Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)

One of them isn't Xerox, which is still a valid trademark. Most people say "photocopy" as the generic term. I have seldom heard "Xerox". I don't ever recall anyone using "Google" as a generic verb for search, as in "I googled for it with Bing."

I agree. However, the nice thing about keeping the data live is that it will benefit from any upgrades you do over the years... what seems like a lot of storage today will be trivial in the future. And you can piggyback on your video storage backup for all of your backup needs. But yeah, the simplest thing to do is copy to a pair of drives and put them in a safe deposit box. From past experience, I would probably add a drive full of parity data as well :)

So what if he really didn't find anything? Why should someone be obligated to report a crime to the criminals before reporting it to the public? Car analogy: You see someone stealing your car, and call the police. The police arrive and arrest the thief. When the case goes to court, the judge throws the case out, because you didn't try to negotiate with the thief before calling the police.

I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.

Let's not fight over technicalities of law. You and I appear to be on the same side and want the same thing. The people in charge are wrong whether it is technically legal or not.

If you really look at how schools piss money away on tech gadgets only to let them collect dust you will find incredible waste. For as long as I can remember, the AV equipment at the various schools I attended sat unused for 99.99% of the time. For an hour session there simply wasn't time to get the cart, set it up, show a video and break it down for the next class. Most schools don't have a dedicated AV department unless they specialize in AV production. So the teachers are left to retrieve and set up the systems and most of them can't even change a lightbulb.

In a high school shop class we has a pretty fancy and expensive AV cart with a pro level Sony Trinitron Monitor and VCR. It just sat in the tool cage year round collecting dust. One day another shop teacher wanted to use the cart to show a video to his class. Turns out some knucklehead destroyed the cart by cutting wires and jamming a metal rod into the VCR destroying the tape load mechanism. There was a huge shit storm and our class was blamed. And rightfully so because we had a surplus of knuckleheads. The quoted cost of that AV cart? $5000. And I believe it seeing how the equipment was top of the line Sony stuff. And this wasn't the only AV cart in the school, we had about a dozen of them. They did nothing year round until some teacher worked a video into a lesson. In fact the only time I ever watched a video in my four years of high school was in health class and English where we watched a film of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

And I not even going to get into the $250,000 robotics system that sat unused for years until my electrical installation shop teacher convinced the school to give us the system instead of the snobby ET department who didn't care if it was sold for scrap. I headed up that project and it was a wonderful experience working with that system.

The point he was trying to make is they charge you for a service call when the problem is with faulty equipment they own. It is then their responsibility to eat the labor and fuel costs to fix their problem.

Thank you. This point is the only really important one. What they were doing may not have even been illegal, which is the whole problem. A rogue agency would have been easy to correct in comparison to an entire government which had overstepped it's bounds.

Weird Al has a whole song about just this very thing.

No, Steam is actually worse: I play CIV5 on occasion. It was purchased on Steam, but I start from the shortcut I asked it to create. Nevertheless, Steam creates a pop-under ad that I have to close *every* time I play the game.

The point is not that I could probably easily find the shortcut to the *real* game (and not the Steam launcher). The point is lack of respect. I already bought the game. As far as I am concerned that is a completed transaction. I have NOT asked for promotional offers.

How are you going to power a car in New Jersey with sunshine in Oman?

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.