bluGill

I'll bet that if it really was important you could pay someone (LLMs make this easier) to dig through the data byte by byte and get everything back despite the corruption. It would take years, and be very expensive, but typically there is enough redundancy to figure it out. Often you only really need a small subset of the data and can live without the rest.

Don't get me wrong, drills are important! You should do them. However backups without a restore drill better than no backups at all. Even if you only get the last full backup, the data from the last 6 months will be the easiest to recreate from scratch if you must.

Maybe. For the average person here though they will already have and want a blu-ray drive for "reasons", and so using it for backup is very cheap. LTO-5 might be cheap, but they still need to buy a drive that they won't use for anything else.

If you are a business of course tape is cheap. Even then, a few usb harddrives are cheap as well and much faster.

At least they have a process. That gives you a chance. Often the process itself is good - you didn't test it but the vendors all did and so the data is there - it might be hard to restore, but it can be done by experts after the fact. The drill means you can recover in a "short time" instead of a "long time" (short time can range from minutes to days, while long time days to years)

If it happened to "them" it could happen to us. You never know when the next war will be.

Only if you are filling the tapes. For the average person bluray is much cheaper since they don't have much data.

I don't buy a single anything from those others. I'm going to buy enough to meet their $40 minimum order. Shipping isn't free, and takes 4-6 weeks (remember this is 1960-1990). All this means that I'm planning all my projects months ahead to make a large order that will keep me busy several months (starting 2 months from now)

As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)

Very much. However I've lived in both over the years. Both need to be torn down and replaced! There are a lot of practical things that anyone who has compared living in a house built in 2026 vs something older will not like.

Of course building a new house is expensive. There are a lot of sunk costs in an existing house and generally while there is a lot to not like about an old house, in generally keeping it and doing small remodels to make it better is a better use of money even though ideally you would replace it.

They were always expensive, but you could go there on a Saturday afternoon and get something that will work - it might not be the right part, but it could be made to work. And expensive is relative - a $0.05 resister for $0.75 is very overpriced, and yet cheap. If you want to be in a hobby having that access close makes it a lot easier.

Well, trucks are popular. They're not that popular. The average American is not driving one. The average American is driving a smaller SUV which, while not as fuel efficient as the Yaris, is still fairly fuel efficient and is only sightless, efficient than a similar sized sedan

I don't know about your city but my city there charge these places all over.

Though honestly, in urban cities, we don't need to add more chargers, we need to add good public transit.

As someone with a degree in human machine interaction: stop blaming machine problems on the user. Humans should not have to plan like that.

All the gas cars I've ever had, if I did a few gallons of gas, would only take a few minutes. Overall, the cost savings is worth having an EV, but charging time is a major downside. We need to stop blaming people for the downside of the technology.

That's about 95%, but there's still that last 5% of road trips that an EV does need to find a place to stop. Fortunately, there are places to charge an EV all over. Not quite as convenient as a gas station, but more than good enough for most trips.

That's the only new car that matters. The average car on the road in America is 12 years old, which means there's a lot of people who are not buying those brand new cars for $50,000. They're buying something older, more economical, and they're the ones who are going to start driving the demand for EVs. Either they will start paying a premium for the used EVs that do come available to them because it's worth it or they're going to start buying the cheap EVs if there are any on the market.

The average American could save a couple thousand dollars per year in fuel costs by driving an electric car. Over 12 years that could pay for a cheap electric car. If you drive a lot more than average, you would save even more money.

Ideological reasons, yes, but the fact remains is the EV market is still standing on its own. Sure, the EV market is not growing anywhere near as fast as other parts of the world, but it is still growing. People talk about their EVs and it's becoming clear to even to people who don't have one that they are useful vehicles.

Every once in a while people ask about cost and discover that for most people charging in your garage is significantly cheaper than anything else and charging on the road is still cheaper than gas and while it does take longer it's not too bad.

And as was pointed out, there is every reason to believe that there'll be a change in administration in the federal level in a few years. And once again, the rules will change. The car manufacturers are going to keep building what they know and have good investments in. But they're going to keep investing in EVs both because in the world they're important players and also because they know the government will change and with it their rules and they don't want to be left behind.

I've seen technology change far too much to do anything for future use. I remember running RG58 coax between rooms for ethernet. Then cat 3 for 10baseT. I came close to running fiber at one point but it would have been the wrong size fiber for anything modern (62uM still works but is out, and it would have been terminated wrong. If you want a future proof, you run yourself conduit from each room to a central data closet and put a string in there so you can pull whatever cable you want when you want it.

The best boss I ever had was a MBA who know nothing about engineering - he didn't try to micromanage us. However there are a lot of MBAs who are bad bosses.

Is it run by the bean counting optimizer is the question.

There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.

There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.

You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.

I've found standing is hard. However a treadmill desk isn't too bad. I'm not able to run while I work, but a somewhat slow walk is easy and I can do that for hours.

That depends on the spec you are proving. If you define bug free as won't overflow any buffers and never follow the NULL pointer it might be possible to prove that much. This would be a useful thing to prove for Postgress - even though it could return garbage for every possible select statement and still pass the above proof. If you want to prove postgres does the right thing as well that is much harder to spec - it might not be worth it.

Businesses that are paying attention to the winds though have already figured out that the internet is a hostile place: both their insurance companies and their governments are making noise about security.

I don't know where OP lives or his situation. I know a few people have chosen to put their house on a rate such as he lives in because by managing of themselves they can get a better better deal overall. Those people though do have a choice and they could go on the slightly higher constant rate per kilowatt hour price that most residential, customers have.

I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.

You have more options to manage this and so can get a lower total cost.

Commercial electric rates have long worked that way. The cheap coal power plants that were used commonly 40 years ago did not like to throttle down and so it made sense. Of course things have changed and Peak has a completely different cost structure now and so it no longer makes the sense it did 40 years ago but

Not true everywhere in the world but it is in the US. We need builder grade induction stoves

Standard well drilling rig. Most farms around the world have their own well, so it isn't uncommon. Self sufficiency magazines used to have ads for DIY drills.

Expect to pay $10-20k for the hole but it is common in large parts of the world.

Correct, but it still was framing that would be useful to have. If nothing else, because civilian reactors mean there's also a civilian program, an educational program, and the military would like to have that around.

Or perhaps the lack thereof if you are one of the unsuccessful companies. In the 90s, I worked for a company that competed with Cisco I worked for a company that competed with Cisco. story was in the mid 80s an executive went to Silicon Valley. His report was that Cisco was a bunch of nobodies that would never go anywhere, which they'd go down the street and buy Vitalink instead. You have heard of Cisco and not Vitalink for a reason.

There is no position to take. The market will remain irrational longer than I remain solvent. But I'm not sure how long that will be

I had one a few months ago for $75. Insurance didn't cover it but they took my card.