EOM

I'm HIGHLY offended by this remark. I'll have you know that my representative only takes the largest, highest quality amounts.

Maybe yours can be bought for a pittance, but mine is thinking ahead for inflation!

You're going to add a large canister of ink-jet ink over the money box?? MY GOD, that's worth more than the entire owning bank itself!

and here it is:

:-) <---- Muhammad

!! That's really cool! Home-brew, huh? Neat.

But I can't do that -- my cheap $100 drone doesn't hardly carry any weight. I guess I'll just add razor-blades to the propellers and slice the watermelon by running into it. Once, anyway.

Even with "scratch resistant external media", I use 10% of the disc space for redundancy and recovery by using Multipar. It's a PAR2 compatible program that handles subdirectories. I've also bought but haven't used in recovery mode ISOBuster, a program that can handle the internal disc structures to try to recovery from corrupted media.

I have manually changed files and parts of files and had Multipar recover the originals; I have not yet physically scarred a CD/DVD/BR to see if it's recoverable via ISOBuster. It's supposed to work, though.

Fair (not archivable quality discs) BDs cost $0.50 for 20GB effective or $25 for 1TB, this is comparable to hard drive prices. They'll handle drops better and if one goes bad, you "only" lose that media (20G) vs terabytes. It's much slower, smaller, and write-once, though.

(OMG -- 20G is "small"?? I remember having things fit on a single 256KB 8" floppy. Much better than paper tape, though.)

Assuming that they use lasers for communication to Sprint and T-Mobile: all it takes are a few half-silvered mirrors somewhere as a R/O tap and SpGoogle(TM) is ready for your business! Use the web as much as you want and they'll make sure your data goes exactly where it's supposed to.

But I just don't know where they are going to place the sharks that are attached to all of those lasers. Guarding the Google Barge, perhaps?

Oh, that's been moved or depreciated, you say? That's just what they WANT you to think. You haven't seen Google Cloak, have you? (Well, for that matter NO ONE has -- but that's kinda the point.)

Now, tie that with their autonomous cars that "no one wants" and you've got: -- KnightRider! All it needs now is RoboCop to change the flat tires.

THIS. This is the only use I can think of for religion, in saving knowledge for the future. (See? It's not totally bad!)

"[In the time of] the classical world" - So, what have you done for me lately?

(Yes, cap-Science isn't enough all by itself either. The real Golden Rule works, too. But I'd still rather all of us try to figure things out than assume everything was completely determined for us millennia ago.

Of course, that's the trick: science is how all of nature and the universe works, religion is how humans should live and relate with each other. Completely different domains. Guess that's why I'm an introvert!)

I did not know that -- it's very sweet; good for them.

Now, I do have an off-topic question: When God finally arrives and brings back everyone from the dead:

a) Does that also include cremations? (Probably so -- just add water.) Dismemberment? (Super Glue.)
b) Will He do it more than once? I can just see Gene waking up in the shadow of the moon, and then immediately expiring because of the non-existent atmosphere and cold. So is this a one-time thing, or does God hit Ctrl-Alt-Del repeatedly until it finally works?
c) God brings back to Earth all of the travelers that have managed to escape Earths' gravity. (Sounds kinda like a shepherd -- "That's not your yard, get back over here. Stupid sheep.")
d) God doesn't bother. "You really want to leave? Have at it." (Wonder if any lawyers will take it up with Him since their potential clients are missing out.)
e) Does that also include video-game characters? NetHack, Mario, Gordon Freeman, etc? (What about PacMan and GLaDOS?) And what about Sweetie?

Enquiring minds want to know

Unused drive space?? Sorry, what's that?

So? Just add 2 and you're all done within 14 years -- problem solved.

If it's good enough for finance, it's certainly good enough for science.

I see what you did there!!

... I only wish it had been intentional.

Oh, like comments? You can write insanely complicated code and as long as it produces the results you had intended, it's correct. But it helps the programmer behind you if you then also write "War and Peace" describing how it works. "It's Magic" is too short.

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

"All the better to track you with, my dear..." -- the NSA

(... aka The Big Bad Wolf. And do you really think your house of bricks is that opaque?)

Well it seems like Closed Source "merely guarantees that all of the bugs can be found" by crackers. (NO, they're not hackers.) They seem to do a pretty good job of finding and exploiting problems withOUT any copy of the source for reference.

(Well, I presume they don't. Maybe Bill Gates has a whole independent second fortune that we don't know about. Or: how DID Balmer afford to pay $2B for a bunch of guys walking around while bouncing a ball?)