The voice recorder may be completely destroyed. Keeping them separate decreases the possibility that a single force or impact will destroy both units.

Same reason enterprise IT departments (should) maintain multiple, separate backups of critical data.

Cute feature list. Too bad my Linux machine does everything I need it for, at the cost of only the hardware. Microsoft has given me no reason to consider spending money when the free options fill my needs, from normal end-user stuff to web design and system administration.

At some point, a person should stand before a legislative committee dealing with copyright term extensions - pick a country where these discussions are happening, any one - and ask just how many more term extensions will be granted, or whether copyright terms will be made permanent de jure, not just de facto.

Since you're already at +5 and you said it better than I could have, can I just tack on "me too"?

It's almost as if "trust" is an unknown concept to many people.

I'm sure this will seem like a great idea... until the power goes out. I would think that the residents of a state subjected to power outages for profit not too long ago might be a bit more careful about increasing their reliance upon electric current for basic information accessibility.

If we don't replace fossil fuel generation with something more sustainable before peak extraction hits, we are all going to be knocked back to the Paper Age pretty fast. Say what you will about dead trees - they don't require current to operate.

... don't leave it in a place where a random disaster (or random disgruntled third-party employee) can wipe it from the face of the Earth. Terabyte-size drives are cheap nowadays. Buy them. Buy many of them. Back up elements to them on a regular basis. Don't destroy raw material until the editing is done and the master has been copied at least twice purely for long-term storage, never mind how many copies need to be made available for distribution. Don't even rely on just hard disks - dump masters to tape if you can afford it. HDCAM's not completely overpriced; hell, even standard-definition Digital Betacam is better than, quite literally, nothing.

If they're lucky, the animated contributions and sound elements may be retrievable should the individuals responsible for those be more scrupulous about their material retention than the studio (the story didn't quite make clear what, if anything, they've been able to recover), but any location shooting lost is going to be a pain to redo.

This should be a very expensive lesson for their technically-inclined production crew and, if they have any, actual IT staff.

Goodness forbid an "educated" person get their hands dirty. It is useful to put theory into practice through direct effort, and it demonstrates a proficiency with the practical tools and results that can only lead to better theory.

As a Canadian, I think we are in no position to pity or criticize our neighbours. Our media and telecom industries are in some ways even more integrated and oligopolistic than our neighbours' equvialents. Most of the private terrestrial broadcasters happen to be owned, in whole or in part, by the same companies that own what are known as "broadcast distribution undertakings" - basically, the cable, satellite, and IPTV providers. Several also own digital pay TV channels, cellular and landline telecom providers, and probably backbone services as well.

Hope you like vertically integrated telecommunications/content cartels. My only question is whether Comcast will buy a wireless service provider or AT&T will buy digital TV channels and fund original programs first.

Wake me when evolution deniers have a a testable hypothesis. "Goddidit" is not a theory.

"Real 4G" is clearly whatever the cell service providers want it to be. Between the meaningless buzzwords in ads and promotional literature, and the alphabet soup of acronyms used to name specific data transmission schemes, it's no wonder so much confusion reigns about which service is "the best".

I think this was actually floated here in Canuckistan early last decade. It never made it into a piece of legislation; it's effectively a tax on any computer with storage that plays music, whether it's a little $50 flash-memory player with cheap plastic buttons to $3500 laptop gaming rigs. There's no hope of equal enforcement, and either the loopholes would be massive or the entire industry would smash it down before it could ever be legislated.

Hey, while we're all getting drawn into well-burnt flamewars, can we get a vi vs. emacs story for our weekend debating pleasure? Maybe some BSD vs. GPL flavour for good measure?

Wake me when the author pits NCSA Mosaic against lynx.

Hear, hear.

My partner and I dumped cable TV when it was clear we were only watching a few shows on the hundred-or-so channels we had access to. 95% of the content was repetitious junk, with the same amount of annoying ads and infomercials as terrestrial broadcast. At least we don't have to pay to pull in HD OTA content, aside from the $45 for the secondhand indoor antenna I bought[0]. Between that and Netflix, we're set. I've thought about slapping together a MythTV box from time to time for recording purposes.

There's some neat stuff happening in OTA broadcasting post-analog shutdown. Some NBC affiliates carry Universal Sports on a subchannel, and some other stations carry things like Retro Television Network (cheesy old TV!), music video channels, and in the case of my area an extra news/educational channel on the PBS feed. Once Canada switches off the analog TV spectrum[1], I expect to see a few more neato things on the air.

[0] We have an unusually good view in the direction of signal sources around here, so costs would probably run into the low hundreds for a proper roof/mast antenna, rotor, preamp, and coax for most suburbanites. It's still worth it, IMHO.

[1] This assumes the telecom/media cartel up here doesn't cook up an excuse to delay the digital switch even farther into the future. The switchover was supposed to be August of this year, though I half-remember rumours that they may push it back to 2013 or beyond. Part of the problem is that most private OTA stations are owned by media conglomerates that also own cable/satellite/IPTV operations, and they're much more interested in squeezing money out of subscribers. Go ahead, ask me about the kabuki fee-for-carriage "debate" that took place here last year. I'm still brassed off at how everyone in this country fell for it.