It's a valuable energy source. What's to stop anyone (eve the current coal company people from founding a "competing" "coal" company that actually digs coal and sells it?

What did he use to store that 20Tb in the first place? I'm assuming we're talking a large RAID array. I doubt, from the sound of it, that we're talking software RAID. So, at a minimum, it'll cost AT LEAST the same as building that RAID again to have a backup, no matter what the medium.

Yeah, you're throwing 50% of your money away - on nothing but backups of shit you've probably downloaded or taken off discs you own anyway. So now he probably sees quite what that data was "worth" anyway.

To be honest, nowadays, for home use, just build another RAID the same size and mirror the data across.

Oh, and if you're that daft with 20Tb of data that you press the wrong button and wipe out an array that you have recovered several times over, you shouldn't be let near the low-level storage. Use a filesystem, or even just access layer, with some kind of snapshotting / rollback.

Buy a cheap NAS, or just build yourself a new RAID from scratch and use the "old" array as a redundant copy of the data. Keep it powered off and somewhere else except once a month or whatever when you mirror across.

Backup speed will be good (the speed at which you can interconnect the two computers, basically, probably Gigabit Ethernet for the cheapest scenario), restore speed will be the same, media will be cheap, no fancy software or hardware required, you can re-use your old setups and just buy a new one when it starts getting full and your backups are literally working copies with no further action required.

If that turns out to not be good enough for your needs, that's when you can look at tape and other stuff. To be honest, tape is dying. The places I've seen have weaned themselves off them and just replicate to as many places as possible (including an occasional "offline" copy to prevent automated spreading of bad/corrupt data to the backups).

It was a joke...

The whole idea of an easy and cheap backup for an edge case like 20 TB of home date is a joke.

READY.
SAVE "20TB

PRESS RECORD AND PLAY ON TAPE
SAVING 20TB

[wait until heat death of universe]
READY.

Wait-- you have 20 TB of data, yet are complaining about expense? That's far above the media requirements for home storage. You're in enterprise territory. Fast, reliable, or cheap: pick any two. Since reliability is not negotiable for backups, you have two options.

Buy an LTO autoloader and tapes. This will cost about $3,500-4,000. You may also need to buy backup software for another few hundred dollars. You'll be able to back it all up within a day, and backup new files in minutes.

Buy the Crashplan unlimited home service, buy the seed drive service to get the first few hundred GB started, and you'll be set in a few days to a week.

If Comcast is your ISP, they can track your DNS queries whether you use their DNS servers or not. Not even DNSSEC will hide your DNS queries - you need DNSCrypt for that.

publishers pay the people who fronted money for the study

If only they did.

Funds paid to scientific publishers pay for editing, not for the original studies. Moreover, peer review -- the most important part of the process -- is almost universally done for free by other scientists in the field; the publishers are just mediators in that process, adding minimal value.

20TB? Probably need a lot of friends... and we're talking geeks here.

Someone's got to pay to fund the research.

...but that someone isn't generally the publishers running the paywalls, so how is that relevant?

Or maybe, like the last Air France airliner to go down, there isn't even time to put out a proper mayday as they're fighting to control the plane (through their own fault or others), but it only breaks up when it hits the floor.

That particular plane had three experienced crew on board, and crashed because someone was holding a control stick back for ages and nobody ever noticed. But it didn't get to put out a mayday, the onboard systems weren't transmitting enough data to highlight the problem to anyone else, and even when the blackboxes were recovered (how long later?), it still wasn't 100% clear quite WHY what happened happened.

Rather than turn everything into a terrorist story, which is just boring when you live in a country that's suffered terrorism for a long longer than the US latest overblown episode, how about we don't pot-shot at people's reputations?

And, to be honest, the whole link you post is really a non-story. Wow. I can remember going to a cabin on an aircraft and getting photos when I was a kid. Back then you could smoke on planes (probably still can in many countries - malaysia's laws? I'm not sure off-hand). But, no, fuck it, he has to be a terrorist to you?

Maybe it was a fucking crash.

Sad. Unfortunate. Unpredictable.

But doesn't do precisely what terrorism is supposed to do - PUT SO MUCH TERROR INTO YOU THAT YOU THINK EVERYTHING IS MORE TERRORISM.

I see we've had a visit from someone with mod points and without a sarcasm detector. Sorry about that, AC.

Dammit, kids, some of us have to get up in the morning and go to work.

Any more noise from the basement and I'm coming down there to knock your heads together.

So my suggestion is that, if you really want to see a jump in math skills, start placing more emphasis on learning the concepts and less emphasis on how fast students can process problems. Allow students unlimited time on tests if they want it (maybe give them the option of taking tests after school instead of in class). It will give a lot of students like me a lot more confidence in themselves once they realize that they're not fucking stupid or "just bad at math"--that they're just slower, more deliberate, and more thoughtful.

Timed tests are common with many subjects. You'd have to make some radical changes to education to eliminate them.

A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.

Can you run a desalination plant using a power source where the output varies at random? That's always been the fundermental issue with wind power.