Inspired by a true event

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Leave it to Bieber

In a post concert meet-and-greet, teen pop idol Justin Bieber was caught in a compromising position with a fan. He was accused of groping the young girl after she uploaded a photo. His publicist denied anything untoward occurred at all, dismissing accusations as "ridiculous" and insisting "That definitely did not happen". Apparently, the image is misleading according to his supporters. What do you think? Personally, I think the boy's on drugs.


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Can't we just get along?

Name any idea(s), no mater how outlandish/improbable to implement, that would address the reason(s) why all over the world people cheat, steal, defraud, rob, rape, maim or kill. Alternatively, explain why there is little we can do to stem the evil that men do.

Most interesting comment gets a nifty prize. Enter early and often.


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This round goes to cat...

Believe it or not, this is an ad from Moldova, promoting a testosterone-laced cat nip. I guess it's meant to beef up your feline if it's getting bullied by the pooch next door.


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My, what big drives you have, grandma

Recently, I found myself in need of a high-capacity USB drive. After assessing what was on the market, I settled on a 16 GB. HP model. It was the minimum I needed and although I paid a little bit more than similar capacity models, it had the advantage of actually being in stock. In the running was only one other model, the Sandisk offering which I had read often gets "locked" in read-only mode for which there is no "fix" to unlock it. But what really sold me on the HP device was its size.

This evening, while still marvelling at its minuscule dimensions, I decided to take a photo of it and offer up a comparison of it and older storage devices. I've been involved in the tech industry since the early 70's and I did a little research this evening to demonstrate how far we've come since then.

Pictured below is a string of six state-of-the-art IBM 3350 hard disk drives first released in 1975 made for large mainframes. They were far faster and much higher capacity than the previous generation of drives. Each drive had a capacity of about 318 MB. The entire string in the image had a capacity of just under 2 GB. As you can see, each single drive enclosure was about the size of an apartment-sized washer or dryer.

Here is a photo of my new thumb drive:

The dimensions are approximately 1 1/8 in. x 1/2 in. x 1/4 in. And half the device is nothing more than the connector. The actual storage area is about a half inch cube! As I said, the capacity is 16 GB. Compared to the old technology, this new device has a data capacity of more than 50 times a single 3350, and more than 8 times the capacity of the entire 6-device string.

Finally, I paid about $15 for my USB drive. Cost of a single IBM 3350 drive in 1975 was over $30,000. No, I did not misplace the decimal.

Note: 3350's came in pairs. The price above reflects half the cost of a 3350 pair.


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