Funny, but the real irony is, how many pictures do you supposed the British government got of this man when he walked into this establishment?

Ironically, Britain is said to have more state-operated cameras than anywhere else on Earth (but it still cannot solve 80% of its crimes). It seems that the more cameras the state uses, the fewer it allows ordinary citizens to use. This may be a manifestation of a psychiatric illness on the part of the some administrators, who have placed cameras into a god-like position that only they are allowed to officiate.

I've been backing up my personal files for about 25 years, on everything from floppy to Iomega tape to CDs and DVDs to Flash to hard drives. I've also had several online accounts that store some of my files.

My all-around favorite data backup is hard drives. They are reasonably inexpensive, reliable, convenient and fast. I have several hard drives that are more than 10 years old and still fully readable. Even my 25 year-old, 20 MB Packard Bell hard drive still boots. Currently, I have about 4.5 TB of files that I maintain on several external hard drives. I like to get drives with eSATA and USB 2 (3 will be good, when prices drop).

My CDs and DVDs generally hold up OK, though other people sometimes say they have problems reading them. They are too small and inconvenient for large-scale backup.

Flash holds up quite well over time. You could probably toss a flash drive into a lake, then fish it out a year later and still read it just fine. The trouble is, they are 10 times more expensive than hard drives, aren't terribly fast and aren't all that large. I fill up 2 TB hard drives fairly quickly.

Storing files online is fairly reliable, as long as the company doing the storage doesn't go out of business or stop offering its services. I had many files on my AOL account, but they transferred my images to a third party (that has now transferred my images to yet another third party), and my Web pages simply vanished. My email may last forever. Regardless, transferring GB files, much less TB backups, over the Internet is not fast, and I don't trust the security on any of these systems.

Tape has not worked well for me. In fact, most companies that rely on tape would be surprised to learn that their files aren't really recoverable, should they ever need them. I had a few copies of a Ditto tape backup, but something went haywire with the hardware and it unspooled the tape off the spindle. I have 1 last tape copy, but the software for Iomega's hardware crashes any modern OS. I've never had so much trouble with a backup plan as I've had with tape.

My floppy drives were still readable, the last time I checked.

Oh, that's right; Germany is facing population collapse. I forgot about that. Those Germans have been running around naked all over the place, and for some reason, the women aren't getting pregnant very often. Now, Germany is facing a decline of 80% or so from its current population by the end of the century, unless immigrants make up the difference.

No point in building power plants in Germany; few will live there much longer.

Worse; it was the Japanese tsunami that dealt those nuclear plants their death blow. How many 100-foot tall tsunamis does Germany get? I can see why the German environmentalists are so afraid of them!

Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, might not agree with that assessment.

Oh, and 60 million euros for 5 MW comes out $12/watt. Contrast this with a nuclear power plant at about $2/watt. Then, there is the land use. Anything using 3 square miles is *huge*! And, for 5 MW?!?! You would have to be nuts to use this in place of conventional power sources.

The molten salt cools enough in 4 hours that it cannot generate significant power. It does not last all night.

I am trained in technology and power generation, among other things. That "vested interests" line is nonsense from the lunatic conspiracy fringe, and it's getting really old. No, the reason your technology hasn't gone anywhere is because it isn't viable for most people. You claim otherwise, but all you have are empty words and phony math. All you alternate energy people are desperate nuts.

Texas spent billions of dollars building windmills. "There will be no power when the wind doesn't blow," we were warned. The alternate energy people claimed that the wind always blows somewhere, so it was simply a matter of having windmills everywhere. Well, guess what? The wind doesn't always blow somewhere in significant amounts! Texas has more wind farms than anyone except China, spread out all over this huge state, but it had to fire up the old backup natural gas power plants because we had no wind and low capacity.

Right now, Germany exports energy. It's nuclear power allows it to do this, as they generate far more than the Germans need. That's about to change, quite likely with the German industrial base having to cut back, move or import energy from another country (the last option a problem, as they don't have long-distance distribution lines).

Just a few days ago, I was thinking about making a parody of "My Little Pony," and I wondered what the legal repercussions might be.

Yeah, tape is the traditional answer, and still gets a lot of support in the industry. Unfortunately, I have never seen a successful restore from tape. I understand that my experience is not unique. Many companies have made regular tape backups for years, but never tried to do a restore, until that day came when they needed it. Then, they found out that it didn't work.

I've been backing up data to hard drives for 20 years. I've rarely had a problem getting my data off a hard drive, and redundancy has been a big help. I maintain about 4.5 TB of data on about 7 TB of external HDDs.

Another important difference between Jell-O and jelly is that Jell-O is a protein and water-based sol, whereas jelly is a sugar and pectin-based gel.

Your post is particularly well-thought out, rational and fair. I see far too many people who advocate the idea that whatever the man with the money does is OK, that anything goes in business, that the ability to treat people as one wishes is its own justification. I am sick of people turning business into a Machiavellian slug-fest. It ultimately hurts everyone involved and is a big part of the reason for those so-called "inevitable" market downturns. Many of those downturns--such as the big one beginning around 2008--could be avoided, if companies were concerned about ethical behavior over self-aggrandizement.

It is unfortunate that I often work at a skill level in which my co-workers are willing to scrape the ground for crumbs, as it were. They will spend much of the money they earn just to keep a job, instead of requiring fair compensation for their work and expenses.

"So yeah, this is just one group of nutcases..."

If they even exist. Even the author of the story admitted that no one has confirmed the authenticity of this story. This is just an urban legend, reported as news.