But man, how atheists go on and on and on and on and on.... about how stupid it is to believe in god...

I'm an atheist. Haven't ever told anybody that they are stupid to believe in their God. Your statement is disproven.

I'm really an "apatheist": a subset of atheism that simply believes it's a waste of time & resources to debate an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I don't care if the supernatural exists, and there is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that caring about the question matters in the slightest. There are a lot of atheists like me: we don't care what you believe in or don't believe in as long as you don't try to force us to believe what you do. Most of us are not the vocal minority you apparently assume all atheists to be.

Absolutely fair comments, thanks for the information that new tapes have a higher cost on a tape drive than used tapes. I should have said "millions upon millions of feet of tape", which would have been a correct statement. I stand corrected.

A drive wears down in a few months if it is constantly writing to new tapes.

That's what the cleaning tapes in your silo are for. The heads are typically good for millions upon millions of read/write cycles as long as they are kept clean. The motors driving the reels are typically of the brushless, multi-speed variety, capable of decades of reliable operation with quality bearings. Cleaning tapes, on the other hand, must be replaced regularly as they wear out.

I frequently see bizarre claims on Slashdot, but the claim that using new tapes "wears down" your tape drive is a new and strange one. Where on earth did you get this idea?

Unless there are legal reasons to keep 5-10 years of backups, or you are dealing in more then 3-5 TB of storage to be backed up, or taking things off-site daily via courier tape is just too expensive.

I like your summary of three important reasons for tape archive. I'll restate in different terms.
1. Mid-term to indefinite data retention.
2. Large quantities of data, where "large" is a value greater than a single hard drive can reasonably store.
3. Disaster recovery planning.

But there are more.

4. "Oops".

That's the category of this KDE git issue. Recovering from an "oops". People screw up. How do you recover? I'm a big fan of having multiple layers in that onion: online snapshots, near-line replicas, and off-line tape backups are a basic three-tiered framework for figuring out how to protect the data. I'm amazed as big as KDE is, they don't have storage/backup expertise helping them keep their data secure. Makes me think I may have found my next open-source niche to fill.

5. Reliability. Contrary to the "fragile, expensive" opinion above, tape failure rates are demonstrably lower than hard drive failure rates despite regular handling. Research left to the reader; hard drives fail at a rate about fifteen times higher than their rated MTBF, which was already considerably higher than tape. Data on tape is far more resilient than data on a hard drive.

6. Cost. If you have to store data long-term, consider tape. Administrative, electrical, power, cooling, and storage requirements are all cheaper.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head; I'm sure there are more reasons for tape to be a good choice. The reality for many people that want to store their data "in the cloud" also is this:

I back up your "cloud" storage onto tape drives. Your cloud storage is only as reliable as my ability to recover it from a disaster.

I agree with you, except for this part:

If you use HDDs you'd have more storage...

It all depends on the scale. If you're talking a small project with a small budget, I agree with you: tape backups are overkill, too expensive, and kind of pointless. Your average open-source project is usually just a few gigabytes at most. Use a snapshotting, journaling filesystem, always keep each version in at least three different places, create a retention policy that makes sense for you based on the needs of your project, and you're good.

And you're right. Today's modern tapes are good for about 4,000 read/write cycles. Even if you get the tapes at a substantial discount, a 5TB+ tape is expensive to destroy!

But when you are talking large enterprise data archiving needs, high-end hard drives do not compete with high-end tape drives in the slightest. And in today's risk-averse corporate climate, a reasonable disaster recovery strategy is a MUST, and providing multiple tiers of storage -- online, near-line, and off-line -- is attractive. 9/11 showed everybody how quickly DR plans can melt.

I could go into a lot of specific numbers talking about how a few modern tape drives in a modestly-sized tape silo outperform similarly-sized hard drives for near-line storage in just about every category except random seek time by several orders of magnitude, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. :-)

I do storage & backup for a living on an extremely large scale. Your post is correct in the main, except for this:

You *never* overwrite your backups, EVER.

You must overwrite tapes if you want to keep media costs reasonable. In our enterprise, we typically use $30,000 T10Kc tape drives with $300 T10K "t2" tapes. Destroyed/broken/worn-out media costs already eat the equivalent of several well-paid sysadmin salaries each year. Adding additional cost for indefinite retention is a huge and unnecessary cost.

Agreed, though, this KDE experience isn't quite like that. Source code repositories commonly have 7-year-retention backups for SLA reasons with customers; most of my work deals with customer Cloud data, which kind of by definition is more ephemeral and we typically only provide 30, 60, or 90-day backups at most, in addition to typical snapshotting & near-line kinds of storage.

No reasonable-cost disk-based storage solution in the world today provides a cost-effective way to store over a hundred petabytes of data on site, available within a couple of hours, and consuming just a trickle of electricity. But if you have a million bucks, a Sun SL8500 silo with 13,000+ tape capacity in the silo will do so. All for the cost of a little extra real-estate, and a power bill that's a tiny fraction of disk-based online storage.

Tape has a vital place in the IT administration world. Ignore this fact to your peril and future financial woes.

Right there with you on "citation needed". I use my Macbooks day in and day out for mass-scale storage administration, and have found the build quality and longevity exceptional compared to the dozen or so HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba laptops I've owned over the past decade.

1. The batteries last longer: 3+ years instead of the 1-2 years typical of every other laptop I've ever owned since laptops went to Lithium instead of NiMH.
2. The keyboards hold up under my hands, while the Toshiba, Dell, and HP nearby -- all newer than the macbook I'm typing on, by the way -- are all sidelined with keyboard problems, doing duty as servers or using an external monitor and keyboard for my kids to do their homework and play Minecraft.
3. The underlying OS is UNIX. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop operating system since 1998. OSX -- with the addition of a few GNU utilities -- has a very usable CLI and I feel right at home.

I bought my wife a Macbook in early 2007. Other than the superficial cracking on the thin plastic where you open the unit (endemic to that generation of white Macbook), it has performed great. I liked hers so much that in 2010 I picked up a 2007 Macbook myself, and am typing on it while taking a break from coding a routine to handle some mass changes on a farm of hundreds of storage appliances. I type all day, every day, and my Macbook does about half that work.

Please provide more details on the "empirical testing" of ASUS and Lenovo. If they truly are longer-lasting than my two six-year-old Macbooks which have been worth at least three Windows-based laptops apiece, then I am extremely interested. It's the amazing reliability of Apple's products that drew me to them. I don't need latest, greatest, or shiny anymore. I need reliable, reasonably quick, and comfortable to use.

Also sigils are what make variable interpolation in strings possible...python must resort to sprintf-like formatting.
$foo = 'scalar';
print "foo is a $foo variable";
vs
foo = 'python'
print "foo is a %s variable" % foo

The Python example can also be written:
foo = 'python'
print('foo is a ' + foo + ' variable')

You're right in that Perl provides much more compact nomenclature, but Python doesn't require sprintf-like syntax for the same output. Python's two possible approaches to this problem are very javascript-like.

Bruce,

I've been a long-time fan of your work, and we met briefly when you spoke in Utah years ago. It was worth the five-hour drive.

There's a great quote from "Ever After" that applies, I think. "Last night, I had a revelation. I used to think that if I cared about anything I'd have to care about everything and I'd go stark raving mad but now I've found my purpose, it's a project actually inspired by you and I feel...the most wonderful freedom."

Take some solace, at least, that this "dumb" Apple-loving, Facebook-using technologist thinks it's time for a personal change. You've inspired me in this post to reclaim my digital life. I want to be an owner of my data; I'm no longer interested in my data being a product to be marketed for profit.

A key issue these days is to not repeat the Ross Perot election. Perot was a spoiler and resulted in a Democrat winning the office (and winning a second term with a huge margin compared to his first). I attended my Republican caucus this year, and such thinking was palpable: a Party win is much more important than voting for your idealogical match. Both parties learned this from spoiler-third-party elections like Clinton/Perot/Bush 1.

...events/races(lots of close cyclist make me nervous, and odds of an accident likely go up)

Exactly how I broke my collarbone and shattered my helmet a month ago. My convalescence has proved to me exactly how much daily bicycling was helping keep my weight under control!

Helmets save lives in a group setting, no doubt about it. After looking at my shattered helmet, I'm pretty certain my crash would have been a brains-on-pavement situation. As it was, I suffered from the concussion for several days.

@erroneus:

The extra 90 minutes spent on my bike commute daily burns -- depending on intensity -- up to 600 calories. I've repeatedly proven this to myself with pedantic calorie-counting, weighing, and measuring of my food along with long-term weight trend analysis. Doing this five days a week is 3,000 calories.

My longer rides on Sundays consistently burn between 1,600 to 4,000 calories. Proven in my eating and exercise logs, with predictable results in my physique, lean to fat ratio, and very repeatable once I got my particular burn-rates figured out. Add this to the previous bicycle commute, and I'm burning an extra 4,600 to 7,000 calories per week over someone sedentary who excels at changing "what they eat".

Exercise -- particularly bicycling, which often involves longer bouts of exercise at lower intensity -- has a measurable and profound effect on obesity on both an individual and statistical level. To claim a lack of activity has no impact on likelihood of obesity is a claim without merit.

"Eating Wrong" does cause obesity, but so does lack of exercise. The two together are the toxic mixture powering today's extraordinary obesity rates.

You can manage your body fat strictly through caloric restriction. But that's much, much harder than preventing obesity through a combined modest caloric restriction and exercise.

Figuring 'something' out from WiFi works only in dense urban environments, and even then isn't good enough for turn by turn navigation, which Apple claims is supported by the iPod Touch and iPad,

Close, but not quite. I live in a rural area, and my iPad figures out locations pretty reasonably within 300 feet or so. Admittedly it will struggle with location in the middle of nowhere, but a "dense urban environment" is not required. Somewhere within line-of-sight to a house or two that has a wifi router (almost all houses in USA these days) will do.

If you amend your statement to "urban or suburban environment", I agree with you!

Try ordering a barrel or bolt without a FFL (Federal Firearms License). You won't get very far. Now if you have your own CNC shop AND a 3-D plastic printer, well then you're on your way...

I don't think that statement is correct. I can order barrels, slides, magazines, ammunition, springs, rails, pins, and all kinds of miscellaneous parts without a FFL or a background check in the US. For instance, a common upgrade to a Kahr CM9 if someone wants greater precision is to purchase a replacement polygonally-rifled barrel made for the higher-end the PM9 . Of course, at that price point you may as well have purchased a PM9 in the first place.

I can buy everything except the receiver without a background check. I'm not sure what you're referring to above.

While I agree substantially with your premise, I disagree with your comparison of Amtrak vs. airlines. The airlines are subsidized to the tune of $3700 per empty seat on their commuter flights. This is a HUGE subsidy from the US government, and its impact on airline prices cannot be underestimated.

Quick summary:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/how-we-pay-3700-per-passenger-to-subsidize-airline-tickets/

Pick a different example and I think we're on the same page :)