I had only hard of LTO tapes quite recently, and I did a very tiny bit of poking around. The latest generation is LTO-6, whose tapes can hold 2.5TB each (uncompressed). The tapes themselves are quite modestly priced -- an LTO-4 tape cartridge (800GB uncompressed) costs about $30 each.

The drives, however, are not cheap. New drives appear to start at around $1200. Used drives are all over the place -- I've seen some on eBay with an opening bid as low as $350. Also, all LTO drives appear to have either an LVD SCSI or a SAS interface, which means you'll also need a controller card. There appears to be no such thing as a SATA LTO drive.

Plus you get to re-live all the joys of selecting tape vendors, and placing bets on whose tapes are going to last for 20 years.

So tired of your, and peoples like you, ignorance. You talk like you know something, but you are pretty clueless.

start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

And try to understand that these systems are already used for maintenance. The actual discussion by people at the grown up table is about expanding the protocol beyond maintenance into constant use.
Among other issues you don't have the background to grasp at this time.
Yes, we should way costs and benefits, but since a large portion of these costs are already sunk, and we are talking about a device that is already used, and spreading that costs for 10+ years, it's a few pennies per ticket, in the worst cost case.

"and usually identify the pilot or ground crew doing something stupid rather than following their training,"
false.

" data really make that much of a difference?"
IF their are survivors, yes, yes it makes a difference. See "Alive!" for one example.

If it cost 1 cent, would it be a waste of money?
No? well then we agree and we are only discussing what cost is a waste of money. and less 1 cent per passenger per segment is about what the cost of this device will be when spread over it's life time; which is how business handle costs.

This device exists, and most, if not all, new commercial aircraft can hove one put in as part of regular aircraft, assuming they don't already have an ACARS system installed.

  I assume that if you are bleeding heavily after an accident, but people don't want to help you becasue it might ruin there 20 dollar shirt, you would be fine dying.

sigh. Those costs ARE the costs at the airport.
I know they are piped. If not you would never get to the airport to do all the tankers haul fuel.

300-400 people, and a life of 30+ years.

Sine there are device that d this, and many, if not all, new large aircraft use them for maintenance, I don't think it's a large an issue as you seem to think.

Like anything official, it's official because it's recognized. In this case recognized by everyone in the scientific field, academia and governments.

Its like saying the Olympics aren't official becasue you can buy your own trophy.

This is a case of the IAU alerting potential victims that the name won't be recognized, and that UWingo should be telling people it will be.

As long as UWingo makes that clear, the IAU won't really care.

true, but when you try to sell then, the international body in charge of there official names have every right to point out to the people that you sell them to they aren't recognized by anyone; which is all that's going on.

You are falling into the 'I know it so everyone knows it' fallacy.

A wide range of age groups come here. from 12 and up, so keep that in mind.

" Yep the bandwidth and storage even on something like Amazon Glacier would be prohibitive to all but the most financially independent geeks."
120 a year is prohibitively expensive? Not for AG, natch, but there are solutions for that, and bandwidth is time. You can do it incrementally. Once done the future dif would be a lot easier.

EVERY article is a chance for targeted ads, it's how they keep running, so get over it already.

Why would you only back up the nut shots from his porn collection?

Uh, no.
His data is on tape and in the back of his station wagon that he needs to backup out of the driveway. :)

10 dollars a month for 20 TB+ isn't really that bad. Over all it's going to be cheaper then building a back up array, plus no maintenance.

Take the storage media he has, and then duplicate it.

Really, was that hard?

NO IT DOES NOT. Does no one here have a grasp of basic business accounting, and large numbers?

It cost 500K to fill at 747 with fuel.
This devices would be a 1 time 100k cost spread out of 30 years, and be paid for by millins and million of tickets.