Is that irony or coincidence?

So just to be clear, then:

Ice Forms: global warming
Ice Melts: global warming
Dog crapped on my sidewalk: global warming
My shoe is untied: global warming

Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time.
Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.

Personally:
- back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or
- just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' things forever just becomes silly. If you have the only unique recording of some substantial historical event, that's one thing. If it's your child's first steps, understand that while that might be important to you and maybe even to them, nobody else cares about it. Really. While losing it would be sad, it wouldn't be tragic. After all, there are billions of person-years of lives that have vanished, unrecorded, and life goes on.

The best part is hearing the lamentations of software patent attorneys and rejoicing in the sounds of their despair.

I can imagine plenty of uses for this in automated systems such as video system or other data gatherer. And even if it's to be used to record manually-triggered output, there's much to be said for the concept of "so much freaking storage that I can pay for this once and never have to think about it again over the lifetime of the equipment I'm using it with".

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Quoth the wiki:

In 1848 Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), wrote in his paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, of the need for a scale whereby "infinite cold" (absolute zero) was the scale's null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment.

Celsius degrees came before Kelvin units.

Those are not real worlds and I'll be damned if I'll ever utter them with anyone over the age of 3 in the room.

Pfft - I came up with seven mind-blowingly awesome ideas before breakfast. The problem is that each would take several programmer-years to implement, so there's an enormously high risk:reward ratio for each.

People don't copy other ideas because it's too hard to come up with their own good ones. They copy ideas because those ideas have already been vetted and proven viable in the marketplace (whether of ideas or of cash revenue).

Microsoft's hardware is nice (although you'd be crazy to compare Surface to MacBook Pro), but their user experience is terrible in comparison.

Google can comply with the ruling by simply un-checking the 'automated response'.

So your emails vanish into a black hole, *never to be responded to*, rather than you getting something confirming (what you suspect) that nobody will ever read it.

Is that really better?
Having dealt with "customer service" (seriously, I can barely say that with a straight face) with German companies for years, suddenly things make a lot more sense, however.

Microsoft decides that it's in their best interest for all customers to use identical UIs, so they make Metro the standard interface on phones, video game systems, tablets, desktops, and servers. Apple decides that it's in their customers' best interest for products to have similar but individualized UIs, so they create tailored interfaces for tiny, small, and large displays.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between the two companies (and why Apple is eating Microsoft's lunch in every category where they directly compete).

Maybe the slashdot post is PART OF THE RESEARCH?

This would be sort of a que sera sera thing except for the pervasive role of government today coupled with the speed of information. The impact of a fad-belief on a single population will normally be along a distribution curve, probably directly relateable to how much it contradicts 'current' or 'conventional' wisdom:
  - some will believe it wholeheartedly and take it as gospel
- some will guardedly believe it
- some will reject it ...with the end result being a distribution of results. If over time it seems to be beneficial, it becomes universalized.

Now?
Vaccines "might" be dangerous? An uninformed (but pretty) celebrity makes a public statement and the next day thousands follow it like unthinking sheep.
Eggs are (believed to be in the fad of the moment) bad? Some bureaucrat swipes a pen and eggs are expunged from every school meal program and officially 'frowned on' across the public, leading to a decrease in consumption of what may be a perfectly healthy food, replaced by high-sugar, high-fat breakfast 'snacks'.

PERSONALLY (I am not a dietician) being alive since 1967, my observation of the (somewhat sudden) increase in obesity across American society seems to dovetail with the whole 'cholesterol' thing - the early-80s crusade drove out what seems to be to have been a relatively unprocessed staple of civilized human consumption. But I'm aware too that the latter-20thC saw the unprecedented industrialization of food production so there could be a host of chemicals at fault that happened at the same time.

The New England Patriots make about $428M a year across 16 games, each of which takes an average of 192 minutes. That works out to about $139K per minute. If Bill Belichick thinks he can work more efficiently with papyrus and a scribe, there'd be a tiny replica of the Nile in the basement of Gillette Stadium by the end of the day.