Yep they are. I get the same order for my kid about once a week. And the price is different in different branches, and changes at different times (it's not dramatic, but as I order exactly 2 items it's noticable). It's been like this since earlier this year.

Employees pay income tax from their gross salary. The employers (including corporations) only calculate it and send to the federal/state/local revenue collectors.

I mainly use my phone as a podcast/audiobook player, hotspot, taking piccies, notifications and making calls (funny that)
I dislike looking at the screen more than a few minutes at a time, and hate looking at tiny fonts/images.
So I carry my 16" laptop everywhere, and browse online (how god intended the internet to be used)

Yeah I second minidisc. I remember friends with players and they sounded really good.
Better than your garden variety CD players (as they had really nice DACs)

They published this too early. Would have made a good April fools story.

In any case, there's a world alternative games ... let it be submitted for that.

Once they were over 50x the price.
The different in price is dropping as the demand/mass production is growing.

Smaller companies are opting out of tape because of the perceived high cost of an automated tape library.
And you are right about less tapes being used, but you are seeing more intelligent backup software that does does perpetual incrementals and de-dupe, keeping the cost of media down.Short-term backups are also being kept on disk (e.g. less than 30 days) and the longer term ones to tape. This means the likelyhood of restore comes from the faster disk.

Sounds like something I used to see in the 90s.

Tape libraries are very low maintenance and they usually have a cleaning cart slot that auto cleans the drive when it needs to
(which isn't very often on modern tape drives)

For a small company (that cant copy the data to another site) then the only manual job is the import/export of the carts and the occasional cleaning cart replacement.

When you are talking about backup up hundreds of TB (or PBs) then you still need tape drives.

1000 tapes only require the power of the tape drives to run... buy another 1000 tape drives and you still need the same power.

.. until you want to restore data from a bunch of magnetic reel tapes.
You need to find a really old tape drive (like a 3420). Then you need to find someone who knows how to operate and read from the media.

I've seen something like this a number of years ago. They even stored a tape drive in the cupboard with the reels.
They couldn't find anyone who could get it operational. Even when they contacted people, who were in retirement, they said it needed an obsolete system to read data. It ended up being shipped abroad to get the data off them, likely with a significant cost.

Enterprises don't generally vault that sort of data for XX years.
They would normally migrate it to an incrementally newer media after a technology refresh.

Any media that's not migrated usually gets destroyed or abandoned (locked away and forgotten) after the appropriate legal limitation period is passed.

We used to see badly run departments scramble to try restore unmanaged/archaic backup media, but is now very uncommon due to requirements
governing data retention and management.
Plus a library of a thousand old tapes could fit in a handful of latest generation media.

I work at a large IT company and there is so much fragmentation and inconsistent security policies that seem to come from knee-jerk decisions by middle managers that have been chewed up because of specific security exposures.

This ends up being difficult for an end user as you end up jumping through extra loops for a service that less important that the one you normally use.

Security personnel, don't listen to reason, they just perform their goosestep and salute to the leader.
If I find a loophole to make my life easier I will use it.

Companies need to realize security needs to be thought out and need to be integrated properly, not a strap on what I see used by large companies.

Client Certs are a pain because the S/W is lacking decent cert management.
In fact most of security is lacking. It should be written better and applications should have proper security integration.

That's just politics. Most politicians do it ... smarter ones usually don't get caught and the more affluent the country the more sophisticated the corruption.

The U.S. Barely makes the top 20 in the Transparency International rankings list (http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results).
Turkey is 50th

well that aint going to happen, unless the socialists take over (not in this lifetime)