No they aren't

You could boot from ATA and SCSI Zip disks just fine, just not from LPT port drives. For Linux you could load a kernel with LPT and Zip support from floppy and boot that way, though.

I erased and rewrote a bunch of CDRWs. But about the same time they got cheap, DVD-RWs came out and I stopped erasing CDRWs.

You don't have the courage to say that to someone even on Slashdot, let alone face to face, coward.

And you expose your true self... as a selfish prick.

They already can't drop the package onto a covered porch the way they're operating now, unless they're doing it as a bombing run and calculating the arc so as to miss any roof over it...

I have all you have plus children on minibikes, quads, and sometimes lawn tractors, and people sawing up stumps with a chainsaw at the tree service less than a block away. The owner drops them off there so poor people in the neighborhood can get some nice wet firewood to choke us all with. I'd barely notice a drone dropping a package off on my roof from ten feet above it, let alone in my yard.

If you mean using SMARTDRV you could theoretically ctrl-alt-del and then shut it off, as it was supposed to flush buffers when you did that. For anyone else's solution, no clue.

It could also be hidden from Wingdings or... (wait for it) ...Impact.

If the animal is hidden from view then it's irrelevant to this discussion since the drone only can react to what it can sense.

The AGI won't need to identify us. It doesn't even need to keep score. All it needs to know is see human, shoot human.

But it isn't. It's easy enough to use stereo vision to measure the distance to an object and then determine whether or not it could get into the drop zone even if it started moving at top speed with no acceleration time. Also, if it was "worried" it wouldn't drop things from such a height.

They came out here first, at a time when they were still useful. CDRWs were very expensive and/or slow. Most of the old ones were SCSI, and most people didn't have a SCSI interface in their PC. As I was a nerd with a Unix and Unixlike background I did, and my employer kicked down a Philips CDD521 with the 2x upgrade that they had been using to write masters and had only recently obsoleted with a 4x Plextor. This is sometimes said to have been the first CD writer, but I think I read somewhere that there was a Sony drive first that came only in a rack mount case.

Minidisc is a true Magneto-Optical drive and is very very cool technology, but unfortunately Sony really strangled the shit out of it in the name of copyright enforcement. There were a couple of models of PC interface, but you couldn't do audio with them. The audio devices didn't allow doing high speed copies, and would respect the copyright bit. If you were a nerd you could get the decoder and encoder chips and just not connect that pin (srsly) and strip out protection but you couldn't just buy a device like that off the now ubiquitous usual suspects^Wservices because they didn't yet exist :)

Needing to unmount was a property shared with other operating systems, but early Unixlikes used to have silly problems. For SCO Xenix I was advised (by a SCO employee) to shut down using the following formula:

sync
sync
haltsys

The second sync didn't do anything the first sync didn't, it was because on that platform sync returned immediately instead of blocking until the unwritten blocks had all been written, and it was there to slow you down. You didn't want to halt too soon...

I was used to doing something before shutting down on DOS though, because my first PCs had ST-506 interface disks and those usually didn't park themselves. You had to send them a command to ask them to do it, which most people did with PARK.COM. ATA interface disks would generally self-park. Some earlier SCSI disks would not, but of course eventually they all did. Almost no MFM/RLL disks would park themselves.

Before iomega's Zip there were the Bernoulli and SyQuest drives.

Bernoulli drives inflated under spin and the head made an air cushion to push that inflated package away from it to avoid crashes. If the disc spun down, then the media moved away from the head. I have no experience with these so I don't know how well this worked in practice.

SyQuest was just a removable HDD platter. It had pretty poor read and write times because the head couldn't be as close to the disc as in a real HDD. They were however very reliable. They had 44 and then 88MB versions in a 5.25" cartridge, and then 135MB and 230MB in 3.5". Then I think some other larger capacity as well before the market chose iomega because it was cheaper, then rejected it because zip drivers were flaky, and went to CD-R which was also becoming cheap.