I used to work for a different subsidiary of Aviva - it was long enough ago that I think I can speak fairly freely.
Like most huge companies (and Aviva are absolutely mahoosive - 1,300 people would make this just one small subsidiary), each division operates with varying degrees of independence - and varying degrees of competence.
My guess is that they meant to send this to somebody called Alison or Alex or something, but instead sent it to all@.... Usually you'd limit who can send to that particular mailing list, enforce some sort of filter to prevent email going out that hasn't been moderated and/or give it a slightly different (and harder to mix-up) alias.
But every boarding pass I've seen lately has a barcode on it which identifies the passenger and their flight. How difficult would it be to store the date and time of their flight and have the scanner flash up a big red error message if they try using a boarding pass for:
- A flight that's already left.
- A flight that's not leaving today.
But this is really more of a problem with ignorance than anything else. If they're dying of malnutrition, they're certainly doing something wrong.
Much of this is half-remembered from stuff I last studied in about 1995, so don't take it as the gospel truth - more as a jumping off point for further research.
You're right that it's ignorance. There's a number of proteins the human body needs. It's relatively easy to supply all of these with a varied, omnivorous diet but rather harder with a vegan diet because there are few vegetable sources of one or two crucial amino acids. IIRC soy is pretty much the only source for at least one such amino acid.
Again, IIRC, I think it's a similar story for some of the B vitamins. There's few non-animal sources so unless you go out of your way to make sure you know what sources exist and include them in your diet, you're potentially in trouble.
The upshot is that if you're going to go vegan, you really should understand nutrition. You can't just wing it and hope for the best; you certainly can't continue to eat the same meals but simply not put meat in when you prepare them.
It's worth pointing out for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know much about how UK ISPs work:
The incumbent telco, British Telecom, set up their own broadband network and also sold their DSL product at a wholesale rate to ISPs. There was quite a lot of fuss from ISPs about this, as the incumbent effectively had an advantage over them - the incumbent owned the infrastructure so could do what they liked with it, up to and including unceremoniously yanking customers broadband.
The upshot is that British Telecom was split into two companies: Wholesale (BT Openreach) and retail (the company you buy your telephone line and broadband from). Openreach own and run the infrastructure, retail effectively just packages and resells it. You or I cannot approach BT Openreach under any circumstances. They won't investigate issues, they won't talk about new or existing lines, they won't do anything unless you're a company that has a contract with them. They will politely point you in the direction of a retailer.
Anyone can set up an ISP and contract BT Openreach. Optionally, they can put their own equipment in the telephone exchanges though this is generally limited to the larger of the (still pretty small) alternative ISPs. But even if they put their own equipment in the telephone exchange, actually running the copper between telephone exchange and customer is contracted out to BT Openreach.
The telephone line rental is totally separate from the broadband, and many of the smaller ISPs won't contract Openreach for the line rental itself or any telephone calls that run over it - they'll only deal with the broadband. Which means it's quite possible to be in a position that your ISP is blaming your telephone provider for your broadband being down; your telephone provider is blaming your ISP. Lots of people I know won't even consider buying broadband unless they can get the phone line from the same company for exactly this reason.
Rumour has it (and I can't be bothered to google, so you'll have to chase it up for yourself) that Clippy had the potential to be really useful.
The rumour essentially states that in an early pre-release version of Office '97, they'd put together some sort of clever algorithm that could figure out if you were lost and bring up Clippy in such cases. So you'd only see if it you really needed it. Apparently the algorithm worked quite well.
A senior manager (possibly Gates himself) demanded that Clippy came up more often. The algorithm was castrated into something that came up every time you typed "Dear Sir".
Seriously? A signed paper? That's it? I can see the people at Toshiba rolling their eyes when they got it.
The ICO has the power to levy serious fines without much in the way of judicial oversight, and they're not afraid to use this power. If you want to avoid paying the fine, you have to take them to court to get it overturned.
Whenever a case like this happens, they write up a nice report in clear English explaining precisely what happened and publish it far and wide, along with details of what punishment they've enacted.
Usually, the size of the punishment is related to:
- How serious the breach was. A breach involving vulnerable people or including a lot of data will usually be more expensive than a breach of a dozen people's names and addresses (data that's on the electoral roll anyway, so is already pretty widely available). - How seriously the organisation responsible for the breach took it. An organisation that makes no effort to prevent recurrence and demonstrates that they don't really care about what happened will typically be fined a LOT more (and yes, how co-operative they were will be in the report). - What resulted in the breach taking place. An organisation that already has strong processes in place to prevent such a breach will get a much lower fine than an organisation which does not.
Think of this signed piece of paper as a written warning. If it happens again, Toshiba can look forward to a swingeing fine and some very bad publicity indeed.
I disagree. As soon as you start suggesting "install this software on your PC" - or even "boot from this LiveCD" you wind up with a plethora of support issues, ranging from "I tried it on the underpowered PC my parents bought at the height of the Vista debacle and found it too slow to be able to do anything", going through "My computer's been on the verge of failing for the last year; in a rather unfortunate coincidence it stopped booting immediately after installing your software and now I'm blaming you" and finishing up with "My offspring ran this CD and now they've broken the computer!".
Every single one of those issues has the same ultimate result: not-terribly-computer-literate Mum & Dad banning the use of "this raspberry pie stuff" on the PC.
Most of these issues evaporate if you provide a cheap & cheerful SBC to run it on.
Have you ever watched Dragon's Den? (Shark Tank, I believe the US version is called). In essence, small business owners approach venture capitalists asking them to fund the business in exchange for a percentage. The VCs generally don't mince their words - if an idea or a business owner is totally uninvestable, they'll certainly be told.
It's been going some years yet probably 40% of the people who go on there still have their priorities completely backwards. "Indie game studio hires a famous voiceover artist before first ensuring they have a vaguely playable game" (as the GP alluded) is an absolutely classic example of this.
Another 40% haven't got their priorities backwards - but they've got an idea that for whatever reason is unlikely to make any VC a fortune. It's simply too niche.
I don't see Kickstarter as being terribly different, except the VCs are the general public and so you have to make your own judgement call as to whether it's a worthwhile investment. The niche business in particular could do quite well with the Kickstarter model.
I don't think it's so much that as the principle of the thing.
By demanding you file your tax online yet not providing a half-sane product to do this free of charge, the ability to file a tax return is itself subject to another charge that you can't easily avoid. Effectively, another tax.
We have something similar in the UK - companies are legally obliged to file their tax returns online by submitting a file in a particular format. The format itself is open and based on XML, but pretty much the only things that support it are commercial applications aimed at the accounting industry. Which means you are forced to pay an accountant even if your affairs are simple enough you could easily fill in the forms yourself.
IIRC they may also have a form online you can fill in. Haven't checked lately...
While I daresay a large proportion of/. will love with the idea of going open source, I would approach it from a different angle altogether.
My angle would be to - at least initially - forget about OSS. Instead, consider "What's my business model? How will I turn this project into something that makes me money? Who's going to buy it and why will they buy this over either buying something else or using a free equivalent?"
The reason I say this is if you're just starting to go it alone, you've got an enormous number of things on your plate. How good are you at web design? Copy writing? Sales & marketing? What you think might appeal to people may not be what your prospective customers think! There's a whole stack of things you've never had to worry about before, and right now you probably ought to be reducing those things. Adding "oh, and I want to use a distribution model that is famously difficult for startups to make work!" is giving yourself extra work for little good reason.
You've never seen the results of the cameras. The suspect is seldom co-operative enough to face the camera straight on, and when they are it's usually a case of "Have you seen this amorphous grey blob? Police would like to speak to him..."
Are you using Linux because you love Linux? Or because you hate Windows?
Because it sounds like you're very close to treating it as a religion. Admittedly I've been there myself - and I'd say that there's damn-all in terms of vaguely usable Linux desktop VPN clients and diabolical commercial support. It's fine if you're looking to get two servers with a very specific configuration working; terrible if you want to connect a single Linux desktop to a commercial VPN system.
Ironic, considering the number of firewall products that are Linux-based. But there you go.
The way I see this statement from Microsoft is "well, if all the processes are followed correctly by our developers, we don't see this happening, so its unlikely. However, there is a chance that a developer may have used the wrong caching or serialisation library for this routine which may have inadvertently left traces on the XBoxes hard disk, so we are going to look into it."
Considering the number of times I've seen applications reinvent the wheel because the developer clearly couldn't find what they were trying to do in an existing library, this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
You're using one of their office products, which are priced rather highly compared with the cheap & cheerful headsets you get for £15 and are therefore, I imagine, somewhat less subject to "let's see exactly how cheap we can make this before it falls apart as part of the unboxing process"
It's actually surprisingly difficult to do that in Windows XP (though I don't recall it being such a problem in Vista and later).
XP will print via IPP, sure, but automating the configuration is an absolute pig when compared with automating the configuration of an SMB-hosted printer.
If it's an SMB-hosted printer with the drivers in the appropriate share and published to Active Directory, it shows up more-or-less straight away in the Wizards, you can script adding it to a PC with a single line and it's relatively straightforward to make that script generic so all you have to do is pass it the location of the printer. If it's not available via SMB, XP doesn't make any of that easy. What you have to do is:
- Set up a virtual printer port for the OS to talk to. For some reason best known only to the FSM, Microsoft decided that any sort of network printer that isn't made available over SMB would connect via something classed as a "local port" (as opposed to network ports) so if you walk through the wizard, you have to do something non-obvious at the first prompt: tell it you're setting up a local rather than a network printer.
- As part of doing this, you tell the computer where on the network to find the printer. XP won't browse the network seeking out IPP printers, so you have to know the printer's IP address or hostname.
- XP will now contact the printer and try to figure out how best to communicate with it. Out of the box, most network printers support a whole lot more than just IPP; the most common mechanism XP will choose is RAW on port 9100. You can override XP's decision, but if you do so you're heading straight into unknown territory because you won't be presented with a list of "ways in which I think I can communicate with this printer". You'll be presented with a list of "Ways in which XP is physically capable of communicating with any printer, with no attention paid as to whether or not the printer in question is even remotely likely to support any of them". So if you haven't memorised or written down what you need to select at this point, you're pretty much heading into guesswork territory.
- Once you've done that, you can now load the driver for the printer. XP may interrogate the printer to find if it needs a driver it already knows about. If it doesn't know about the driver, you're about to hit another roadblock. XP won't choose a sensible default like "Generic Postscript" or "Generic PCL". You have to tell it what driver to use, and even if it's just a plain Postscript printer you can't just give it a PPD file and have done with. You need a driver built for Windows.
Scripting this isn't much better. Microsoft don't provide a nice easy way to script this in XP, at least not one you can be certain is available on any old Windows XP computer. So as part of the setup, you actually have to call the libraries that do the configuration from a command line in the same way as the Wizard does - there's no easy command-driven wrapper around the libraries.
Basically, Windows XP does everything in its power to make using anything other than the Official Sanctioned Microsoft Solution (TM) so damn difficult to work with that you give up and buy all the necessary Microsoft products to follow their official solution.
Vista and 7 are better in some ways at this, and worse in others.
Air travel is safe because of tremendous efforts exerted towards making the process safe.
That's really funny. Sad, but funny.
To a certain extent it's true. The various aviation authorities treat safety very seriously; the tiniest incident in the air will be thoroughly investigated and if there's the remotest hint that it could happen again, carriers worldwide are alerted to investigate their processes, their training or their aircraft to prevent a recurrence.
That's why, when Concorde crashed, the entire fleet was grounded until such time as their fuel tanks could be reinforced with Kevlar. It's why the investigation into Air France flight 447 (which crashed in 2009) is still going on; it's why they found the flight data recorders even though it took two years.
But the difference is, the aviation industry looks for evidence to decide what steps to take. AFAICT, the DHS just invents rules on the spot based on the latest crazy "I know how someone could get past our security!" idea that someone cooked up.
There's real laws - things that are flat-out illegal. Questions you can't ask, demands you can't make. There aren't very many of these.
Then there's fake laws. These are usually invented by compliance departments as a way to avoid getting into trouble under real laws - in essence they write a bunch of rules which say "You can't do A, B or C because it's against the law".
What they actually mean is "Under certain circumstances, doing A, B or C may possibly expose us to legal risk that we don't need to be exposed to. The law is actually rather more nuanced than that - it doesn't explicitly ban A, B or C for a start - but we've got to interpret the law as best we can and put it into rules for the lowest common denominator of staff - the people who frankly can't be trusted with any discretion. And while we're pained to admit it, these people exist in every company of any reasonable size. Some would like to believe it's possible to guarantee you only ever hire decent people and you can easily fire anyone for any transgression, however minor, the instant they commit it. Well, I'd like to believe in unicorns."
I know all that, and I already do it. But, as you say, it's a bit silly to call any sort of media "archival for N decades" when you can't buy the drive to read it, nor can you even be sure you can buy a controller to plug the drive into or a computer with a slot suitable for such a controller after only 1-2 decades.
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I used to work for a different subsidiary of Aviva - it was long enough ago that I think I can speak fairly freely.
Like most huge companies (and Aviva are absolutely mahoosive - 1,300 people would make this just one small subsidiary), each division operates with varying degrees of independence - and varying degrees of competence.
My guess is that they meant to send this to somebody called Alison or Alex or something, but instead sent it to all@.... Usually you'd limit who can send to that particular mailing list, enforce some sort of filter to prevent email going out that hasn't been moderated and/or give it a slightly different (and harder to mix-up) alias.
You mean the barcode isn't just a serial number for use with a database lookup?!
OK, I've not flown to the US in a few years.
But every boarding pass I've seen lately has a barcode on it which identifies the passenger and their flight. How difficult would it be to store the date and time of their flight and have the scanner flash up a big red error message if they try using a boarding pass for:
- A flight that's already left.
- A flight that's not leaving today.
But this is really more of a problem with ignorance than anything else. If they're dying of malnutrition, they're certainly doing something wrong.
Much of this is half-remembered from stuff I last studied in about 1995, so don't take it as the gospel truth - more as a jumping off point for further research.
You're right that it's ignorance. There's a number of proteins the human body needs. It's relatively easy to supply all of these with a varied, omnivorous diet but rather harder with a vegan diet because there are few vegetable sources of one or two crucial amino acids. IIRC soy is pretty much the only source for at least one such amino acid.
Again, IIRC, I think it's a similar story for some of the B vitamins. There's few non-animal sources so unless you go out of your way to make sure you know what sources exist and include them in your diet, you're potentially in trouble.
The upshot is that if you're going to go vegan, you really should understand nutrition. You can't just wing it and hope for the best; you certainly can't continue to eat the same meals but simply not put meat in when you prepare them.
It's worth pointing out for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know much about how UK ISPs work:
The incumbent telco, British Telecom, set up their own broadband network and also sold their DSL product at a wholesale rate to ISPs. There was quite a lot of fuss from ISPs about this, as the incumbent effectively had an advantage over them - the incumbent owned the infrastructure so could do what they liked with it, up to and including unceremoniously yanking customers broadband.
The upshot is that British Telecom was split into two companies: Wholesale (BT Openreach) and retail (the company you buy your telephone line and broadband from). Openreach own and run the infrastructure, retail effectively just packages and resells it. You or I cannot approach BT Openreach under any circumstances. They won't investigate issues, they won't talk about new or existing lines, they won't do anything unless you're a company that has a contract with them. They will politely point you in the direction of a retailer.
Anyone can set up an ISP and contract BT Openreach. Optionally, they can put their own equipment in the telephone exchanges though this is generally limited to the larger of the (still pretty small) alternative ISPs. But even if they put their own equipment in the telephone exchange, actually running the copper between telephone exchange and customer is contracted out to BT Openreach.
The telephone line rental is totally separate from the broadband, and many of the smaller ISPs won't contract Openreach for the line rental itself or any telephone calls that run over it - they'll only deal with the broadband. Which means it's quite possible to be in a position that your ISP is blaming your telephone provider for your broadband being down; your telephone provider is blaming your ISP. Lots of people I know won't even consider buying broadband unless they can get the phone line from the same company for exactly this reason.
Rumour has it (and I can't be bothered to google, so you'll have to chase it up for yourself) that Clippy had the potential to be really useful.
The rumour essentially states that in an early pre-release version of Office '97, they'd put together some sort of clever algorithm that could figure out if you were lost and bring up Clippy in such cases. So you'd only see if it you really needed it. Apparently the algorithm worked quite well.
A senior manager (possibly Gates himself) demanded that Clippy came up more often. The algorithm was castrated into something that came up every time you typed "Dear Sir".
I did wonder how ed got written.
Seriously? A signed paper? That's it? I can see the people at Toshiba rolling their eyes when they got it.
The ICO has the power to levy serious fines without much in the way of judicial oversight, and they're not afraid to use this power. If you want to avoid paying the fine, you have to take them to court to get it overturned.
Whenever a case like this happens, they write up a nice report in clear English explaining precisely what happened and publish it far and wide, along with details of what punishment they've enacted.
Usually, the size of the punishment is related to:
- How serious the breach was. A breach involving vulnerable people or including a lot of data will usually be more expensive than a breach of a dozen people's names and addresses (data that's on the electoral roll anyway, so is already pretty widely available).
- How seriously the organisation responsible for the breach took it. An organisation that makes no effort to prevent recurrence and demonstrates that they don't really care about what happened will typically be fined a LOT more (and yes, how co-operative they were will be in the report).
- What resulted in the breach taking place. An organisation that already has strong processes in place to prevent such a breach will get a much lower fine than an organisation which does not.
Think of this signed piece of paper as a written warning. If it happens again, Toshiba can look forward to a swingeing fine and some very bad publicity indeed.
If "nice product" was all you needed to be a success, we'd all have HD-DVD players - and before that, Betamax VCRs.
No, thanks. I'd rather use floppies than buy ANYTHING from Sony.
3.5" floppies are based on a design by Sony.
I disagree. As soon as you start suggesting "install this software on your PC" - or even "boot from this LiveCD" you wind up with a plethora of support issues, ranging from "I tried it on the underpowered PC my parents bought at the height of the Vista debacle and found it too slow to be able to do anything", going through "My computer's been on the verge of failing for the last year; in a rather unfortunate coincidence it stopped booting immediately after installing your software and now I'm blaming you" and finishing up with "My offspring ran this CD and now they've broken the computer!".
Every single one of those issues has the same ultimate result: not-terribly-computer-literate Mum & Dad banning the use of "this raspberry pie stuff" on the PC.
Most of these issues evaporate if you provide a cheap & cheerful SBC to run it on.
Welcome to Yet Another Protocol Devised By Academics Who Have Not Been Near a Real Network in Twenty Years, If Ever.
Or YAPDBAWHNBNARNITYIE for short.
Have you ever watched Dragon's Den? (Shark Tank, I believe the US version is called). In essence, small business owners approach venture capitalists asking them to fund the business in exchange for a percentage. The VCs generally don't mince their words - if an idea or a business owner is totally uninvestable, they'll certainly be told.
It's been going some years yet probably 40% of the people who go on there still have their priorities completely backwards. "Indie game studio hires a famous voiceover artist before first ensuring they have a vaguely playable game" (as the GP alluded) is an absolutely classic example of this.
Another 40% haven't got their priorities backwards - but they've got an idea that for whatever reason is unlikely to make any VC a fortune. It's simply too niche.
I don't see Kickstarter as being terribly different, except the VCs are the general public and so you have to make your own judgement call as to whether it's a worthwhile investment. The niche business in particular could do quite well with the Kickstarter model.
I don't think it's so much that as the principle of the thing.
By demanding you file your tax online yet not providing a half-sane product to do this free of charge, the ability to file a tax return is itself subject to another charge that you can't easily avoid. Effectively, another tax.
We have something similar in the UK - companies are legally obliged to file their tax returns online by submitting a file in a particular format. The format itself is open and based on XML, but pretty much the only things that support it are commercial applications aimed at the accounting industry. Which means you are forced to pay an accountant even if your affairs are simple enough you could easily fill in the forms yourself.
IIRC they may also have a form online you can fill in. Haven't checked lately...
While I daresay a large proportion of /. will love with the idea of going open source, I would approach it from a different angle altogether.
My angle would be to - at least initially - forget about OSS. Instead, consider "What's my business model? How will I turn this project into something that makes me money? Who's going to buy it and why will they buy this over either buying something else or using a free equivalent?"
The reason I say this is if you're just starting to go it alone, you've got an enormous number of things on your plate. How good are you at web design? Copy writing? Sales & marketing? What you think might appeal to people may not be what your prospective customers think! There's a whole stack of things you've never had to worry about before, and right now you probably ought to be reducing those things. Adding "oh, and I want to use a distribution model that is famously difficult for startups to make work!" is giving yourself extra work for little good reason.
You've never seen the results of the cameras. The suspect is seldom co-operative enough to face the camera straight on, and when they are it's usually a case of "Have you seen this amorphous grey blob? Police would like to speak to him..."
Are you using Linux because you love Linux? Or because you hate Windows?
Because it sounds like you're very close to treating it as a religion. Admittedly I've been there myself - and I'd say that there's damn-all in terms of vaguely usable Linux desktop VPN clients and diabolical commercial support. It's fine if you're looking to get two servers with a very specific configuration working; terrible if you want to connect a single Linux desktop to a commercial VPN system.
Ironic, considering the number of firewall products that are Linux-based. But there you go.
The way I see this statement from Microsoft is "well, if all the processes are followed correctly by our developers, we don't see this happening, so its unlikely. However, there is a chance that a developer may have used the wrong caching or serialisation library for this routine which may have inadvertently left traces on the XBoxes hard disk, so we are going to look into it."
Considering the number of times I've seen applications reinvent the wheel because the developer clearly couldn't find what they were trying to do in an existing library, this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
You're using one of their office products, which are priced rather highly compared with the cheap & cheerful headsets you get for £15 and are therefore, I imagine, somewhat less subject to "let's see exactly how cheap we can make this before it falls apart as part of the unboxing process"
It's actually surprisingly difficult to do that in Windows XP (though I don't recall it being such a problem in Vista and later).
XP will print via IPP, sure, but automating the configuration is an absolute pig when compared with automating the configuration of an SMB-hosted printer.
If it's an SMB-hosted printer with the drivers in the appropriate share and published to Active Directory, it shows up more-or-less straight away in the Wizards, you can script adding it to a PC with a single line and it's relatively straightforward to make that script generic so all you have to do is pass it the location of the printer. If it's not available via SMB, XP doesn't make any of that easy. What you have to do is:
- Set up a virtual printer port for the OS to talk to. For some reason best known only to the FSM, Microsoft decided that any sort of network printer that isn't made available over SMB would connect via something classed as a "local port" (as opposed to network ports) so if you walk through the wizard, you have to do something non-obvious at the first prompt: tell it you're setting up a local rather than a network printer.
- As part of doing this, you tell the computer where on the network to find the printer. XP won't browse the network seeking out IPP printers, so you have to know the printer's IP address or hostname.
- XP will now contact the printer and try to figure out how best to communicate with it. Out of the box, most network printers support a whole lot more than just IPP; the most common mechanism XP will choose is RAW on port 9100. You can override XP's decision, but if you do so you're heading straight into unknown territory because you won't be presented with a list of "ways in which I think I can communicate with this printer". You'll be presented with a list of "Ways in which XP is physically capable of communicating with any printer, with no attention paid as to whether or not the printer in question is even remotely likely to support any of them". So if you haven't memorised or written down what you need to select at this point, you're pretty much heading into guesswork territory.
- Once you've done that, you can now load the driver for the printer. XP may interrogate the printer to find if it needs a driver it already knows about. If it doesn't know about the driver, you're about to hit another roadblock. XP won't choose a sensible default like "Generic Postscript" or "Generic PCL". You have to tell it what driver to use, and even if it's just a plain Postscript printer you can't just give it a PPD file and have done with. You need a driver built for Windows.
Scripting this isn't much better. Microsoft don't provide a nice easy way to script this in XP, at least not one you can be certain is available on any old Windows XP computer. So as part of the setup, you actually have to call the libraries that do the configuration from a command line in the same way as the Wizard does - there's no easy command-driven wrapper around the libraries.
Basically, Windows XP does everything in its power to make using anything other than the Official Sanctioned Microsoft Solution (TM) so damn difficult to work with that you give up and buy all the necessary Microsoft products to follow their official solution.
Vista and 7 are better in some ways at this, and worse in others.
Neither does London to Mexico. Its just quicker and more fuel efficient that way.
This is the aviation industry we're talking about here. If they can save £1 over the entire flight, they will.
Air travel is safe because of tremendous efforts exerted towards making the process safe.
That's really funny. Sad, but funny.
To a certain extent it's true. The various aviation authorities treat safety very seriously; the tiniest incident in the air will be thoroughly investigated and if there's the remotest hint that it could happen again, carriers worldwide are alerted to investigate their processes, their training or their aircraft to prevent a recurrence.
That's why, when Concorde crashed, the entire fleet was grounded until such time as their fuel tanks could be reinforced with Kevlar. It's why the investigation into Air France flight 447 (which crashed in 2009) is still going on; it's why they found the flight data recorders even though it took two years.
But the difference is, the aviation industry looks for evidence to decide what steps to take. AFAICT, the DHS just invents rules on the spot based on the latest crazy "I know how someone could get past our security!" idea that someone cooked up.
Well, there's effectively two sorts of law here.
There's real laws - things that are flat-out illegal. Questions you can't ask, demands you can't make. There aren't very many of these.
Then there's fake laws. These are usually invented by compliance departments as a way to avoid getting into trouble under real laws - in essence they write a bunch of rules which say "You can't do A, B or C because it's against the law".
What they actually mean is "Under certain circumstances, doing A, B or C may possibly expose us to legal risk that we don't need to be exposed to. The law is actually rather more nuanced than that - it doesn't explicitly ban A, B or C for a start - but we've got to interpret the law as best we can and put it into rules for the lowest common denominator of staff - the people who frankly can't be trusted with any discretion. And while we're pained to admit it, these people exist in every company of any reasonable size. Some would like to believe it's possible to guarantee you only ever hire decent people and you can easily fire anyone for any transgression, however minor, the instant they commit it. Well, I'd like to believe in unicorns."
I know all that, and I already do it. But, as you say, it's a bit silly to call any sort of media "archival for N decades" when you can't buy the drive to read it, nor can you even be sure you can buy a controller to plug the drive into or a computer with a slot suitable for such a controller after only 1-2 decades.
It's not a 20-year archive format if you have to do that.