Mittens are being taxed now? Just in time for winter! Thanks, Obama!

ENIAC was Turing-complete, which is a full computer as nearly everyone understands it now.

No one claims America "invented computing", you crass buffoon.

Except for those pesky,slow mechanical relays... and total lack of conditional branches.

Did you actually read the article? He didn't ask for the ENIAC, specifically. They could have just grabbed an old IBM, but the guy assigned the project kicked it up a few notches. Parts of it are still unaccounted for, and one panel they recovered was destroyed. The missing panels would have to be recreated from plans-- if they still exist-- and the existing ones would have to be extensively repaired.

I have to agree that if we had a runoff system, people would probably stop complaining about the elector system that they know nothing about. Having a de facto two party system is simply not working. We probably should get rid of physical electors to streamline the process, but the idea of citizens electing their president through the states is a logical, consistent one.

You keep copying your archival backups from years ago? Hope it's encrypted.

Can I just load a station wagon full of LTO tapes and keep driving it around the country? Can't beat the bandwidth.

70G is less space than I have on my phone.

A 70G tape seems silly in an age of cheap 64G thumb drives.

Those QIC drives used to really stink. Only DDS and 8mm were usable, and those weren't really for consumers. QIC drives used to shoeshine like mad, even if on a SCSI controller like the one I had.

They didn't, but fortunately the Julian date was a signed integer.

Not to mention:

With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed

March 28, 2011

Now backup that dataset weekly for two months, tape wins easily. Even without the need for archives a minimal useful backup strategy favors tape.

> For $150 you can get a SSD with plenty of space for the vast majority of desktop roles,

Bullshit.

A $150 SSD will only be good enough for a machine you are using like a terminal. Anything beyond that and you will need more space.

I want more storage in my PHONE than that.

Exactly. RAID prevents a drive failure from being an immediate data loss.

Plus, RAID allows me to keep all of my bulk storage online while I am replacing a drive. That portion of my data hoard is not completely unavailable to me while I am copying data to the replacement drive.

Of course you want at least 2 copies of your data.

This is where the relative cheapness of HDD wins the day. You don't just need 1x of what you think you need but at least 2x.

Yes. Take that large number associated with SSD tech and DOUBLE it.

It's not disingenuous at all. It merely demonstrates the primary problem here, namely the price gap. Larger SSD drives are low capacity and expensive. They are priced outside the range of most consumers while also being inferior in terms of bulk storage. A larger SSD is less able to justify it's price premium than a larger HDD.

Even if SSD prices get less ridiculous, chances are that HDD prices/capacity will keep pace and continue to keep HDDs relevant.