I have never worked for a tech giant in any location, but from what I read they seem to like the "captive" workforce. They provide all the amenities like cafeterias with food better than most fast lunch options, on-premise childcare, cough-and-cold clinics, and so on.
Is it the city sucks to house X thousand workers in one place, or is it that they think they benefit from creating an island that's hard to leave (and they make it so you don't need to)?
I haven't heard of it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't start offering their own charter schools, at least for elementary ages. My son is in third grade and it seems like school is frequently closed for various days off that I don't get as vacation time. With an on-campus school, he would either not have that time off ("Lean in") or it would just be taken care of by the on-campus after school care they would provide so that I could keep working until 6 or 7 PM without needing to rush home to pick him up.
Plus it would aid in employee retention -- would you want to leave Google for another job if it meant junior couldn't attend Google School anymore. Sure, charter status would require them to let you keep attending, but since you'd be commuting to some other all-encompassing campus in a totally different suburb, the logistics would fail.
It's really pretty simple. America has always been a country with flaws, but at least we didn't promulgate torture as policy, we didn't systematically suspend habeas corpus.
The domestic police departments used to routinely beat people. Until not that long ago, lead slaps/saps were nearly universal among police officers and beatings used as a means of summary justice and extracting confessions. And this was for domestic criminal law enforcement. The tactics were even more severe for breaking strikes, suppressing civil dissent (Chicago, 1968?) and race riots.
I think the idea that violence hasn't been used until five minutes ago by those in power to further their goals is ludicrous. We've just adjusted who is eligible to be beaten.
Some update exchange values on a daily basis, some offer their goods in a single currency (dollar, euro) and expect the buyer to deal with the exchange rate to those currencies from whatever their local currency is.
At a multinational corporation level it's probably a mix of all of them, with a little speculation thrown in. It's a finance guy's wet dream because they can mix in all kinds of shenanigans to reduce taxes, hide profits, etc.
I think it makes more sense to compare these spree killers with the attackers in Kenya and India. The latter had more sophisticated plans and training, including planting weapons and ammunition ahead of time. The spree killers did none of these things.
Whitman's success was largely due to his training as a Marine sharpshooter, not to any planning or organization. The "planning" of Columbine was about as sophisticated as an elementary school snowball fight.
As disturbed as Breivk is, his case actually comes closest to actually representing an actual terrorist action. His stated motivation was one of extreme politics. The only thing apparently lacking is membership in a broader organization.
There have been a lot of Americans of Somali descent recruited to return to Somalia and fight for al-Shabab, so I don't think it's unrealistic to think that there are people already here who could be recruited to do this. I don't think you need or would even want to recruit people from overseas to do this.
Domestic mass shootings, despite the political rhetoric surrounding them, are always the work of a single individual suffering from some kind of mental illness. They lack all but the most rudimentary planning and execution, they're only quasi-rational. The net effect is that nobody sees them as part of an ongoing threat or conspiracy. There's not this feeling that they are deliberate attacks by a larger organization or with a larger purpose in mind.
A mass shooting by a terrorist organization I would expect to have superior tactics and organization. I would also expect that if they were identified as being terrorist attacks that the perception of threat would be much greater because the attacks would be seen as the result of rational planning and execution, not apparent one-time actions.
If you accept the argument that terrorists principal goal is to create, well, terror, then you would expect terror attacks with the only real goal of creating chaos and news.
Given the chaos and headlines created at the mall in Kenya or the hotel in India, you would expect something like that to happen in the US. It's not hard to get ahold of guns, there are presumably a fair number of motivated attackers, and there are plenty of targets available.
As an example, coordinated attacks on 3-4 shopping malls simultaneously would be in the news forever and probably have a non-trivial economic impact from people avoiding malls alone, let alone the expected costs of all the security you'd expect to be demanded/added.
Either security is that good or the actual threat just isn't there. I find the former hard to believe.
Any time you have a monopoly, there is a general tendency for the monopoly to extract the highest rent they can and to offer the least it can for that rent.
I think the only real answer is a municipal fiber distribution system which only provides layer 2 connectivity and sells access to service providers.
It's probably more efficient to sell IP connectivity, but that's a "service" and that's when you get into issues of government competing with private industry. And I would wager that a municipal ISP for cost reasons would be a single, NAT'd IP address type of service.
The downside would be that it would be extremely expensive to build such a network and I don't know how you would pay for it or how it would get built. Ideally the city would own it and pay someone else to build it and operate it with a fixed margin, like an electric utility.
The FBI already has a history of pretty ugly domestic surveillance, dating back at least to COINTELPRO (which was a systematic, determined project) and probably dating back further than that on an ad-hoc basis given what we know about J. Edgar Hoover and his penchant for keeping dirt on people. And all of this happened when the NSA was just trying to figure out how to tap phone lines without creating a lot of extra clicks.
It's an open debate on whether those revelations and the changes in leadership over the years have made the FBI less prone to systematic, gross violations or whether the mere fact of the FBI's relatively untouchable status as the principal Federal law enforcement agency and long-time role as a major counterespionage agency just make it prone to these violations regardless.
I would guess the latter, so it might not make any difference.
I would prefer to see the NSA's SIGINT capabilities kept totally isolated from any domestic law enforcement myself. I think if domestic law enforcement has NSA SIGINT capabilities, you're going to get a lot more parallel construction cases, where SIGINT is the real source of criminal investigation but judicially acceptable sham investigations are built to prosecute cases.
At least this way you make it just slightly harder for domestic law enforcement to use SIGINT as a means to fish for people to prosecute. As information sharing with the DEA has shown, it won't be impossible or never happen, but I think NSA has a built-in kind of bureaucratic turf protection that should keep them getting too dragged into domestic law enforcement.
My dog responds to this and I don't quite understand how. If I say that to him and the ball is around, he will go after it and immediately want to play. Even if the ball is put away or not visible (we cycle toy free availability to maintain interest), he will search for it.
But I haven't done often enough or with enough treats to make it a reinforced behavior like "sit", "down" or "wait". I can only guess I've used the word "ball" a lot when playing with him and the ball and he's come to associate that word (or the phonetic sound) with the ball.
Wireless mirroring is already a feature of iOS devices and AFAICT it can be done with Android too. This would be less cumbersome than HDMI cabling and avoid a clunky connector and adapter (at least for iOS phones).
There's only two pieces missing from it -- remote touch, so you can use the car's built-in dash screen for control and display fitting, so the phone's display is formatted to fit the car screen's aspect ratio.
The latter may be more complicated given the way apps seem to be written for iOS in regard to screen size (eg, updates to support iPhone 5, 1x/2x mode on iPad). The easiest 'fix' would seem to be a car display close in aspect ratio to iPhone (just larger to make it driver-friendly).
Remote touch doesn't seem like it would be that hard to add, and for all I know its baked into mirroring, just not enabled. You could even disable display the keyboard or video playback as long as the vehicle is in motion (my Volvo does something similar with its in-built menu system; most of it is unavailable when the car is in motion).
The phone display could just be another tab/view of the car's in-dash display which could then dispense with navigation apps and everything else that doesn't involve the controlling the car's components like HVAC or built-in radio.
"Say on pay" wouldn't be such a hot topic in corporate governance (it even has its own wikipedia page) if investors actually had that much influence over executive compensation.
Most top executive compensation is detrmined by compensation committees made up of board members, many of whom are also top executives elsewhere. I don't want to risk you limiting my compensation if it exposes me to a risk you might limit mine. There's a moral hazard for these people.
The consultancies who get involved in executive compensation face the same risks -- those that come out and say that compensation should be decreased will likely find themselves losing business. Another moral hazard where self-interest keeps them from advocating for anything but the status quo.
The end result is that rank and file investors have little to no control over this and many barriers are erected to prevent shareholders from voting in more than an advisory way on this, let alone an up/down vote or even less likely, dictating compensation strategies.
Even in situations where CEOs have the concentrated authority to make big decisions unilaterally, I find it hard to believe that they are *individually* performing all the work required to make them. They are instead relying on legions of experts and other labor to make a decision, something which I don't think is magical enough to warrant the sheer scale of pay they recieve because they individually aren't doing the work but are demanding the scale of pay as if they were.
Even then, when they make terrible decisions that cost billions of dollars or oversee others who lose this and they lose their jobs, they still walk away with so much money its difficult to see any accountability they face. Maybe if you face the prospect of earning $20 million dollars you should also face the risk of losing $20 million dollars personally. But the current system is just win-win for them outside of bragging rights at the club.
Could Amazon ever allow other merchants to accept its "coin", in effect creating a more fungible currency?
They're big enough in enough ways (size, computing capacity, etc) that they almost could create a stored value system and transaction processing ability that they might be able to induce other vendors to accept their coin that they would in turn redeem for the merchant as actual currency.
Smaller vendors would get access to a sophisticated payment system and perhaps gain customer confidence or customers wanting to spend/get rid of coins on items Amazon doesn't carry.
Amazon would gain the transaction info for their analytics as well as maybe more consumer acceptance of their coin.
I wonder how long until big e-commerce companies attempt to create a common currency-type payment system that allows them to bypass Visa/MC/banks and possibly even deal with national currency conversion costs.
I agree in principal with you, but I'd guess it's the constellation of asterisks that come next to advertised bandwidth which are attached to all manner of limitations and constraints that may prevent you from getting the bandwidth you think you're buying, along with some kind of magical hand-waving about how they can't promise you a specific bandwidth to any particular site on the internet due to all manner of network engineering limitations.
If consumer connections had a SLA attached to them they would have a claim, but as of now the claim isn't really a contractual one, it's more of a moral one based on the vendor claiming to sell X but delivering less than X.
That's how I run it, too, although I agree that there can be complications if your VM environment has a hiccup and you need Internet connectivity to fix it. A couple of times I've found myself hauling out an old broadband router and jacking it into my cable modem so I could fix something.
Do you run it with a dedicated WAN NIC, or do you use a VLAN?
I use a VLAN which I assume might be some kind of slight vulnerability, but there's no management interfaces on any device for that VLAN which I'm guessing adds some margin of security.
Anyone whose opinion matters knows exactly what net neutrality means.
The doublespeak and equivocation from the Obama administration on these issues is pretty appalling. I'm sure he's carefully balancing saying that he wants to keep the campaign contributions rolling in but in a way that doesn't immediately alienate half the Democratic base.
I kind of hope that he realizes sooner rather than later that this is his last term and that he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected in 2016 so he can finally quit trying to simultaneously take three sides of an issue that has two constituencies.
Hillary has been out of the administration long enough and has her own checkbook so taking a stand on something shouldn't burn the Democrats' best hope for 2016.
The irony of Obama is that the shafting he's done to progressive Democrats exceeds the worst nightmares right wingers had about him.
Storage capacity is the easy part. You can get a perfectly serviceable 24TB of RAID-10 with dual 10G ethernet in a single 3U rackmount for $10k or less. You could always restripe to RAID 5 if your speed demands aren't great and have 40TB of storage. With dedupe and smart incrementals that could represent months of 5 TB production storage.
I think the bigger headache is tape writes. If you have repository sizes you want to dump that exceed LTO-6 capacity you have to decide if you want to deal with a changer, change tapes manually or look at two drives and structuring repositories based on tape size so you can parallelize your dumps.
Disk is a lot less headache for short-to-medium term backups and most decent backup software does enough dedupe, compression and intelligent incrementals that you can keep weeks or even a month or more of backups online for easy retrieval. Plus disk for backup is one of those places where you can get away with "good enough" cheap SAN-ish storage and not pay the freight for high-dollar SAN.
Tape makes it easy and reliable to get it off site or if you need more retention than you can afford on disk. I wouldn't buy anything less than LTO-5 and LTO-6 is probably the way to go.
You and the person you're replying to are both right.
There's a fair amount of scifi that merely ladles on a bunch of melodrama in the hope that someone will think of it as "character development" when in fact it often just serves as filler and often displaces action and technology.
"Walking Dead" went down this road IMHO in Season 2 on the Farm. So much of that season was personal and social angst in a rural agricultural setting with the occasional appearance of a zombie. Everything else kind of went by the wayside. I'm not saying some of it wasn't enjoyable or it wasn't well done or that it isn't a "realistic" depiction of being stuck with people in a crisis situation but the entire narrative was defined by a bunch of personal melodrama without the rest of it.
Showing the complex personal, social and cultural dimensions of science and technology -- when it happens -- is when science fiction transcends being genre entertainment and actually becomes more like classical drama or literature.
This claim would be easier if there hadn't been a general trend of dumbing down all versions of Windows over the years, making basic "advanced" settings like IP addresses harder and harder to get to.
It'd be nice if there was a prompt during setup that asked "Are you an expert user?" and provided a UI that made access to system settings and information much less obfuscated.
I personally don't think the move to PowerShell as a configuration vehicle is necessarily a solution to the "dumbed down" user interface. It may help with scripting, but I'm not sure that foisting a whole new CLI and syntax is really what I'd call a huge step forward in usability.
In some ways the server manager in 2012 tries to bridge the gap between obfuscated and unobfuscated UIs, but it doesn't let you perform many tasks, instead just dumping you, shortcut-style, to the existing UI.
But isn't the history of oil consumption a de facto demonstration of pricing? As demand increases, prices increase and production technology improves? The 1970s brought off-shore and deep water oil production, followed by increasingly more fuel efficient cars (as one example).
Contemporary pricing has given us hybrid and viable electric cars. Fracking and tar sands have extended oil production. Even trucking has gotten aerodynamic.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never worked for a tech giant in any location, but from what I read they seem to like the "captive" workforce. They provide all the amenities like cafeterias with food better than most fast lunch options, on-premise childcare, cough-and-cold clinics, and so on.
Is it the city sucks to house X thousand workers in one place, or is it that they think they benefit from creating an island that's hard to leave (and they make it so you don't need to)?
I haven't heard of it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't start offering their own charter schools, at least for elementary ages. My son is in third grade and it seems like school is frequently closed for various days off that I don't get as vacation time. With an on-campus school, he would either not have that time off ("Lean in") or it would just be taken care of by the on-campus after school care they would provide so that I could keep working until 6 or 7 PM without needing to rush home to pick him up.
Plus it would aid in employee retention -- would you want to leave Google for another job if it meant junior couldn't attend Google School anymore. Sure, charter status would require them to let you keep attending, but since you'd be commuting to some other all-encompassing campus in a totally different suburb, the logistics would fail.
It's really pretty simple. America has always been a country with flaws, but at least we didn't promulgate torture as policy, we didn't systematically suspend habeas corpus.
The domestic police departments used to routinely beat people. Until not that long ago, lead slaps/saps were nearly universal among police officers and beatings used as a means of summary justice and extracting confessions. And this was for domestic criminal law enforcement. The tactics were even more severe for breaking strikes, suppressing civil dissent (Chicago, 1968?) and race riots.
I think the idea that violence hasn't been used until five minutes ago by those in power to further their goals is ludicrous. We've just adjusted who is eligible to be beaten.
Some update exchange values on a daily basis, some offer their goods in a single currency (dollar, euro) and expect the buyer to deal with the exchange rate to those currencies from whatever their local currency is.
At a multinational corporation level it's probably a mix of all of them, with a little speculation thrown in. It's a finance guy's wet dream because they can mix in all kinds of shenanigans to reduce taxes, hide profits, etc.
I think it makes more sense to compare these spree killers with the attackers in Kenya and India. The latter had more sophisticated plans and training, including planting weapons and ammunition ahead of time. The spree killers did none of these things.
Whitman's success was largely due to his training as a Marine sharpshooter, not to any planning or organization. The "planning" of Columbine was about as sophisticated as an elementary school snowball fight.
As disturbed as Breivk is, his case actually comes closest to actually representing an actual terrorist action. His stated motivation was one of extreme politics. The only thing apparently lacking is membership in a broader organization.
There have been a lot of Americans of Somali descent recruited to return to Somalia and fight for al-Shabab, so I don't think it's unrealistic to think that there are people already here who could be recruited to do this. I don't think you need or would even want to recruit people from overseas to do this.
Domestic mass shootings, despite the political rhetoric surrounding them, are always the work of a single individual suffering from some kind of mental illness. They lack all but the most rudimentary planning and execution, they're only quasi-rational. The net effect is that nobody sees them as part of an ongoing threat or conspiracy. There's not this feeling that they are deliberate attacks by a larger organization or with a larger purpose in mind.
A mass shooting by a terrorist organization I would expect to have superior tactics and organization. I would also expect that if they were identified as being terrorist attacks that the perception of threat would be much greater because the attacks would be seen as the result of rational planning and execution, not apparent one-time actions.
The question I have is, why hasn't this happened?
If you accept the argument that terrorists principal goal is to create, well, terror, then you would expect terror attacks with the only real goal of creating chaos and news.
Given the chaos and headlines created at the mall in Kenya or the hotel in India, you would expect something like that to happen in the US. It's not hard to get ahold of guns, there are presumably a fair number of motivated attackers, and there are plenty of targets available.
As an example, coordinated attacks on 3-4 shopping malls simultaneously would be in the news forever and probably have a non-trivial economic impact from people avoiding malls alone, let alone the expected costs of all the security you'd expect to be demanded/added.
Either security is that good or the actual threat just isn't there. I find the former hard to believe.
I have no problem with the hypocrisy part of it, but what does the white part have to do with it?
Any time you have a monopoly, there is a general tendency for the monopoly to extract the highest rent they can and to offer the least it can for that rent.
I think the only real answer is a municipal fiber distribution system which only provides layer 2 connectivity and sells access to service providers.
It's probably more efficient to sell IP connectivity, but that's a "service" and that's when you get into issues of government competing with private industry. And I would wager that a municipal ISP for cost reasons would be a single, NAT'd IP address type of service.
The downside would be that it would be extremely expensive to build such a network and I don't know how you would pay for it or how it would get built. Ideally the city would own it and pay someone else to build it and operate it with a fixed margin, like an electric utility.
Yes, 5 years, just in time for the holographic storage to hit the shelf, too.
The FBI already has a history of pretty ugly domestic surveillance, dating back at least to COINTELPRO (which was a systematic, determined project) and probably dating back further than that on an ad-hoc basis given what we know about J. Edgar Hoover and his penchant for keeping dirt on people. And all of this happened when the NSA was just trying to figure out how to tap phone lines without creating a lot of extra clicks.
It's an open debate on whether those revelations and the changes in leadership over the years have made the FBI less prone to systematic, gross violations or whether the mere fact of the FBI's relatively untouchable status as the principal Federal law enforcement agency and long-time role as a major counterespionage agency just make it prone to these violations regardless.
I would guess the latter, so it might not make any difference.
I would prefer to see the NSA's SIGINT capabilities kept totally isolated from any domestic law enforcement myself. I think if domestic law enforcement has NSA SIGINT capabilities, you're going to get a lot more parallel construction cases, where SIGINT is the real source of criminal investigation but judicially acceptable sham investigations are built to prosecute cases.
At least this way you make it just slightly harder for domestic law enforcement to use SIGINT as a means to fish for people to prosecute. As information sharing with the DEA has shown, it won't be impossible or never happen, but I think NSA has a built-in kind of bureaucratic turf protection that should keep them getting too dragged into domestic law enforcement.
Haven't most cars switched the bluetooth versus hardwired cabling connectors?
I've only used two rentals with bluetooth and music with my iphone was pretty seamless.
My dog responds to this and I don't quite understand how. If I say that to him and the ball is around, he will go after it and immediately want to play. Even if the ball is put away or not visible (we cycle toy free availability to maintain interest), he will search for it.
But I haven't done often enough or with enough treats to make it a reinforced behavior like "sit", "down" or "wait". I can only guess I've used the word "ball" a lot when playing with him and the ball and he's come to associate that word (or the phonetic sound) with the ball.
Wireless mirroring is already a feature of iOS devices and AFAICT it can be done with Android too. This would be less cumbersome than HDMI cabling and avoid a clunky connector and adapter (at least for iOS phones).
There's only two pieces missing from it -- remote touch, so you can use the car's built-in dash screen for control and display fitting, so the phone's display is formatted to fit the car screen's aspect ratio.
The latter may be more complicated given the way apps seem to be written for iOS in regard to screen size (eg, updates to support iPhone 5, 1x/2x mode on iPad). The easiest 'fix' would seem to be a car display close in aspect ratio to iPhone (just larger to make it driver-friendly).
Remote touch doesn't seem like it would be that hard to add, and for all I know its baked into mirroring, just not enabled. You could even disable display the keyboard or video playback as long as the vehicle is in motion (my Volvo does something similar with its in-built menu system; most of it is unavailable when the car is in motion).
The phone display could just be another tab/view of the car's in-dash display which could then dispense with navigation apps and everything else that doesn't involve the controlling the car's components like HVAC or built-in radio.
"Say on pay" wouldn't be such a hot topic in corporate governance (it even has its own wikipedia page) if investors actually had that much influence over executive compensation.
Most top executive compensation is detrmined by compensation committees made up of board members, many of whom are also top executives elsewhere. I don't want to risk you limiting my compensation if it exposes me to a risk you might limit mine. There's a moral hazard for these people.
The consultancies who get involved in executive compensation face the same risks -- those that come out and say that compensation should be decreased will likely find themselves losing business. Another moral hazard where self-interest keeps them from advocating for anything but the status quo.
The end result is that rank and file investors have little to no control over this and many barriers are erected to prevent shareholders from voting in more than an advisory way on this, let alone an up/down vote or even less likely, dictating compensation strategies.
Even in situations where CEOs have the concentrated authority to make big decisions unilaterally, I find it hard to believe that they are *individually* performing all the work required to make them. They are instead relying on legions of experts and other labor to make a decision, something which I don't think is magical enough to warrant the sheer scale of pay they recieve because they individually aren't doing the work but are demanding the scale of pay as if they were.
Even then, when they make terrible decisions that cost billions of dollars or oversee others who lose this and they lose their jobs, they still walk away with so much money its difficult to see any accountability they face. Maybe if you face the prospect of earning $20 million dollars you should also face the risk of losing $20 million dollars personally. But the current system is just win-win for them outside of bragging rights at the club.
You mean to say it's a 2000 year old *system*, not just an expression.
Could Amazon ever allow other merchants to accept its "coin", in effect creating a more fungible currency?
They're big enough in enough ways (size, computing capacity, etc) that they almost could create a stored value system and transaction processing ability that they might be able to induce other vendors to accept their coin that they would in turn redeem for the merchant as actual currency.
Smaller vendors would get access to a sophisticated payment system and perhaps gain customer confidence or customers wanting to spend/get rid of coins on items Amazon doesn't carry.
Amazon would gain the transaction info for their analytics as well as maybe more consumer acceptance of their coin.
I wonder how long until big e-commerce companies attempt to create a common currency-type payment system that allows them to bypass Visa/MC/banks and possibly even deal with national currency conversion costs.
They have to print and mail your paper statement. That costs real money, although I would imagine they have it covered up to quite a few pages.
I agree in principal with you, but I'd guess it's the constellation of asterisks that come next to advertised bandwidth which are attached to all manner of limitations and constraints that may prevent you from getting the bandwidth you think you're buying, along with some kind of magical hand-waving about how they can't promise you a specific bandwidth to any particular site on the internet due to all manner of network engineering limitations.
If consumer connections had a SLA attached to them they would have a claim, but as of now the claim isn't really a contractual one, it's more of a moral one based on the vendor claiming to sell X but delivering less than X.
That's how I run it, too, although I agree that there can be complications if your VM environment has a hiccup and you need Internet connectivity to fix it. A couple of times I've found myself hauling out an old broadband router and jacking it into my cable modem so I could fix something.
Do you run it with a dedicated WAN NIC, or do you use a VLAN?
I use a VLAN which I assume might be some kind of slight vulnerability, but there's no management interfaces on any device for that VLAN which I'm guessing adds some margin of security.
Anyone whose opinion matters knows exactly what net neutrality means.
The doublespeak and equivocation from the Obama administration on these issues is pretty appalling. I'm sure he's carefully balancing saying that he wants to keep the campaign contributions rolling in but in a way that doesn't immediately alienate half the Democratic base.
I kind of hope that he realizes sooner rather than later that this is his last term and that he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected in 2016 so he can finally quit trying to simultaneously take three sides of an issue that has two constituencies.
Hillary has been out of the administration long enough and has her own checkbook so taking a stand on something shouldn't burn the Democrats' best hope for 2016.
The irony of Obama is that the shafting he's done to progressive Democrats exceeds the worst nightmares right wingers had about him.
Storage capacity is the easy part. You can get a perfectly serviceable 24TB of RAID-10 with dual 10G ethernet in a single 3U rackmount for $10k or less. You could always restripe to RAID 5 if your speed demands aren't great and have 40TB of storage. With dedupe and smart incrementals that could represent months of 5 TB production storage.
I think the bigger headache is tape writes. If you have repository sizes you want to dump that exceed LTO-6 capacity you have to decide if you want to deal with a changer, change tapes manually or look at two drives and structuring repositories based on tape size so you can parallelize your dumps.
I think you need both.
Disk is a lot less headache for short-to-medium term backups and most decent backup software does enough dedupe, compression and intelligent incrementals that you can keep weeks or even a month or more of backups online for easy retrieval. Plus disk for backup is one of those places where you can get away with "good enough" cheap SAN-ish storage and not pay the freight for high-dollar SAN.
Tape makes it easy and reliable to get it off site or if you need more retention than you can afford on disk. I wouldn't buy anything less than LTO-5 and LTO-6 is probably the way to go.
You and the person you're replying to are both right.
There's a fair amount of scifi that merely ladles on a bunch of melodrama in the hope that someone will think of it as "character development" when in fact it often just serves as filler and often displaces action and technology.
"Walking Dead" went down this road IMHO in Season 2 on the Farm. So much of that season was personal and social angst in a rural agricultural setting with the occasional appearance of a zombie. Everything else kind of went by the wayside. I'm not saying some of it wasn't enjoyable or it wasn't well done or that it isn't a "realistic" depiction of being stuck with people in a crisis situation but the entire narrative was defined by a bunch of personal melodrama without the rest of it.
Showing the complex personal, social and cultural dimensions of science and technology -- when it happens -- is when science fiction transcends being genre entertainment and actually becomes more like classical drama or literature.
This claim would be easier if there hadn't been a general trend of dumbing down all versions of Windows over the years, making basic "advanced" settings like IP addresses harder and harder to get to.
It'd be nice if there was a prompt during setup that asked "Are you an expert user?" and provided a UI that made access to system settings and information much less obfuscated.
I personally don't think the move to PowerShell as a configuration vehicle is necessarily a solution to the "dumbed down" user interface. It may help with scripting, but I'm not sure that foisting a whole new CLI and syntax is really what I'd call a huge step forward in usability.
In some ways the server manager in 2012 tries to bridge the gap between obfuscated and unobfuscated UIs, but it doesn't let you perform many tasks, instead just dumping you, shortcut-style, to the existing UI.
But isn't the history of oil consumption a de facto demonstration of pricing? As demand increases, prices increase and production technology improves? The 1970s brought off-shore and deep water oil production, followed by increasingly more fuel efficient cars (as one example).
Contemporary pricing has given us hybrid and viable electric cars. Fracking and tar sands have extended oil production. Even trucking has gotten aerodynamic.