Yes, let's set a standard, AND NEVER CHANGE IT.

Technology makes one leap into the future, and never changes again, so new standards are just capitalist hokum meant to deceive a gullible public and corrupt crony governments.

Why anyone ever let the government move away from the horsefull carriage standard, I do not know. Oh wait, that was after they'd already let the government approve the carriage, as if horses alone weren't good enough. Oh wait, that was after they'd already approved the walking standard. Oh wait, someone approved shoes and boots. And socks. And shoelaces, don't forget them, or velcro tabs, or slip-ons.

Yes, by all means, let's freeze standards to what YOU want, bub.

In the business, this is called duty cycle, and there are significant MTBF differences between enterprise quality drives (FC, SAS) and consumer drivers (SATA, NL-SAS) at high duty cycles.

If you are running a server like a SQL database, an Exchange server, or a Host like ESX or HyperV with a good number of guest vms, then the disks are going to be active much of the time. This high duty cycle will wear down the low end drives over time.

I have been stocking up on car analogies for years in preparation for exactly this moment.

So decades after they've almost vanished from mainstream use, they'll suddenly become faddish again, and manufacturers will be competing with each other to see who can build the biggest box to take up the most space on the desktop? Cool. I can't wait for the resurgence of 50-pound CRTs.

"Mod me up! Mod me up!"

Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you'd left off the second sentence there. The freedom-loving US has declared "War on $NON_MATERIAL_THING" more often than any other country I can think of.

Especially if the business in question caters to hipsters and half the customers are wearing those godawful chunky plastic BCGs. You can hide a lot of recording and processing power in those things these days ...

"Ministers" pretty much rules out .... only a few countries. Subby might want to include the country next time.

"Has become"? "No longer"? Look, whistleblowers have always been treated badly. Governmental, corporate, academic--no matter what kind of organization you're in, the organization will react badly to anything it sees as a threat. And the problem gets worse the larger the organizations are. In small groups, human beings act like human beings, but in large groups, they act more like the cells of some vast organism. Imagine how you'd react if some of your muscle cells suddenly started refusing to contract when you told them to, even if by that refusal they were preventing you from doing something you really shouldn't do.

I've worked in government, industry, and now academia each for about a third of my adult life. Believe me when I say that the uncertainty in academia is much, much greater than in the others. There are rewards, obviously, or people wouldn't do it at all, but security is not one of them. By comparison, the other sectors are much safer.

Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks "academics don't know anything about the real world," this probably won't get through to you.

Hey there, Internet Tough Guy. It's been a while. How ya been?

Stepping in to save a stranger's life is pretty much the opposite of predation. If you're using this as an example of psychopathy, you're defining the word so broadly as to have no meaning.

When people in a society prey on other people in that society, we usually identify their behavior a a disease, and rightly so.

Okay, tell you what: bury half a human skeleton in your yard, call the cops, and tell them you've found some interesting bones but you're not sure what they are. Be sure to let us know what happens next.

It would indeed be idiotic, if anyone were making that claim. Who's making it?

"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."