Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Are full hard drives heavier than empty hard drives?

I read about this in the Talk page of the article about disk drives in the German Wikipedia.

What sounds like a pretty stupid question (it probably is), might still have a pretty interesting answer. Any physics students (electrical engineering? computer science?) out there who can enlighten us? Are there any scientific studies about such issues? There are some theories (German, sorry), but I'm not sure whether that's more than random guesses...

Other stupid questions from the articles above: Are charged cell phone batteries heavier than empty ones? Are Word documents with bigger fonts heavier?

My head hurts...

I didn't follow this disaster too closely, but here's a short (most probably incomplete) roundup of what happened so far:

1. The Sony DRM installs a rootkit,
2. people use the rootkit to make game cheats safe from the (Blizzard) Warden,
3. trojans start (ab)using the DRM rootkit,
4. Sony gets sued,
5. Sony pulls the rootkit.

Nice bedtime story so far. Now it turns out that Sony’s web-based XCP (rootkit) uninstaller seems to open huge, gaping security holes itself...

Not that I would care too much, I don't buy any Sony CDs. There's a huge pile of great Creative Commons licensed music out there (shameless plug: check my music podcast for some hand-selected goodies). No need to pay huge corporations for crappy music which comes with funny "extras"...

This has got to be the funniest cause someone has ever requested donations for:

After we collect $400 in donations, we will take that money to a local Apple Store. We will purchase the iPod, open it right inside the store, and destroy it right on the spot. The whole thing will be shot on film, and displayed on this site. This is only a social experiment, for the entertainment of the donors, and visitors of this site.

The $400 are raised, so expect the video anytime soon...

Update: The video is now available.

I knew it! Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb...

(via <TeRanEX/> weblog)