(Flooded area...Jetpack Guy flies in near house with a family of 4 on top of it, as the flood waters rise...)

Jetpack guy sees problem, calls in real helicopter.....

All of your scenarios imply that Mr. Jetpack has to save the day by him / her self. Real rescues are a team sport.

That said, it isn't a compelling sort of thing to own. Expensive, likely cranky of maintenance and training. Limited range. More useful to get a bunch of cheap drones and running around looking for people to help.

No, it just means that Skynet is more patient than you are.

Then don't host adverts. You are a business, even if you aren't trying to make a 'profit'. TANSTAAFL.

But you aren't going to get anywhere near a forest fire in a little battery powered drone. Watch the big heavy helicopters bounce around over the flames. A drone is going to go tits up rapidly in any updraft. After you lose your thousand dollar toy you might think of a less expensive stupid hobby next time - like buying a boat.

A drone sitting over the firefighters or behind them is going to be completely out of the flight line. No danger to anybody since all of the firefighters are wearing hard hats anyway.

And hopefully, the pros with the $20 000 drones that have the range and altitude to get in the way are smart enough to read the NOTAMs and have some common sense. Yes, there will be exceptions, but you can't make stupid illegal. Adding more anti stupid regulations is rarely successful.

You mean Kaylee isn't going to be the mechanic?

Then I'm not interested.

The rest of America hates you.

It's Obama's fault.

Yep. Different failure rates shouldn't make a whole lot of difference. You should be able to restore your system and data today, tomorrow, next year. It will fail sooner or later. Murphy was an optimist.

Depends on the trouble. I have about 30 GB of data that I 'need' - tax stuff, professional documentation, etc. I have a couple of terabytes of stuff that I like to keep around - mostly my pictures / videos and family stuff. If I lost it all I'd be sad but in no way financially or legally discomforted. And it really isn't hard to backup terabytes of stuff these days.

Totally amazing when you think about it. I recall the first 5 MEGABYTE hard disk that I saw. You could see all those files scrolling down the 80 x 25 CP/M screen. We were just floored. Five entire megabytes.....

That is one major advantage to OS X. You can make a drive image and boot off of it. Helps for migration testing and backups. It really frosts me that Microsoft hasn't figured out how to do that yet. I can keep a 128 GB flash drive in my bike bag and restore my laptop anywhere in the world I can get a new HD. Pretty damned convenient.

This. Other than a brief bit of annoyance and the fact that I would have to take my attention off the latest Slashdot thread, I don't really care what any individual hard drive is doing. And if I'm worrying about the primary data drive, the NAS, the external off site hard drives AND Dropbox going out, well, sucks to be me.

OK, hundreds of hard drives.

And a couple dozen DVD writers. Slashdotters hate change.

"Sorry honey, I can't make it over to dinner at your folks house tonight. Hard drive failed."

Clouds and silver lining sort of thing....

Maybe start a Kickstarter program to get all of you folks on 12 inch 80 x 25 monitors on to something more current?

Yes, I think putting the ambiguous icon on the right hand side of the screen is dumb, but I can read the entire headline (and the summary and, if the editor provides a link, TFA but that's only for special occasions).

Do you program at all?

I think you missed the funny. Of course, your post might be subtly sarcastic in which case I missed the funny.

Life is so complicated in ASCII....

You'd better not move into management. Backups are expensive. Expensive is bad (unless it refers to something on management's expense account). Let's get with the program. As I mentioned earlier, money is management. And management needs the money. You don't.