umm, you mean, like, maybe the user uploading the content to Facebook in the first place? Oh, right, there's no consent (implied or otherwise) there at all. Nope.

Your guess assumes that Facebook engineers are as stupid as you and think that the problem can't be solved.

Who says they want to reuse them?

This medium is for archive storage. The whole point of archive is that it's static data, not liable to change - and you don't even want it to change. Also, if your goal is to keep the data forever then you're not going to reuse the media it's stored on, whether that's tape, HDD or optical.

There is a difference between 'enterprise' and 'consumer' drives.
Facebook, Google, et al. may use consumer grade disks, but mostly because they've engineered for failure - they *expect* drives to fail and have built systems around that expectation (multiple copies in geographically-diverse locations, software automation of data replication, etc.).
When you have that level of back-end systems managing failure, it doesn't matter so much if your disk fails in 2 years or 5 - your system is engineered to deal with it so you might as well save money buying the cheaper drives - they're all going to fail anyway.
The same is not true for 'typical' enterprises where 'replication' may extend as far as RAID within a host, with an offsite backup.

I've heard that's common for broads everywhere [da boom CHING!]

In other news, shares in Sharp Electronics and LG Electronics jumped sharply today, for unspecified reasons.

That 'article' is a joke - of course Surface comes out on top - when 'reviewed' by the guy who wrote the book on Windows Phone 8.

It's also funny - I recall the exact same argument over quantity vs. quality of applications back in the 80's when Apple were the underdog. Seems like MS can't change their habit of... recycling other peoples' ideas.

I also especially like the sign-off... "It’s time for all of you, my faithful readers, to tell me why I’m wrong"... well, we might if there was ANY option to comment on the page.

So, why are Slashdot running this Surface ad under the guise of an article?

But that's just familiarity. If you grew up under a metric system, were taught metric in school and saw metric measurements in everyday objects (other than the 2 liter soda bottles...) then you'd be able to visualize 1 kilometer just as easily as you could visualize 1 mile today.
The issue here is that it will take a generation (or more) to make that transition, during which time all the big nobs will feel increasingly isolated as they're more quickly overtaken by these 'new math' thinkers. Inertia is comforting.

but the _commercials_

When paying/working/whatever on a computer you're generally focussed and have a general control over what you see/do.

On TV, especially kids TV, any program you're watching is frequently interrupted by images and messages about junk food, snacks, sodas, sugar-laden juice drinks, etc.

I contend that it is this (subliminal" maybe) messaging that's leading to obesity as much, if nor more so, than just the sedentary nature of watching TV.

Change the computer so that every for 2 out of every 8 minutes of usage your computer screen is replaced with images of BigMacs, Whoppers, Coke, Skittles, etc., etc. and I BET that all those non-fat computer kids will get fat pretty quickly.

Damn, did I just give the junk food industry a new target to aim for?

All the 'throttle the process/port/ip' answers are wrong. I'm surprised people here can't see that.

The issue is that the idio^H^H^H^H user in question is using AFP/SMB/whatever to open the file, but that's the same process he would use to transfer the file over the network.

If you throttle the file server daemon to 10kbps/nice 20/whatever, all that will serve is to make network transfers excruciatingly slow to the point where he'll be complaining "but it takes _hours_ to copy the file over the network, which is why I work on it remotely".

If there is a throttling solution it is in allowing fast file copies while maintaining slow open/writes. I don't know that exists (at least at the user-manageable level). Read-only shares might help (that way he can't save his edits back) but will end up with fragmented file stores (and someone has to keep track of where the latest version of any file is).

You might be able to craft a possible solution via Mac OS X's ACLs - maybe write/add_file on the directory, but read-only files so he can create new files but not edit/save/overwrite existing files.

At the end of the day, though, without a network infrastructure change (e.g. a central file server) this problem isn't going to go away.