Call me a moron, but I don't get why one would pay the extravagant prices for "audiophile" equipment.

With the same cash, I can go get studio equipment, such as a good set of monitors with a subwoofer, a mixer, an amp, a parametic equalizer, a graph equalizer, and other rack equipment. Heck, with the price of some "audiophile" stuff, I can end up with a mixing deck, a top of the line keyboard, and enough cash left over to treat the room (kill standing waves, have proper bass traps at the corners, etc.)

Adding it up... do I want some "audiophile" stuff with $400 wooden knobs? Or would I be better off spending the money and have not just an accurate sound to listen to, but the ability to cut an album, even being able to record a drummer properly with the needed 12-16 mics (depending on drumset.)

Because a lot of us have seen what happens if data gets out that shouldn't.

Admiteddly, a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whatever is good enough for most things, but a lot of businesses have data that no chances can really be taken (as a drive with data on it, and an erased drive can "accidently" switch places in a pile), so having drives get physically scrapped makes the bean counters happy.

Nail, hit head.

Nuclear power done right brings a lot to the table:

1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.

2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.

3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)

4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.

And it only will get better. The reactors in use today are designs built when disco was in fashion and people wore leisure suits. Modern reactor designs are generations ahead in safety, usability, and economy than the existing reactors that are on life support. Take an implemention of a traveling wave reactor. If done right, there would be zero need to enrich uranium, and the by-products are useful items.

Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused.

I'm happy to see some sort of energy progress in the US other than gas and oil.

We can compare the oil spills in the gulf, and not just the BP one, there are others that have been reported to still be spewing out crap. Those are "gifts that keep on giving". There are large swaths of the seabed that are just lifeless now.

Contrast that to the area around the worst nuclear disaster in world history. Years later, it has become a game preserve. Were it not for the rad meters, it has become an ecological paradise where nature has come back.

If Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster we ever will have, while undersea drilling is still a nascent technology where a blowout can happen at any time, I'm all for nuclear power with only caveat.

The caveat is that in today's economy, there is no responsibility. Stakeholders have been replaced by shareholders. A reactor head can be made out of pot metal, be installed, and it fails. The company that made it can just shrug, file bankruptcy, the owner of the company take his golden parachute and live in the Bahamas. What would be needed is regulation where if there is malfeasance, there will be people going to prison and fortunes taken away, and not just pawns thrown under the bus to appease the masses, then back to business as usual.

Very good info, and I appreciate your (the AC's) correction.

The biggest reason I run a multi-pass erase (followed by a pass of zeroes so the OS doesn't get confused) is less of grinding the existing bits out, but more for a test, in hopes that a sector that is on the edge gets picked up and relocated before data is stored there.

As for a low-level format command, I wish IDE/SATA drives had that. That way, the existing sectors that are marked bad and relocated would be considered bad, and the relocation table freed up. This way, there is more room for newly grown defects in the relocation table. Of course, having onboard encryption where a SECURITY ERASE UNIT command would force the drive to not just do a zero, but change the master read/write encryption key would be nice too.

If an IDE drive, what's better for the task, a master or slave controller?

That is a lot like Hushmail's old Java-based system. The key gets generated in a Java applet running locally, and is only used to decrypt mail on the client end. Log out, said passphrase and unlocked private key get purged. This way, encrypted mail was inaccessable to anyone.

However, if one skipped Java and used Javascript that allowed the key to be decrypted on the server, then Hushmail had the same amount of security as a normal E-mail provider.

Nothing in DB's EULA about encryption. They even have mention of using TC volumes and notes about sparse files not being supported.

Its mind-blowingly obvious that I use TC containers (with the .tc extension), so if it were an issue, I'd well have been notified and/or kicked off DB ages ago.

That doesn't mean that it may happen in the future, but as of today, nothing wrong with storing encrypted volumes, because one is paying for that.

Both EncFS and PhonebookFS allow the use of chaff files. This way, an attacker would have no clue what is junk and what might be vital info.

Another idea is to do what some people do is have a TrueCrypt volume on the cloud drive. Assuming the cloud software is smart enough to send only changes as opposed to completely sending the file, all they will see are encrypted deltas to offsets in the file. To help fool traffic analysis is easy -- do a bunch of random reads/writes, or just defragment the volume, and run a free space erase afterwards.

If they are suspicious, doesn't bother me. VPN and usage of encryption, especially if one is using for work related items is more of a matter of common sense and due diligence.

I always use a VPN if on a Wi-Fi connection. This way, it means far fewer people are able to see what I am doing, or interfere with the traffic.