> As for aiming... yes, it is trivial. The Mariana Trench is very big, and GPS quite precise.

No.

> > > There is no possibility of anyone getting it back,
> > Correct. No one ever went down there. Especially not robots.
> Three times in total

Whatever.

> Not much down there. Just lots and lots of water, and very little life.

You don't know that. Touching down stirred up loads of silt so people couldn't see anything.

> Water that takes a very long time to circulate to the surface.

That is true.

> It's a perfect disposal site. Deposit-only, no withdrawals. Cheap. The only place that might get contaminated is a vast expanse of uninhabited nothing.

Based on our current knowledge and even then it's not even close to an undisputed fact.
As we have vast amounts of experience dealing with time frames that are several times longer than even the farthest reaches recorded history, this one is a no-brainer.

What is your take on faster-than-light travel and endless energy? We could use some help there, as well.

> The easiest would be to just put it in boxes and throw it down the Mariana Trench.

No risk of an accident at sea; storms never happen. Aiming is trivial, as well.

> There is no possibility of anyone getting it back,

Correct. No one ever went down there. Especially not robots.

> and if it ever comes back up naturally it'll be long after safe decay.

Again, correct. The only natural way for it to come up is by the boxes growing feet and walking to shore. No other way. And no contamination of whatever is down there, either.

> The problem is political: Throwing nuclear waste in the ocean violates international law, and for some reason no politician wants to start the process of changing that.

Pity.

I just have one question: Are you being sarcastic and why did people mod you insightful instead of funny?

I see the sensationalist and wrong headline; the blurb is folded in.

I click expand and, lo behold, it's an anonymous submission that links to Phoronix. Yet. Again.

I guess none of the mods will read this anyway, but why can't we let this cesspool die by ignoring it into oblivion?

btrfs is simply not there, yet.

My off-site git-annex machine uses zfs-fuse with RAIDZ2 and copies=2.

Just because I can reasonably assume that one location is safe does not mean that I can't use a tool to manage and verify all copies automagically ;)
Especially since my laptop does not have any checksumming FS but I still need to use it to make copies while on the road.

I am going to be boring and tell you what I learned from the founder of a data recovery company.

1) One single pass of zeros is enough. urandom if you want to be paranoid.
2) If you want, or need (auditing, etc), to physically destroy the drives: Bend the platters. As soon as the platters are bent, you can not spin them for data extraction, any more. Keeping in mind the distance between head and platters, even the slightest bend becomes irreparable. And as soon as you can't spin them, you are looking at scanning the whole platter without any fancy off-the-shelf controller logic.

According to him, those are the only two cases when they tell the customer over the phone that they don't even have to bother sending the disks in.

The point is that the platters get bent.

> Every 3 months

Aye.

> , never ceases to amaze me.

Not me. I care deeply about this topic and all the common answers/options are shit.

I knew people in the US paid for receiving SMS, but you pay for receiving calls, as well?

1) Never use DVDs. Ever. They eat data like no tomorrow.
2) Guard against bit rot. Make sure you have checksums of all files so you know when your media degrades.
3) Maintain at least three separate copies in at least two different locations.
4) Ideally, have offline storage, as well. Check on it twice a year, but else: do not touch!
5) As of today, git-annex is your best bet to automate all of the above. Make sure you use the most current version and prepare for a somewhat bumpy road if you don't know git, yet.

I am sure there is some way to deal with tectonic movement over the long term and I would love to hear about it.

is that it exists and you are not spanked to death with a paddle for it.

This is brought to you by "fuck you, I already paid for watching that flick with money and/or by watching the clearly marked and separate advertising."

Also, it does not matter if they hold up soap and grin, all people use Dell/Apple/Nokia/younameit, everyone one two and a half men drinks Radeberger or if companies in Transformers only accept one kind of CC. I like to think I notice that crap and hope others do, as well.
If anything, it leaves a negative image of the company, for me.

> 2) Your brain actually works harder in the weird situation where it's got to talk to someone who's not there â" humans haven't really evolved to do it well.

Does not really make sense, does it? I don't look at passengers while talking to them so they are not "there", either. Same for people in the back seat unless I see them in the rear view mirror.

Unless the concept of cell phones is still new and exciting, I don't believe it's inherently weird due to our path of evolution. If anything, we should all be stunned into silence every time we switch on the light.. And we are pretty used to artificial lighting, by now.

...all of you are more or less pretending that this is a blatant rip-off from day one or Intel giving the consumer more options.

What no one seems to anticipate is how this will change the market.

Is this a move that will give the customer more options at the same initial price? Yes.

But history has shown time and time again that once a company has the ability to press more money out of a customer, they will.
Be it the scumbag OEM who can now claim speeds of "up to* 3 GHz" or similar, be it Intel who may very well run scary-ish ads and campaigns that urge you upgrade or simply "options" which are really mandatory but the average Joe does not find out until way too late.

This is not about replacing the artificial crippling of CPUs with upgrade options. This is about creating an infrastructure to get more money out of the end customer.

And yes, if you are reading this, chances are you will not fall for it even though it annoy you. Consider yourself lucky. Your parents, friends, etc? Not so much.

I always disliked Dark Matter as too magic and Dark Energy even more so.

While I have no problem acknowledging that there won't be any definite answers for quite some time, a basic principle we simply didn't find yet seems more pleasing than matter we can't find.

Either way, interesting times, etc :)

...as a general rule would be awesome. Not only for games but for everything. Artwork etc would still be an issue, but at least the code could be used/updated/improved...

I would love to have Master of Orion _1_ released. TCP/IP and larger integers for the global account. Larger universes, more tech levels to get to, maybe moving stars, improved mass updates to resource management....

I would _pay_ for that.

(MoO2 & 3 can die in a fire)