Getting rid of ACPI sounds also like a "good luck with that" plan.
If anything, insufferably shitty firmware has been steadily bloating to the point where we should probably start including it in operating system marketshare charts...
If I was the maker of Bitcoin, I'd want privacy too.
I am sure interested parties (Read: NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA/etc.) would love to question (Read: Guantanamo Bay) the makers of this almost anonymous currency.
In all seriousness, what questions would you want to ask? If somebody thinks that he's still sitting on a huge pile of bitcoins, they'd probably want those transferred to a new owner; but there aren't a lot of other secrets to be had, aside from tedious and largely pointless questions about 'So, what inspired you to create a cryptocurrency?' How it works is a matter of public knowledge, and if there are any undocumented lemmae your best bet is probably to ask your own in-house team of world class cryptographers to read the paper and drink some coffee while thinking about it.
Maybe some enraged central bank chairman wants to take a rasp to his teeth just for spite; but there isn't much interrogative value.
Even aside from the shoddy standards of evidence (Newsweek, shoddy reporting? Knock me over with a feather...), how well can something possibly go when a 'news' organization decides that what their readers really need is a human interest angle on this 'bit-coin' thing that the geeks are talking about. And not just any squishy 'human interest' bullshit; but squishy 'human interest' bullshit about somebody who (even if he were the creator) now has essentially no known or suspected activity (unlike, say, the large stable of colorful characters operating exchanges and controversial ASIC operations and so on).
It's like a newspaper deciding that, in order to help readers understand the operations of the American government, they are going to entirely ignore all contemporary politicians and political happenings in order to write: "The Mysterious Writer Behind 'Common Sense' Unmasked!".
The fact that they appear to be harassing a sick, troubled, old man for cheap pageviews is just ghoulish; but the very premise they started from is shitty journalism: "Well, we don't know anything about cryptography, and our readers wouldn't know a prime number from a subprime number, so we'll ignore that, and the (moderately high stakes, at times) contemporary wheeling and dealing in the exchange and mining arenas is all complex and stuff, so let's just unmask the mysterious mystery man, and maybe do some tepid armchair psychology about what made him act... Everybody loves that shit, and it requires no special skills, knowledge, or attention span, so it should move eyeballs."
I should have phrased that a bit more clearly: it's perfectly possible for different people(or even the same people, with different bitcoins) to have 'eh, you'll just have to trust us on that; but it sure is fast!' and mathemagic-crypto-money at the same time, it's not as though the presence of one activity irrevocably taints the entire pool of bitcoins for the other; but any specific bitcoin (or subdivision of one) can only have one or the other:
Someone always has to be the one holding the private keys, and they are the only ones for which the elegant math and its assurances apply(and even for them, it only applies to the BTC side of a transaction, not to whatever the other party promised to deliver in exchange for that irreversible payment).
You can layer all sorts of arrangements on top of that, as the exchanges do(where the exchange, not its users, is the one holding the keys; but near-instant clearance, escrow, transaction reversals, etc. are all possible because all 'transactions' are just the exchange shuffling bits internally), or a transaction broker/insurer type model, as you propose, or a conventional escrow service, or any number of other possible contractual arrangements.
Nothing about bitcoins magically prevents the use of any of the zillions of arrangements we've applied to commodities and mediums of exchange throughout history, my point is just that, if you are a participant in those things, the properties attributed to bitcoins are largely irrelevant to you(basically the only one that matters is double-spending prevention, without which inflation would render all of them worthless within a few hundreds of milliseconds), and if you do want to enjoy all the properties of bitcoins, the list of things you can do with them gets a great deal shorter.
That's not some scathing condemnation, every medium of exchange in history has only functioned because some semblance of law, custom, or a mixture of the two kept the surrounding institutions vaguely in check, fraud within sufferable limits, and so on; but bitcoin brings nothing new to the table here, except in the very narrowest range of uses, where its mathematical properties do hold, and if you wander outside of that, it's open season.
It would be interesting, if somehow the exchange functionality were built into the protocol and entirely P2P. Getting rid of these centralized exchanges seems like it would really stabilize the currency. I don't know how remotely feasible that would be, it is far too early in the morning without coffee.
Effectively, what you describe is the protocol(which is p2p as well), except that the protocol does not address the issue of matching prospective buyers and prospective sellers (a protocol that does this, without a central market-operator, would be neat; but bodging one into a protocol for transferring virtual coins without double-spending would probably be unwieldy, though clients that implement both would be logical).
Perhaps the more fundamental issue (aside from any empirically hairy and/or provably intractable issues with an authority-less market protocol and select classes of DoS attacks or something) is that the blockchain arrangement that bitcoin uses(while secure, even without an authority, exactly as intended) isn't particularly fast, and obviously is of no value whatsoever for cashing in or out between BTC and another currency.
The 'exchanges', since they (from bitcoin's point of view) are just one entity making internal, irrelevant, decisions about how many of its coins go in box #1 and how many in box #2 and so on can 'transfer' coins at near-arbitrary speed (since the 'transfer' is just an internal number-shuffling, not an actual bitcoin transfer in the architectural sense) and, if suitably set up, can also perform transfers between holders of currency and holders of bitcoins.
Really, I'm inclined to view 'exchanges' (and their generally atrocious track record on getting hacked, being outright scams, etc.) as one of the major symptoms of Bitcoin's fascinating, and slightly tragic, clarification of the virtues and limits of its concept: you can have a currency-like instrument, perfect in its crystalline mathematical security or you can have the features people expect from money; but getting both? That isn't obviously a problem that is in-scope for mathematics, much less solvable...
Also, why in God's Green Earth are we talking about regressing to the 1920s? When did we give up on progress?
Well, the Great Depression hadn't happened yet, and none of that commie 'New Deal' nonsense, so if you would really prefer to keep partying like the Gilded Age hasn't quite ended, you might see a trip back to the '20s as progress...
To the degree that it doesn't merely shove people from Company A's product to Company B's product(which would probably be roughly a wash hedonically, though possibly slightly negative if a company were to discover that the marginal value of a dollar spent on advertising is higher than a dollar spent on improving products...), I'd have to assume that the news is more or less 100% bad.
When the punchline is that possessing Product and/or Service X will make you better off; and the target demographic is 'people who currently don't have one; but might be willing to believe that', it's pretty much best-case that the ad will fail, and increasing levels of added dissatisfaction with lack of Product X for the other cases.
Here's a better idea Mr. Greenspam. How about we make your pay equal to everybody elses? (My insulting consulting invoice is issued by the way)
You'd pay him that much?
Even after his tragicomic “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief"; but, not to worry, “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets...Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.” performance?
(I guess, horribly enough, the fact that the events of the day did move him to concede that the 'free markets just full of rational actors!' model...might have a few weak spots... actually makes him a better empiricist than more than a few other economists in that camp.)
Unfortunately, what you avoid in union management you gain in contracting company executives and shareholders...
Even if you derive so much pleasure from stepping on workers that it's illegal in 14 southern states, that's an expensive way to get rid of some unions...(and that's the best-case scenario, the cost-benefit looks worse if you don't.)
Alibaba is mostly (possibly entirely, I don't know how much if anything they sell on their own account) the middleman. I'd be fairly surprised if they don't make it past 'consumer protection' (such as it is) pretty much entirely unscathed. Maybe they'll even add an abusive mandatory binding arbitration clause!
There's also the matter of your expected retrieval case: tapes almost certainly beat HDDs in the archival timeframe, so suck it up and pay up; and they (if reasonably modern) can be alarmingly fast at the linear reads and writes associated with doing full restores or fast backups of data that have been suitably lined up to be shoved onto tape.
On the other hand, they are almost perversely non-random-access(doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set with library swapping, more than doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set larger than your library can handle with junior-admin swapping), so the 'somebody fucked up, they need File X to be like it was three months ago' scenario sucks.
Nearline or consumer SATA on undistinguished controllers aren't quite as zippy; but they might as well be a RAMdisk compared to tape if you are doing small-scale restores, though probably not as fast if de-icing a much larger dataset for wholesale restoration of multiple systems.
On phones that use Samsung's RIL; but either custom firmware or substantially-modifiable rooted firmware, the SELinux capabilities that they (fairly recently, was it 4.2?) could presumably be used to nuke most of the risk. Assuming it uses the filesystem commands at all, the legitimate day-to-day uses are presumably a few specific 'we were too cheap for NVRAM' locations that (if not documented, should at least be empirically determinable) you could then restrict it to.
Now, if you just need a few megs of cheap storage and don't want to bump the BoM, building an arbitrary filesystem access mechanism seems so sloppy and unconcerned with actual security as to make me wonder what else they fucked up; but SELinux is pretty powerful, if a pain, at granular lockdown of lousy or dangerous software.
You can name whatever you like whatever you want. No muss, no fuss, no red tape, no nothing.
Achieving a name recognized by somebody other than you is a somewhat more complex problem, usually requiring a certain amount of give-and-take in terms of "I'll accept your stupid idea if you endure mine" type arrangements.
For all the histrionics about it, Nobody was somehow magically anointed the Super Name Czar by some magically authoritative process. Some organizations have their shit together, and any names in a given domain not endorsed by them are pretty much just private nicknames, some don't; but that's it.
Tape actually works pretty well, it's just that if you are running a small enough system that "Well, obviously, just get another 20TB array and store it at one of your other sites, idiot... On second though, get two extras and put each one at a different offsite location" isn't the answer that springs to mind almost reflexively, you probably can't afford the cost of entry.
An actually contemporary tape drive(and a machine capable of keeping it fed when it is running full bore) is Not Cheap; but the fleabay shit that is cheap tends to offer painfully mediocre capacity and unknown reliability. Disks, by contrast, have a cost of entry that basically starts at zero and scales more or less linearly with the number of disks, unless you absolutely must have them all online at the same time(and even here, you hardly need screamin' hardware RAID for your backup volume, and bulk SATA ports of undistinguished performance are cheap).
I haven't checked; but while Backblaze definitely doesn't back up UNC-pathed SMB shares or (ugh, mapped drive letters), is it smart enough to check whether a disk is 'real' or just an iSCSI initiator pointed at a suitable target? Even the cheap-ass versions of Windows come with a bundled initiator, though the target is server only...
A low-altitude controlled flight into terrain(especially the 'clip multiple bits of it' kind, rather than the 'squish. into the mountainside' kind) is a hell of a lot more survivable than just about anything at cruising altitude and almost definitely over water.
It's a pity that they apparently didn't have the tools to distinguish the wreckage of a white aircraft from snowcap at that time (or in that place); but their odds of having something worth finding were a lot better.
I'm not sure why GIMP originally wanted a Toolkit; but Gtk mostly emerged because Qt was proprietary at the time. Given that, for all its failings as a toolkit, Gtk, possibly along with other factors that coincided with it(I'm perfectly willing to listen; but don't know of any offhand) succeeded in getting GPLed Qt. I think Nokia even LGPLed Qt part of some aspect of their flailing-death-spiral strategy.
That, to the best of my understanding, is what confuses people: Qt is generally considered superior to Gtk, is now LGPL, and is generally well liked; so why would somebody say 'Well, Gtk has issues, so I'm going to make my own Gtk; but better!' when they could just use Qt?
I apologize if I didn't express it clearly; but the punchline of my thinking is this: Unlike some countries that operate welfare states (the northwestern European ones, say), which have fairly broad political agreement on the fact that that's an OK idea, and so do a lot of their welfare spending 'in kind' (things like healthcare, education through college, sometimes various housing schemes) because it is not politically toxic to do so, the US has a welfare state; but is far more conflicted about that. This tends to cause such (highly visible and vulnerable) 'in kind' programs either to never make it to production or to get shot down; which means that most of the redistribution ends up happening just by cutting people checks directly (under a varied and ever-shifting collection of programs and excuses) which is easier to sustain, in the face of lacking political support and poor odds of long-term support, than would be programs that involve funding institutions rather than throwing checks at people.
At least for the ones where you don't have to send down the fanciest in research ROVs to scour multiple square miles of deep ocean floor, I suspect that the materials science and structural engineering people probably have a wish-list of Very Important Bits that they'd like to examine in detail; but it certainly wouldn't increase the motivation to go hunting.
As much as penny-pinching on safety systems is a bad habit, is the emotive "zOMG, Tell the Families!!!" really the best argument that there is for these systems?
It's been what, over three days now, with an aircraft that disappeared from radar at commercial cruising altitude without so much as a burst of garbled obscenities from the flight crew. Do you think that your family is clinging to those little flotation-device pillows, awaiting a rescue that would have come in time if only for upgraded real-time blackbox transmission?
If anybody derives some sort of comfort from whatever they do manage to find, all the better; but this is all trying to recover data for failure analysis, not survivors.
Now, if you want to justify real-time transmission, check out the amount of (incidentally not paid for by the airline) search gear that has been diverted from Malaysian, Chinese, and other sources to looking for the debris. Whole bunch of ships, airplane and helicopter overflights, diversion of what, 10 satellites? That starts to make the $100k look like savings.
Hmm... sounds like we should gut the VA, to encourage the sickies to snuff it early, and rake in the savings from both reduced medical expenses and reduced pension obligations.... Tax cuts for my friends and campaign donors!
Yet if you point this fact out, you lose a presidential election...
Actually, there may be a confounding factor (this is a hypothesis, anybody who has real numbers is welcome to step forward to argue for or against):
Assuming you aren't inimically opposed to the concept of the welfare state (whether because you think that it's actually a good idea, or whether you think that it's relatively cheap insurance to keep a fundamentally capitalist economy with slightly higher tax rates to buy off the proles, irrelevant), the state basically has two options for 'redistribution':
1. Actually comparatively high taxes on individuals and corporations, used to fund a variety of not-directly-cash public services(eg. national health system, cheap or free education, etc.).
2. Avoid the flack associated (in the US) with robust public-sector offerings, and sneak in your social welfare spending primarily in 'emergency' programs (WIC, etc. which pay in scrip; but have nontrivial USD value once you discount them for being able to purchase only certain classes of goods) and in 'hand up for the virtuous poor' type things ("earned income tax credit", assorted subsidies for small business loans, edging up to programs that are basically a sop for the middle class, like mortage related deductions).
Now, lest anybody misinterpret me on this point: I Think It Is A Bad, Bad, thing that nontrivial swaths of the US population are basically so damn poor that the only cash worth squeezing out of them is sales taxes and check-cashing joint fees. However, barring a solution to that problem, it would be my contention that (like our absurd 'We should really have universal health care; because our current system is an utter clusterfuck delivering bad results for crazy high prices, and tying workers to their jobs; but universal health care is commie socialism, so let's have a crazy arrangement where the government 'launders' universal health care(at a tidy markup) through the incumbent private insurance companies!') our 'let's see if we can get some of the benefits of a welfare state without courting the unpopularity of calling it that, and without the clout to do anything about the ever-widening wealth gap' approach has left us with a singularly dysfunctional creature, neither fish nor fowl.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting rid of ACPI sounds also like a "good luck with that" plan.
If anything, insufferably shitty firmware has been steadily bloating to the point where we should probably start including it in operating system marketshare charts...
If I was the maker of Bitcoin, I'd want privacy too. I am sure interested parties (Read: NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA/etc.) would love to question (Read: Guantanamo Bay) the makers of this almost anonymous currency.
In all seriousness, what questions would you want to ask? If somebody thinks that he's still sitting on a huge pile of bitcoins, they'd probably want those transferred to a new owner; but there aren't a lot of other secrets to be had, aside from tedious and largely pointless questions about 'So, what inspired you to create a cryptocurrency?' How it works is a matter of public knowledge, and if there are any undocumented lemmae your best bet is probably to ask your own in-house team of world class cryptographers to read the paper and drink some coffee while thinking about it.
Maybe some enraged central bank chairman wants to take a rasp to his teeth just for spite; but there isn't much interrogative value.
Even aside from the shoddy standards of evidence (Newsweek, shoddy reporting? Knock me over with a feather...), how well can something possibly go when a 'news' organization decides that what their readers really need is a human interest angle on this 'bit-coin' thing that the geeks are talking about. And not just any squishy 'human interest' bullshit; but squishy 'human interest' bullshit about somebody who (even if he were the creator) now has essentially no known or suspected activity (unlike, say, the large stable of colorful characters operating exchanges and controversial ASIC operations and so on).
It's like a newspaper deciding that, in order to help readers understand the operations of the American government, they are going to entirely ignore all contemporary politicians and political happenings in order to write: "The Mysterious Writer Behind 'Common Sense' Unmasked!".
The fact that they appear to be harassing a sick, troubled, old man for cheap pageviews is just ghoulish; but the very premise they started from is shitty journalism: "Well, we don't know anything about cryptography, and our readers wouldn't know a prime number from a subprime number, so we'll ignore that, and the (moderately high stakes, at times) contemporary wheeling and dealing in the exchange and mining arenas is all complex and stuff, so let's just unmask the mysterious mystery man, and maybe do some tepid armchair psychology about what made him act... Everybody loves that shit, and it requires no special skills, knowledge, or attention span, so it should move eyeballs."
I should have phrased that a bit more clearly: it's perfectly possible for different people(or even the same people, with different bitcoins) to have 'eh, you'll just have to trust us on that; but it sure is fast!' and mathemagic-crypto-money at the same time, it's not as though the presence of one activity irrevocably taints the entire pool of bitcoins for the other; but any specific bitcoin (or subdivision of one) can only have one or the other:
Someone always has to be the one holding the private keys, and they are the only ones for which the elegant math and its assurances apply(and even for them, it only applies to the BTC side of a transaction, not to whatever the other party promised to deliver in exchange for that irreversible payment).
You can layer all sorts of arrangements on top of that, as the exchanges do(where the exchange, not its users, is the one holding the keys; but near-instant clearance, escrow, transaction reversals, etc. are all possible because all 'transactions' are just the exchange shuffling bits internally), or a transaction broker/insurer type model, as you propose, or a conventional escrow service, or any number of other possible contractual arrangements.
Nothing about bitcoins magically prevents the use of any of the zillions of arrangements we've applied to commodities and mediums of exchange throughout history, my point is just that, if you are a participant in those things, the properties attributed to bitcoins are largely irrelevant to you(basically the only one that matters is double-spending prevention, without which inflation would render all of them worthless within a few hundreds of milliseconds), and if you do want to enjoy all the properties of bitcoins, the list of things you can do with them gets a great deal shorter.
That's not some scathing condemnation, every medium of exchange in history has only functioned because some semblance of law, custom, or a mixture of the two kept the surrounding institutions vaguely in check, fraud within sufferable limits, and so on; but bitcoin brings nothing new to the table here, except in the very narrowest range of uses, where its mathematical properties do hold, and if you wander outside of that, it's open season.
It would be interesting, if somehow the exchange functionality were built into the protocol and entirely P2P. Getting rid of these centralized exchanges seems like it would really stabilize the currency. I don't know how remotely feasible that would be, it is far too early in the morning without coffee.
Effectively, what you describe is the protocol(which is p2p as well), except that the protocol does not address the issue of matching prospective buyers and prospective sellers (a protocol that does this, without a central market-operator, would be neat; but bodging one into a protocol for transferring virtual coins without double-spending would probably be unwieldy, though clients that implement both would be logical).
Perhaps the more fundamental issue (aside from any empirically hairy and/or provably intractable issues with an authority-less market protocol and select classes of DoS attacks or something) is that the blockchain arrangement that bitcoin uses(while secure, even without an authority, exactly as intended) isn't particularly fast, and obviously is of no value whatsoever for cashing in or out between BTC and another currency.
The 'exchanges', since they (from bitcoin's point of view) are just one entity making internal, irrelevant, decisions about how many of its coins go in box #1 and how many in box #2 and so on can 'transfer' coins at near-arbitrary speed (since the 'transfer' is just an internal number-shuffling, not an actual bitcoin transfer in the architectural sense) and, if suitably set up, can also perform transfers between holders of currency and holders of bitcoins.
Really, I'm inclined to view 'exchanges' (and their generally atrocious track record on getting hacked, being outright scams, etc.) as one of the major symptoms of Bitcoin's fascinating, and slightly tragic, clarification of the virtues and limits of its concept: you can have a currency-like instrument, perfect in its crystalline mathematical security or you can have the features people expect from money; but getting both? That isn't obviously a problem that is in-scope for mathematics, much less solvable...
Also, why in God's Green Earth are we talking about regressing to the 1920s? When did we give up on progress?
Well, the Great Depression hadn't happened yet, and none of that commie 'New Deal' nonsense, so if you would really prefer to keep partying like the Gilded Age hasn't quite ended, you might see a trip back to the '20s as progress...
How does marketing and advertising impact this?
To the degree that it doesn't merely shove people from Company A's product to Company B's product(which would probably be roughly a wash hedonically, though possibly slightly negative if a company were to discover that the marginal value of a dollar spent on advertising is higher than a dollar spent on improving products...), I'd have to assume that the news is more or less 100% bad.
When the punchline is that possessing Product and/or Service X will make you better off; and the target demographic is 'people who currently don't have one; but might be willing to believe that', it's pretty much best-case that the ad will fail, and increasing levels of added dissatisfaction with lack of Product X for the other cases.
Here's a better idea Mr. Greenspam. How about we make your pay equal to everybody elses? (My insulting consulting invoice is issued by the way)
You'd pay him that much?
Even after his tragicomic “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief"; but, not to worry, “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets...Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.” performance?
(I guess, horribly enough, the fact that the events of the day did move him to concede that the 'free markets just full of rational actors!' model...might have a few weak spots... actually makes him a better empiricist than more than a few other economists in that camp.)
Unfortunately, what you avoid in union management you gain in contracting company executives and shareholders...
Even if you derive so much pleasure from stepping on workers that it's illegal in 14 southern states, that's an expensive way to get rid of some unions...(and that's the best-case scenario, the cost-benefit looks worse if you don't.)
Alibaba is mostly (possibly entirely, I don't know how much if anything they sell on their own account) the middleman. I'd be fairly surprised if they don't make it past 'consumer protection' (such as it is) pretty much entirely unscathed. Maybe they'll even add an abusive mandatory binding arbitration clause!
So Ebay, but with lower transaction fees?
There's also the matter of your expected retrieval case: tapes almost certainly beat HDDs in the archival timeframe, so suck it up and pay up; and they (if reasonably modern) can be alarmingly fast at the linear reads and writes associated with doing full restores or fast backups of data that have been suitably lined up to be shoved onto tape.
On the other hand, they are almost perversely non-random-access(doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set with library swapping, more than doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set larger than your library can handle with junior-admin swapping), so the 'somebody fucked up, they need File X to be like it was three months ago' scenario sucks.
Nearline or consumer SATA on undistinguished controllers aren't quite as zippy; but they might as well be a RAMdisk compared to tape if you are doing small-scale restores, though probably not as fast if de-icing a much larger dataset for wholesale restoration of multiple systems.
On phones that use Samsung's RIL; but either custom firmware or substantially-modifiable rooted firmware, the SELinux capabilities that they (fairly recently, was it 4.2?) could presumably be used to nuke most of the risk. Assuming it uses the filesystem commands at all, the legitimate day-to-day uses are presumably a few specific 'we were too cheap for NVRAM' locations that (if not documented, should at least be empirically determinable) you could then restrict it to.
Now, if you just need a few megs of cheap storage and don't want to bump the BoM, building an arbitrary filesystem access mechanism seems so sloppy and unconcerned with actual security as to make me wonder what else they fucked up; but SELinux is pretty powerful, if a pain, at granular lockdown of lousy or dangerous software.
You can name whatever you like whatever you want. No muss, no fuss, no red tape, no nothing.
Achieving a name recognized by somebody other than you is a somewhat more complex problem, usually requiring a certain amount of give-and-take in terms of "I'll accept your stupid idea if you endure mine" type arrangements.
For all the histrionics about it, Nobody was somehow magically anointed the Super Name Czar by some magically authoritative process. Some organizations have their shit together, and any names in a given domain not endorsed by them are pretty much just private nicknames, some don't; but that's it.
Tape actually works pretty well, it's just that if you are running a small enough system that "Well, obviously, just get another 20TB array and store it at one of your other sites, idiot... On second though, get two extras and put each one at a different offsite location" isn't the answer that springs to mind almost reflexively, you probably can't afford the cost of entry.
An actually contemporary tape drive(and a machine capable of keeping it fed when it is running full bore) is Not Cheap; but the fleabay shit that is cheap tends to offer painfully mediocre capacity and unknown reliability. Disks, by contrast, have a cost of entry that basically starts at zero and scales more or less linearly with the number of disks, unless you absolutely must have them all online at the same time(and even here, you hardly need screamin' hardware RAID for your backup volume, and bulk SATA ports of undistinguished performance are cheap).
I haven't checked; but while Backblaze definitely doesn't back up UNC-pathed SMB shares or (ugh, mapped drive letters), is it smart enough to check whether a disk is 'real' or just an iSCSI initiator pointed at a suitable target? Even the cheap-ass versions of Windows come with a bundled initiator, though the target is server only...
A low-altitude controlled flight into terrain(especially the 'clip multiple bits of it' kind, rather than the 'squish. into the mountainside' kind) is a hell of a lot more survivable than just about anything at cruising altitude and almost definitely over water.
It's a pity that they apparently didn't have the tools to distinguish the wreckage of a white aircraft from snowcap at that time (or in that place); but their odds of having something worth finding were a lot better.
I'm not sure why GIMP originally wanted a Toolkit; but Gtk mostly emerged because Qt was proprietary at the time. Given that, for all its failings as a toolkit, Gtk, possibly along with other factors that coincided with it(I'm perfectly willing to listen; but don't know of any offhand) succeeded in getting GPLed Qt. I think Nokia even LGPLed Qt part of some aspect of their flailing-death-spiral strategy.
That, to the best of my understanding, is what confuses people: Qt is generally considered superior to Gtk, is now LGPL, and is generally well liked; so why would somebody say 'Well, Gtk has issues, so I'm going to make my own Gtk; but better!' when they could just use Qt?
I apologize if I didn't express it clearly; but the punchline of my thinking is this: Unlike some countries that operate welfare states (the northwestern European ones, say), which have fairly broad political agreement on the fact that that's an OK idea, and so do a lot of their welfare spending 'in kind' (things like healthcare, education through college, sometimes various housing schemes) because it is not politically toxic to do so, the US has a welfare state; but is far more conflicted about that. This tends to cause such (highly visible and vulnerable) 'in kind' programs either to never make it to production or to get shot down; which means that most of the redistribution ends up happening just by cutting people checks directly (under a varied and ever-shifting collection of programs and excuses) which is easier to sustain, in the face of lacking political support and poor odds of long-term support, than would be programs that involve funding institutions rather than throwing checks at people.
At least for the ones where you don't have to send down the fanciest in research ROVs to scour multiple square miles of deep ocean floor, I suspect that the materials science and structural engineering people probably have a wish-list of Very Important Bits that they'd like to examine in detail; but it certainly wouldn't increase the motivation to go hunting.
As much as penny-pinching on safety systems is a bad habit, is the emotive "zOMG, Tell the Families!!!" really the best argument that there is for these systems?
It's been what, over three days now, with an aircraft that disappeared from radar at commercial cruising altitude without so much as a burst of garbled obscenities from the flight crew. Do you think that your family is clinging to those little flotation-device pillows, awaiting a rescue that would have come in time if only for upgraded real-time blackbox transmission?
If anybody derives some sort of comfort from whatever they do manage to find, all the better; but this is all trying to recover data for failure analysis, not survivors.
Now, if you want to justify real-time transmission, check out the amount of (incidentally not paid for by the airline) search gear that has been diverted from Malaysian, Chinese, and other sources to looking for the debris. Whole bunch of ships, airplane and helicopter overflights, diversion of what, 10 satellites? That starts to make the $100k look like savings.
Pandering to reactionaries isn't as effective as it used to be. Even the good old Gay Menace just doesn't get people worked up these days.
Hmm... sounds like we should gut the VA, to encourage the sickies to snuff it early, and rake in the savings from both reduced medical expenses and reduced pension obligations.... Tax cuts for my friends and campaign donors!
Yet if you point this fact out, you lose a presidential election...
Actually, there may be a confounding factor (this is a hypothesis, anybody who has real numbers is welcome to step forward to argue for or against):
Assuming you aren't inimically opposed to the concept of the welfare state (whether because you think that it's actually a good idea, or whether you think that it's relatively cheap insurance to keep a fundamentally capitalist economy with slightly higher tax rates to buy off the proles, irrelevant), the state basically has two options for 'redistribution':
1. Actually comparatively high taxes on individuals and corporations, used to fund a variety of not-directly-cash public services(eg. national health system, cheap or free education, etc.).
2. Avoid the flack associated (in the US) with robust public-sector offerings, and sneak in your social welfare spending primarily in 'emergency' programs (WIC, etc. which pay in scrip; but have nontrivial USD value once you discount them for being able to purchase only certain classes of goods) and in 'hand up for the virtuous poor' type things ("earned income tax credit", assorted subsidies for small business loans, edging up to programs that are basically a sop for the middle class, like mortage related deductions).
Now, lest anybody misinterpret me on this point: I Think It Is A Bad, Bad, thing that nontrivial swaths of the US population are basically so damn poor that the only cash worth squeezing out of them is sales taxes and check-cashing joint fees. However, barring a solution to that problem, it would be my contention that (like our absurd 'We should really have universal health care; because our current system is an utter clusterfuck delivering bad results for crazy high prices, and tying workers to their jobs; but universal health care is commie socialism, so let's have a crazy arrangement where the government 'launders' universal health care(at a tidy markup) through the incumbent private insurance companies!') our 'let's see if we can get some of the benefits of a welfare state without courting the unpopularity of calling it that, and without the clout to do anything about the ever-widening wealth gap' approach has left us with a singularly dysfunctional creature, neither fish nor fowl.
Contractors.
Some of them also do independent work; but others (in terms of customer base and income) are basically federal employees in all but name and price.