We once had one that might have been the same model.
One head crashed big time, tape backup turned out to have failed, guess who was asked to rescue as much data as possible using Norton Commander?
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Go shoot some holes in a hard drive. Itās fun.
Weāre stlil talking about hard drives, right?
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I was thinking about some buck shot shotgun shells in short pipes, circularly arranged over the hard drive, electrically ignited. With a pellet catcher porous concrete brick under the disk.
Maybe I should test it some dayā¦
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More fun than an industrial shredder anyway. 
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A less fun but more efficient and simpler to make way would be a little chip with an encryption key for the disk. With either a tiny thermite pellet, or a spring-loaded punch that destroys the chip die, or other possibilities.
Without the key the disk is a bunch of random numbers.
And you can have the key backed up somewhere, perhaps in another country, in case of a false activation.
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Or just have good backupsā¦cause it is the right thing to do.
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Which are then vulnerable to being recovered by the adversary.
The must-not-lose-data-to-a-fault and must-not-divulge-data-to-the-adversary is the same class of problem as safing nukes; you want them to go off only and only when they should, and not unintentionally, not even in case of fire or nearby explosion (see strong link - weak link scheme, for example). Could be inspiring.
Yeah yeah, but if you transcode video badly it looks noticeably poor on a large screen. Macroblocking, squirmy shadow details, motion breakup. Blu-ray compression is really well optimised and so I wouldnāt like to add any more to it.
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You can have that immortality now: just write a good book/poem, or murder a lot of people at once. Or over a few years by inventing the next cigarette, w/e.
And as for your last pointā¦yeah. More or less. But Iād still not like to see humanity wiped out like that, or any other way tbh.
But then, whatās immortality good for when you arenāt around to enjoy it.
Sometimes you have to tear down the old when you want to build something better on its place.
Itās not āwiped outā. Itās ātransformedā or āupgradedā.
Yesā¦āupgradedā into something completely different.
Excuse me, Iām going to go āupgradeā a toaster with a hammer to get at the sweet, sweet tungsten ribbons inside.
Or like Michaelangeloās David getting āupgradedā into a series of book ends.
Thereās also the simple fact that it gets harder and harder to come up with ways to improve a given technology.
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No, by 8TB I mean 8TB, as in the Seagate or Western Digital 8 TB drives. I assume being stocked at a retailer like Best Buy qualifies as widely available.
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Itās just nichrome. And if you have a broken toaster, it is good stuff to salvage. The society is broken anyway.
In a way, book ends are actually useful; a statue is just āprettyā.
But in this case itād be more about turning an ugly chunk of rock into said statue. Or the book ends.
Society sucks. Humanity sucks as well. Both are grossly overrated, at least in their current form.
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Actually, thereās something to be said for not putting all your eggs in one basketā¦
Just nichrome? nooooooā¦where CAN I turn effort into tungsten, anyways?
Lightbulbs?
ā¦I should get myself a bucking bar and get it gold-plated, for the funā¦
ā¦or, even better, if Iād get the money, get a custom-made set of two hemispheres from tungsten, about grape-sized, with a small hole in the middle. A 1:1 model of the pit of the Fat Man.
TIG welding rods?
I have to askā¦ where is your particular Singularity idea coming from, anyway? You seem oddly sure and specific about what you expect people want to happen, and all of it is almost completely unlike anything Iāve come across before.
Also, back on topic, I for one could really use 30-40TB of local storage. Iāve built up a lot of games and movies over the years and Iām tired of storing thousands of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs in binders instead of ripping ISOs and having a place to keep them all.
On that note, why do I spell is ādiskā for hard drives and ādiscā for optical media?
Well, not to be that person but disc vs disk. They came from the same source and got distinctivized on magnetic vs. optical relatively recently.
The convention for flat, rotational data storage mediums is that disk refers to magnetic storage while disc refers to optical storage.
Although ā¦
In 1979, the Dutch company Philips, along with Sony, developed and trademarked the compact disc using the ācā spelling. The ācā spelling is now used consistently for optical media such as the compact disc and similar technologies.[4]
Apparently there are some old trademark precedents that set optical up to use disc instead of disk.
(For the record, I believe language is for the people who use it. Dictionaries can, at best, describe what the language was for many people when the dictionary went to press. Beyond that, if weāre having a conversation and we both understand each other, we were using language correctly no matter how many rules we ābroke.ā So interchange disc and disk all you want as far as Iām concerned. 
)
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