Cue the Star Trek music as the Enterprise begins to circle yet another duplicate of the planet Earth. Spock turns to the Captain and says "It seems an exact duplicate of the Sol system, but formed billions of years earlier. Before even the creation of your solar system Captain. Most interesting."

Yes, but that is a PEBCAK issue, not a technical one. It would probably be the same with any other secure off site storage. In this case, the backup hard drive is probably the least of the families worries or at least allows for eventual recovery if the computer is locked and nobody knows the passwords.

Every year, I just back up my files to an external hard drive and put it in my safety deposit box in the bank. If my house burns down, I still have all my photos (long since scanned in all my old film stuff), documents, and even music. I've got the last several years in there so it would take three or so drives not working to really lose everything (after I lost everything at home). Usually I spend a little extra money to make sure I have small external hard drives that don't have wall worts to power them as they'll fit in the safety deposit box easier and I won't have to keep track of the wall worts either. In the past, I suggested my parents do the same with a flash drive and my father scoffed when I mentioned keeping on in the safety deposit box. Of course, his computer got hit with the encryption malware and they lost everything including the flash drive we back up everything several years earlier because they can't remember where it might be.

I can't really argue with that. This makes me sort of sad.

Actually, I thought the plots were fine for the prequels. The scripts needed a rewrite to clean up a few details, rework a character or two, and fix dialogue, but the general idea was ok.

Thank god.

Probably should actually say 'Designed in California. Made in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Assembled in China.'

Because, due to history, mainly WW2, vacation as well as sick days and health care have mostly been relegated to the employers rather than by the government. Easy explanation is that it happened because during WW2, there was a pay freeze mandated due to the war effort, so employers started offering healthcare,sickdays, and vacation, above and beyond any required by law, as part of the job offer because that's what they could offer to get new employees in a time of a labor shortage. This continued after the war as it was now a standard part of employment. Thus, the middle class was largely taken care of and there was no large push to get the government involved. The cultural expectation is that if you want better of any of these things, you should get a better job which should just require work on your part. Also coming from that, is the cultural expectation that if you don't have better that what the law demands employers give you, that you are a slacker.

I have it pretty good in the US and get two and half weeks a year of sick time (which carries over from year to year, so at this time, I actually have about five months of sick time since I hardly ever use it) and after ten years, five weeks of vacation time a year (which also carried over). I'm happy where I'm at because while I could probably find a job that pays more, I probably couldn't find one that gave me as much vacation time which is now in higher demand to me than more money.

I still am. While I like Sections 1 & 3 of the Libertarian party platform and don't think any other party has anything like them, I've gotten too old for Section 2 but see it as a pipe dream that would never get implemented even if the Libertarians did get into office.

Statements by friends of mine here on H-1B visas would say otherwise. The time it takes to switch over sponsors is usually more than the time given before having to leave the country. They typically lived in fear of getting laid off before they were able to get their green cards or become citizens which was taking years to do.

Common sense is supposed to mean being able to learn from your mistakes. What it usually means is 'why no, I don't have any data to support my statement.

If it pissed you off enough to post about it, it probably was good art.

Because it's still 100 years away. Let others be the pioneers, spend the research money, and then come in and deploy the same tech for cheap.

Consumers yes, Enterprise, perhaps not so much. Enterprise doesn't like to upgrade and stuck with XP till they pretty much had to move to Win7 (although many including my company are still paying for XP patches for current deployments). Enterprise will stick with Win7 as long as they can again. Moving to Win8 looks like a user training issue that would be a nightmare in the Enterprise setting. Of course, few enterprise would consider upgrading anyway while the current standard is still being supported, so Microsoft probably had one or two upgrades to do what they wanted and it wouldn't upset their Enterprise licensed users for Windows and Office that account for a lot of their income. Win10 will probably be the next Enterprise standard and if they do mess it up, it might allow for somebody else to eat some of their market. I've already seen vendors switching to Linux servers for the back end on Enterprise systems. If MS messes things up and it would mean user retraining and software rewriting anyway, vendors and enterprise might look at other options.

Great! As a physicist, I eagerly look forward to your supporting math to back up those posits which contradict the math I have already seen.