing had been a little different, history would include at least a few very interesting twists.

I have a friend like that. She is so different from her siblings in her intellect and drive, and while she's a lot like her mother in some ways, as much as she loves her father, she's nothing like him. He's 6'4" and skinny as a rail, she's 5' and round. He's uneducated, extremely conservative and a bible thumper, and she's college educated, heavily invested in the sciences, and herself an educator. He...

Well, about five years ago, her mother confided to her that for a couple of years before she (my friend) was born, she was having an affair with the the husband from another couple that she (the mother) and the father had been playing bridge with. I saw a picture of the biological father, and he's the spitting image of my friend's first son. It's crazy.

And guess what? He's educated, a successful entrepreneur, politically liberal, involved in his religious community but not a bible thumper. I'm sure there's some nurture in there, but nature seems to be pretty important, at least in her case...

Thanks! I didn't know about the FTC option. Hopefully it works better than the "do not call" list.

I'm confused. Could you please make a car metaphor?

I can't decide whether to respond, "...says the AC" or, "...how the heck did this turn into a liberal vs. conservative issue?"

Nice. Let's play six degrees of politicization of a thread!

Well, another way to think about it is that the bulk mail is there to smooth out the cost and revenue for the delivery process. You might get real mail 2-3 times per week, but I'd be willing to wager that there are individuals and even whole neighborhoods who don't get first class mail more than once a week. Without something to deliver daily, it might make sense to reduce schedules in certain areas even more, which would reduce the overall value of the service because then even sending out mail would take longer. Incremental cost of delivery would go up, overall value would go down. Without heavy subsidies, getting rid of bulk/DMA delivery would likely further the divide between haves and have-nots.

Don't get me wrong; I despise bulk mail, and it inevitably goes right in the recycling bin for me. However, to suggest that it's a pure subsidy for the businesses that use it, without also showing the benefit that the USPS and the people who send and receive mail through it is not entirely fair.

My personal view is not a popular one: I think it is OK for a service like the USPS to be heavily subsidized in locations and during times when it is losing money. Not all things of value necessarily produce enough revenue to reflect that value. Destroying the mail infrastructure would, in my humble opinion, injure our democracy and lead to problems that we have yet to imagine.

That being said, there are other ways to skin this cat. If the folks on the Hill were to amend the Constitution to indicate that Internet access is a human right, and provide funding such that even the poorest of the poor had basic access via, say, smart phones at a rate which is affordable to all, I'd be OK with gutting the USPS. But I don't see that happening any time soon.

Of course, now that I think about it, T-Mobile is sort of doing that. If you just want to pay your bills, send a few emails a week, their free 200 MB for life for tablet owners is actually pretty good...

Under current law, my understanding is that this is not possible. Occasionally, some enterprising congress critter suggests a new law requiring providers of services to maintain all sorts of logs, but the folks on the left typically attack it as being an unacceptable privacy invasion, and the folks on the right attack it as being an unsustainable burden on business.

But it's possible that some day, a law will pass requiring all companies to keep exhaustive, indexed laws of all electronic communication, both by internal parties and clients. It's not likely, and it'd be expensive to implement and difficult to enforce, but it's not impossible.

"The free university." Hm. I wonder how that magical beast ever existed. Did it really run without funds?

(Hint: No. the historical fountainheads of free ideas and scientific discovery have, for the most part, survived on significant amounts of government--i.e. taxpayer--funding in most civilized societies.)

...Apple does not have to fail for Linux to succeed, nor visa versa.

The comments on this thread remind me of heated conversations I had as a 13 year old, when my friends and I couldn't agree on which was better, the Commodore 64, the Apple IIe or the Atari 800. Anyone who's read my previous comments probably knows that I was firmly in the Commodore 64 camp.