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Comment No joke, it's hard (Score 4, Insightful) 186

Deleting data is really really hard. If one is storing large amounts of data it is difficult to put a system in place which can prove that every copy in your posession has been deleted. Think about the work of sifting through thousands of write-once offline backups, be it tapes or CDs or whatever, locating the data, copying the original minus the data and destroying the originals. If that's not hard enough, what about data that's not in discrete files. Say there's a PostgreSQL database that's zipped and spans a thousand peices of physical media. The only way to delete a record is to load the whole database then redump it. And don't forget about regenerating all the index files. And dealing with obsolete file formats.

This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.

Comment Wasted fruit? (Score 5, Insightful) 160

The real news is that 20% of the watermelon crop is currently thrown out due to cosmetic issues. I don't understand why shape and surface issues would disqualify the fruit from use in processed foods. Such as watermelon juice, fruit salads, sweeteners, etc. If true (and the article did not provide citations, this represents a stunning waste.

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