At the same time, characters with a Jersey accent sound arrogant and idiotic, a southern drawl makes them sound dumb, hick, and quite possibly inbred and crazy, and a Texan accent makes them sound Texan.

100% fair... 2 different departments - IT's bean-counters are easier to persuade than security. Still, completely fair sadly.

That's correct, it isn't suitable. Like I said above, even if it's completely redundant it has to be a complete snap-shot. Yes it's silly, but it's a compliance thing. We have to be able to pull something out (not several things or do back-tracking through a few years of change tracking) and say "Here's exactly what the server looked like on the 34th of Smarch, 2009."

Not to mention the postal service! Damn snooty mailmen with their eagle-logo cars and fancy uniforms... Now I know how to get back at them.

Yes, tape does age. Just like hard drives and optical media. But just for the record, up here in Los Alamos we're still pulling data off of tape and copying/analyzing it from our underground nuclear testing. In the computer world, that is a very long time. It was of course stored very differently than modern tape storage methods, but it's readable and usable with a little effort.

That's absolutely true - That's why the gods gave us RAID. If something dies, swap a disk out. But for archival, several spinny disks per night held for several years gets pricey. And, yes, it is mostly for compliance issues. In the decade+ that I've been working here, we've yet to have to pull a tape for any reason other than to prove we have them.

It's not so much about processing speed - It's about memory hogging. I don't have much of a problem with that concerning Chrome or FF, but depending on what you have open using just a few tabs under IE can quickly eat a half-gig of RAM. With a couple of GB in the computer that may or may not be an issue, but it seems rude and makes me feel a little violated and dirty...

At work, I'm only allowed IE or FF. I use both depending on what I'm doing, but FF as my primary. At home I'm typically a Chrome user, but I have all three installed and use them all, again depending on what I'm doing. IE is the only way I can remote in to work. Chrome is light-weight and great for browsing or Netflix. Some applications (excuse me for admitting that I'm a Facebook user, but primarily Facebook apps) are much more reliable under Firefox than under IE or especially Chrome. I haven't used Opera for many years - Ever since they started using ad-support, even though I realize that's long gone. I've never bothered with Safari.

So, even though I usually live in Chrome, I see no reason to completely ditch the alternatives - They all have their place. Can't we all just get along?

Well, of course - Pretty much nobody needs this for home use. But you're forgetting that, beyond those several thousand businesses, there's also the government. We have to back up nightly and retain stuff for a VERY long time. And the government, in case you haven't noticed, is big. And we have to back up everything, even if it's completely redundant it has to be a complete snap-shot. We use tape here because, for our needs, it makes practical and financial sense. I realize that most people don't associate government with being practical or financially responsible, but every once in a while there's a sensible nerd who can make a pretty chart with colorful lines representing $$ spent that's able to persuade the powers that be.

Tape's not dead, it just has limited situations where it makes sense. Home is rarely one of them.

I think it takes more than clever marketing to declare yourself a prophet. However, being a prophet can be very profitable.

So if they're too overzealous, does that imply that there's an appropriate level of overzealousness?

If they're somehow imaging the drive it's easy - Just run every attempt against the same image instead of the one counting fails.

Exactly.

1) Buy a device
2) Figure out what it's doing
3) Coincidentally discover a bug in your phone and offer a patch

Yes, but they have The Right Stuff.

Actually, I don't see why anyone would hack into Airbus to give them secrets from Boeing. I'd hack into Boeing and then just openly give them to Airbus. Hacking into Airbus to give them secrets just seems redundant.