An item dropped from 10 feet high will take 0.79 sec to hit ground, in which time a speeding cat or dog could cover 20-35 feet.

Animal could also easily be hidden from arial view.

She should have said "programmed" rather than anthropomorphizing it, but other than that, she's correct -- that is, in fact, how it is programmed to behave.

It depends on the density of the neighborhood. The preferred use-case for drones is "neighborhoods" where the houses are few and far apart from each other, making ground delivery tedious and making the distance between the drone and the nearest set of ears larger.

They're currently a bit shy of a light day out. Exactly how much energy do you think half century old solar panels would be generating if they had them?

Sounds like fun :)

Reminds me of making floppy backups on a machine with only one floppy drive, and not much memory.

Please insert disk 1
Please insert disk 2
Please insert disk 1 ...

The most visceral storage failure experience I can recall was from a PDP 11 disk pack. The disk head had crashed into the media, and since the pack is not fully sealed you could SMELL the burning.

> People don't even understand what C:\ refers to these days anymore

So your argument in a nutshell is that people today are so dumb that they don't know what tech they are using, so let's pretend that hard drives no longer exist?

>So with the HDD we have very different tech, which works at a fundamentally different principle, and stores files in a different way people used to.

Well, no, you are wrong on all counts there.

> But that is all irrelevant since ZIP is not a harddrive

You're right. Back then we had both hard drives AND ZIP drives. Crazy, huh?

I'd forgotten about Bubblejet printers - a great option before Laserjet printers became so cheap.

I still fondly remember the old high speed line printers that existed before dot matrix and daisy wheel ones. They were extremely fast - some of them used a vacuum to help suck the paper out and stack it since it was spewing out so fast.

There was always something satisfying about having a printout of your program on a fanfold stack of wide 132 col paper. You could put plastic covers on it to make it like a book if you wanted to archive it.

As far as "bubble" tech, there was also magnetic bubble memory that everyone was briefly excited about as a form of chip-based non-moving memory, but never took off.

> Back in the 1990s, floppy disks "had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,"

Not quite true. 5.25" floppies had progressed from single to double to quad density (1.2 MB), then being replaced by 3.5" "floppies" (rigid case, so not really floppy anymore, at least not on the outside) which initially had 1,44MB capacity, but then doubled to 2.88MB although admittedly these were not so widely used.

Before my time, but I believe the original 8" floppies, used in the early 70's, also went up to 1.2MB capacity.

Punched cards are an interesting comparison to today's tech - they did serve as a storage medium, but were also the way you input programs back before online access to shared computer systems or personal computers were a thing.

Closely related to punched cards, at least in terms of "storage technology" (holes in a media, detected by photo diodes) was punched tape, either paper or mylar (or longevity). This was now more of a storage media, as well as a way that you would buy software before cassette tapes and floppies replaced it.

Fast forward to today and DVDs for computer storage and backups are still not totally obsolete, and in a ways are the direct descendant of punched tape - still using holes (pits) in a media, read by an optical detector.

Not at all true. We had hard drives in the 80's and those continue to be used today, even if supplemented with SSDs.

Of course they were much smaller capacity - I remember having a 10MB (yes - meg, not gig, or tera) "winchester" hard drive when working at Acorn in the early 80's.

Certainly cloud storage wasn't a thing back then, although it wouldn't have been such an alien concept. In the pre-internet BBS days the servers were mostly for file sharing, not for personal use, but already with the early internet (again early 80's), before the WWW existed (what you kids think of as the internet) you could sync your files to your "cloud server" if you were a student with a university account (and an acoustic coupler to dial in).

Anyone remember the "stringy floppy" (continuous tape loop)?

I remember first hearing about them in form of the Microdrive used with the Sinclair QL, but they'd already existed for a number of years before that.

Sinclair's stuff was always so cheap, cheesy and unreliable. If you saw the Sinclair C5 (first commercial EV?!) it's give you a good intuition about everything else Sinclair built, although his calculators were OK, as was the Spectrum. The ZX-80 was so poorly designed that one recommended solution to it overheating was to sit a carton of cold milk on top of it!

Okay, here's one field: in the last four weeks, Claude Code has detected and diagnosed 91 genuine bugs in the open-source library I maintain. That's 91 bugs that likely would have remained unfixed indefinitely, unless/until I (or a user) happened to stumble across a resulting runtime misbehavior and then laboriously worked our way backwards to pinpoint the underlying software defect. I'd estimate probably 150 man-hours were saved, right there.

On balance, it would appear to be the case.

I respect many of those comedians for their satire, but not getting news from newspapers is a recipie for idiocracy.