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Somewhere around West Bend, several people have pieces of U.S. Navy Commander Wilma Roberts' life - her furniture, her china, her clothes, financial records, the family Bible, even the ceremonial sword from her son's graduation from a military academy. Nearly all Roberts' worldly possessions were auctioned off by a storage business last summer after a classic military snafu: Though Roberts, 48, was on active duty in Japan and Kuwait from July 2008 to July 2011, Navy officials stopped paying for her storage in 2010 and told the West Bend company it could sell off the goods - though the Navy...

I've been looking on the web for a good vendor or vendors of food for long term storage. I'd like some feedback from you fellow FReepers as to your experience with the various companies out there....

After listening to all the responses last night to the Gentleman from Nevada asking the Candidates what they would do with Yucca Mountain, they all got it wrong IMHO.If my memory is correct, Pres. Carter signed an agreement with the Soviets in regards to Nuclear Proliferation and one of the concessions he made was not to reprocess our spent fuel from Nuclear Power Plants. This would allow to recapture unspent fuel and make pellets of it again for refueling. France does, and it maybe folklore, but I have seen it claimed all their spent fuel would fit in a closet.If...

A&E's "Storage Wars," a show about people who bid on the contents of abandoned storage lockers, had its second season premiere this summer to 5.1 million viewers. It's the HIGHEST RATED show in the network's history. Tru TV's nearly identical "Storage Hunters" has become a breakout hit - ALMOST as big of a hit as Spike's nearly identical "Auction Hunters." That's right. There are three DIFFERENT shows on TV about STORAGE LOCKERS. Reality TV is frequently trashy, but never before has it featured so much actual trash.

how did you convince your spouse to be a prepper? (and not think you're nuts) Post your interesting , amusing , and/or somber antecdotes here. IE: I convinced her the money saved on growing food could be used for some killer pedicures.

OUESTION: Home Design Software Aug 29, 2011 Is there a computer software program that lets you: 1. First take item's size or dimensions and label them and save them, (stove, couch, sink, etc.) as a movable item. 2. Place them on a design sheet, and move them around by mouse movement. 3. Define space between items, and be able to change it later. 4. After you get satisfied with your layout of items, then design walls around those items, and design you home, yard, or whatever you are planning to build, in that order, and be able to make changes...

From Simon Black of Sovereign ManMarc Faber: Don’t Store Your Gold In The United StatesAs usual, the CNBC hosts were completely dumbfounded.Phoning in from Sao Paulo, Brazil, investment guru Marc Faber was a guest on CNBC last week, once again telling the unvarnished truth about the state of the world economy and bankrupt western nations.This time, Faber had a very clear message: that everyone should own *physical* gold… and what’s more, they should store it outside of the United States: “I prefer if investors hold physical gold in a safe deposit box, ideally outside the US, in various locations…...

Superman's memory crystals may become reality in computers Computers may soon be saving their data onto hard drives made of glass following research by British scientists who have developed a way of storing information similar to the "memory crystals" seen in the Superman films. By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent 9:45AM BST 14 Aug 2011 Researchers at Southampton University used lasers to rearrange the atoms in pieces of glass, turning it into new type of computer memory. They claim the glass memory is far more stable and resilient than current types of hard-drive memory, which have a limited lifespan of a...

Every house has food in the pantry that has been there for weeks if not months, but according to food experts, you may want to think twice before throwing those items out. Many common food products last far longer than you might think.

Modified carbon nanotubes can store solar energy indefinitely, then be recharged by exposure to the sun. A novel application of carbon nanotubes, developed by MIT researchers, shows promise as an innovative approach to storing solar energy for use whenever it’s needed. Storing the sun’s heat in chemical form — rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container — has significant advantages, since in principle the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy. The problem with that approach has been that until now...

Panasonic Corp's Digital AVC Marketing Division will release a rewritable single-sided three-layer Blu-ray disc that is compatible with the Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Format and has a capacity of 100 Gbytes April 15, 2011. The company claims that it is the world's first rewritable Blu-ray disc with a capacity of 100 Gbytes. The new product is a 2x-speed recordable Blu-ray disc compatible with the BDXL Part1 Version3, and its capacity is twice as large as that of an existing single-sided two-layer Blu-ray disc (50 Gbytes). Specifically, it is possible to record about 12 hours of a terrestrial digital TV program in...

LECOMPTON, Kansas — Imagine cleaning out a garage and finding something so amazing that it was like winning the lottery. It happened to a Lecompton businessman. Working as an auctioneer for the last 40 years, Bill Fair said he has come across some weird stuff. "A skull, body parts," he said. But Fair said even he wasn't prepared for what he found recently. What Fair found was a classic 66 Shelby Mustang one of only 1,100 made, and sold from Carroll Shelby's personal car lot.

What is the general opinion that there will be a food shortage in the United States? Also, what do people recommend? What to purchase? How to store? How to prepare? Any good web sites to go for tips? Thank you in advance.

Antimatter: The Conundrum of Storage by Paul Gilster on March 11, 2011 Are we ever going to use antimatter to drive a starship? The question is tantalizing because while chemical reactions liberate about one part in a billion of the energy trapped inside matter — and even nuclear reactions spring only about one percent of that energy free — antimatter promises to release what Frank Close calls ‘the full mc2 latent within matter.’ But assuming you can make antimatter in large enough amounts (no mean task), the question of storage looms large. We know how to store antimatter in...

Most weeks, you make a big grocery list and head to the store, prepared to buy loads of fresh food to make your family's meals. We often don't give a thought to stuff sitting in the kitchen cupboard or we automatically throw out anything that's been in there longer than we can remember. But Janice Revell, co-founder of StillTasty.com, says "Look in your pantry and your cabinets and check whether the items really do need to go. You'll be shocked by what you really don't need to throw away." So before you throw out that years-old sugar or replace that...

Although not quite the Intel SSD announcement we were expecting in Q4, today Intel unveiled its first mSATA SSD: the Intel SSD 310. Based on the 34nm Intel X25-M G2 controller, the 310 will be available in both 40GB and 80GB capacities. The 80GB version should perform a bit slower than an 80GB X25-M G2 while the 40GB version will perform like a 40GB X25-V.  

Making your own Desiccant Packs for Long-term Firearm Storage By Burt Gummer “I feel I have been denied critical, need-to-know information!” (Tremors II) With the political climate such as it is today, those of us who had enough for-sight to acquire firearms for the eventual need of preservation and survival have realized that long term storage will become a necessity. It will become a necessity because those in power would like the populous as dependant and passive as possible. This of course includes the right to keep and bear arms which the morons on the left & in the White...

There is always a bull market somewhere. With the stock market continuing to whipsaw and bonds getting ever-pricier, investors are looking further afield for decent returns—and some are finding them. Self-storage buildings, anyone? How about abandoned railroad beds, cellular towers, student apartments or parking facilities? Such unglamorous niches, once shunned by the investing elite, are performing well in 2010, even as the Dow industrials limp along. If you haven't heard about these seemingly arcane plays yet, it may be because the smarter money is getting there first. In some cases, private-equity firms, pensions and college endowments, which are cutting their...

Sources close to Seagate roadmaps have leaked the potential of a 3TB SAS drive being released this year.The quest for storage is almost a never ending saga.  Dubbed the Constellation-ES, the replacement for the Seagate Barracuda-ES, the drive is expected to arrive later this year with a 7200 RPM rotation speed, and a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.  A 1TB version of the 2.5" Barracuda-ES is also expected to arrive around the mid year point.

Less than 24 hours ago I was called into a meeting with SandForce, the SSD controller manufacturer that has been on fire lately. The company makes two controllers: the SF-1200 and SF-1500. The meeting was initiated by SandForce to clear up any misconceptions I might have about the differences between the two controllers. No good deed goes unpunished, and the quick meeting turned into an hour long debate about responsibility and ethics. It turns out that while I finally know the difference between the SF-1200 and the more expensive SF-1500, not all drives based on the SF-1200 will offer the...

By the end of January 2011, almost all new hard drives sold will have switched to a new format that will increase their size and efficiency, but will leave those clinging to Windows XP frustrated. Traditionally, data on hard disks has been broken up into 512 byte chunks. Each broken-up sector requires additional space on a physical disk to mark the beginning and the end of each piece. Extra space is also needed for error correction, and there needs to be a bit of room to separate it from the next chunk. This wasn't much of a problem when the...

Hard disk drive capacity growth rates are slowing and two 2.5-inch drive capacity increases are in qualification with drive manufacturers, according to TDK. The firm is a major hard disk drive head manufacturer and its read/write heads have to match the areal density capabilities of the media they are moving across. In its results presentation for its third fiscal 2010 quarter, it showed a chart (pdf) depicting areal density increases and timescales.TDK product launch schedule In the 3.5-inch drive class, 500GB/platter drives are shipping now and 640GB/platter (or thereabouts) read/write heads are in qualification with TDK's OEM customers, the drive...

SANTA FE, N.M. – Rancher Jack Chatfield sees untapped value in the spaces that lie beneath New Mexico's dusty landscape. But he said the state needs to first decide who owns them. Scientists are looking at underground fissures and caverns as places where carbon dioxide emissions captured from fossil fuel power plants can be stored. Carbon emissions are among the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The underground space also could store compressed air as part of a process to generate clean electricity. "This is a huge issue for our society today. It's technology that is on the cutting edge...

I wasn’t supposed to be able to tell you about this until Monday, but it looks like the news leaked early so IMFT gave us the green light.Intel and Micron jointly formed IMFT (Intel-Micron Flash Technologies), LLC back in 2006. The two companies share production from the venture. Intel gets 49% of IMFT’s flash production and Micron gets 51%.In the usual Intel tradition, IMFT aggressively scales process technology to be competitive. The company started manufacturing at 72nm, spent 2008 at 50nm and just last year scaled down to 34nm. The latter is what found its way into Intel’s X25-M G2...

The chemical Bisphenol A, which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and food-can liners, has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and municipalities because of potential health effects. The Food and Drug Administration will soon decide what it considers a safe level of exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), which some studies have linked to reproductive abnormalities and a heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. Now Consumer Reports' latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods we...

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, July 2, 2009 – A Nebraska National Guard agriculture development team is helping Afghan farmers capitalize on their investments. Members of the Task Force Warrior agribusiness development team work alongside Afghan farmers who went to Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, June 24, 2009, to learn how to assemble grain bins. A Nebraska group shipped the bins to Afghanistan, which are designed to store seed and harvested grain. U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Lory Stevens  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The Task Force Warrior agribusiness development team trained farmers from nearby provinces here June 24, showing them how...

In Part I, I set the groundwork for this discussion by providing the details that the so-called mainstream media won’t. I finished by asking some basic questions: Why would the SJC take up this case on appeal? How would the SJC be viewed by the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts if they indeed were to rule against Runyan? What if they rule in favor of Runyan? What, if any would be the short or long term ramifications? Before I answer those hypothetical questions let’s review some more historical context to help you understand where we are today. The Second...

The lithium ion batteries used in laptops and cellphones, and tipped for future use in electric cars, are approaching their technological limits. But chemists in the UK say that there's a way to break through the looming energy capacity barrier – let the batteries "breathe" oxygen from the air. A standard lithium ion battery contains a negative electrode of graphite, a positive electrode of lithium cobalt oxide, and a lithium salt-containing electrolyte. Lithium ions shuttle between the two electrodes during charging and discharging, sending electrons around the external circuit to power a gadget in the process. The problem with that...

Tight storage may lead to huge oil price drop Posted by Rune Likvern on May 12, 2009 - 10:00am in The Oil Drum: Europe Topic: Demand/Consumption Tags: backwardation, china, china oil storage, contango, oecd, oil prices, original, tanker storage, us oil consumption, us oil storage [list all tags] The present contango in oil prices bears all the hallmarks of an oil market where supplies are well above present fundamental physical consumption. The recent large inventory build of petroleum, under a steep contango which now is flattening, within the big oil consumers (like the OECD countries and China) have left some...

Back in the early 1990s the outlook for the nation in general and gun owners in particular seemed rather grim to many people. A few years earlier in 1986, Congress had banned civilians from owning newly manufactured machine guns. There was ever more strident talk of banning semi-automatic weapons or so called assault weapons. Many of us regarded a semi-automatic rifle as the foundation of a home defense battery. Many of us believed that more laws banning ever more types of guns were imminent. About that time I acquired a Ruger Ranch Rifle through a private sale. I decided to...

This is my ammo stock. Most of it was acquired 8-10 years ago when ammo compared to today’s prices was very cheap. I have stocked here; .177 pellets and BB’s, 22 rimfire, 38 special, 9mm, .223, .308 and 12 gauge. A common question is; how much ammo should I store for SHTF? First, several questions need to be asked. 1. Exactly what are you storing it for? For the Survivalist, it is food gathering (hunting) and home or self-defense. 2. How long will the situation causing the need last? Let’s assume TSHTF and commonsense says it will be 5 years....

Billerica, Mass. - Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone is seeking to preserve gun safety laws by fighting two court rulings that could loosen gun storage regulations. Leone’s office filed an appeal in the state appeals court, disputing a Lowell District Court decision to dismiss gun charges against a Billerica man for improperly storing a firearm and possessing a firearm without a valid firearm identification card. Richard Runyan’s lawyers argued the charges against him were unconstitutional based on a Supreme Court case, Washington, D.C. versus Heller, ruling individuals have a right to posses weapons for self-defense and requiring that handguns be...

There is a great list posted over at the The Power Hour for those of you who are as a precaution preping some emergency stores. http://www.thepowerhour.com/news/items_disappearfirst.htm

The words of a grandmother whose grandchildren were murdered as the result of California's mandatory gun storage law... Yesterday, St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner Kurt Hofmann wrote a powerful piece entitled, “’Protecting’ children … from the ability to defend themselves” in which he discussed the plight of the Carpenter family. On August 23, 2000, Jonathan David Bruce broke into the Carpenter home and, armed with a pitch fork, brutally attacked the four children at home alone, killing two. Although the children were trained in the use of firearms, the family’s guns were locked away in compliance with California law. The...

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Jan. 27, 2009 - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive - the world's highest capacity drive and the latest addition to WD's popular, environmentally friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green™ hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD's industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.

Tse-whit-zen artifacts languish in storage By Jonathan MartinSeattle Times staff reporter An arrowhead created by a Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member. One of the Pacific Northwest's most astonishing archaeological finds in a generation has languished for more than a year, lingering on metal shelves in a Seattle warehouse, unseen by the public and unexamined by scientists. No one questions the discoveries — artifacts from a 2,700-year-old Native American village excavated from the Port Angeles waterfront amid great public interest — should be exhibited, analyzed and celebrated. But the 900 boxes of artifacts — such things as spindle whorls carved from...

Ten minutes to open storage blissFind out how to eradicate 99.7% of spam Having been worked over by the rise of Linux servers, Sun Microsystems wants to capitalize on what it sees as the next major "open systems" movement. The company believes that storage systems - or more specifically storage software - will transition to favor lower-cost, less proprietary plays. Sun this week took what feels like a rather minor step in the open storage direction with the release of two "how-to-guides" meant to help with the creation of a storage server and a NAS (network attached storage) appliance. The...

I would like to continue storing my scrap lumber in the garage, but my wife is worried about termites. I told her that as long as it is stored off of the ground and not touching the walls that it is safe from termites. I cannot find the definitive word on the internet on this subject. Can someone here help me out? Thank you.

Arctic Foxes Put Eggs in "Cold Storage" for Lean Times James Owen for National Geographic News October 29, 2007 Arctic foxes create "nest eggs" each year to prepare for leaner times, according to a new study. Like squirrels gathering nuts for the winter, the small foxes hoard bird eggs in case there's not enough of their favorite prey—the collard lemming—to go around in the spring. The stored eggs can last for up to a year after being buried, thanks to the Arctic permafrost and natural preservatives inside the eggs. "It appears as if cached eggs are used as a backup...

It's too much to demand that any vendor try and make RAID storage exciting. Our hats, however, go off to Panasas for trying. The company this week started hyping its Tiered Parity Architecture (TPA) – technology that serves as an extension to RAID. Panasas CTO Garth Gibson, one of the inventors of RAID back at Berkeley, is once again behind this advance, which once again helps customers route around disk errors. Part of the Panasas TPA pitch centers on the idea that customers will face more disk failures as drives grow larger. According to some industry metrics, you're likely to...

By DOUGLAS BIRCH Associated Press Writer YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Amid tense relations between the United States and Russia, two prominent American arms control advocates Friday toured a storage facility designed to hold tons of plutonium and enriched uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and former Sen. Sam Nunn, co-authors of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, were escorted through the high-security Mayak Fissile Materials Storage Facility — built to withstand assaults from terrorists and a direct hit from a jet. Russia plans to store up to 25 metric tons of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons at...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Few families store their firearms safely, according to a pediatric researcher at Brenner Children's Hospital, part of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Robert H. DuRant, Ph.D., and his colleagues' research study results are published in the June issue of Pediatrics. "Over 70 percent of the families surveyed reported not storing their firearms safely in their residence," DuRant said. "This concerns us a great deal because having guns in the home increases the likelihood that they will be used in a suicide or unintentional injury. It's imperative that parents understand the necessity of storing guns safely in...

Storage tech firms have their part to play in tackling computer power consumption, NetApp said today. More than half (59 per cent) of NetApp customers are thinking hard about green computing, and forty six per cent have invested to slow down the spin of the electric meter, according to a company survey released today. NetApp acknowledges that chip and server heat reduction is still the most important issue to tackle, but addressing storage issues can yield significant cuts in both the power and space necessary in a data center, it says. "Storage has gone from a very small fraction of...

EMC, which is perhaps best known for its disk arrays and some of the software it has acquired in the past few years, such as VMware for server and workstation virtualization, Legato Systems for tape backups, and Documentum for information lifecycle management, is a bit frustrated that Wall Street doesn't correctly value EMC's portfolio of products. And so, it is selling of a 10 percent stake in VMware, perhaps its hottest item, in an initial public offering. In 2006, the VMware unit had $709 million in sales, up 83 percent, and with the launch of the Infrastructure 3 product set,...

FreeNAS is a small, powerful, full-featured implementation of FreeBSD as a network-attached storage device. (It also happens to be January's Project of the Month at SourceForge.net.) If you're a Linux user like me, the BSD-speak used for devices and such might give you pause, but other than that small caveat, installation and usage shouldn't be a problem. It's powerful enough to be used in the enterprise, but it's friendly enough so that even a typical home office user can take advantage of it. Here's how I created an easy-to-use NAS device for rsync backups and FTP server on my LAN.

A-DATA has shown off prototypes of an upcoming solid-state drive for ExpressCard, IDE and SATA interfaces. The samples have capacities of 32, 64 and 128 GB. The 32 and 64 GB drives come in 1.8" form factors while the 128 GB drive is in a 2.5" size. Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The state of Nevada on Friday asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject the U.S. government's plan to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste temporarily above ground at a mountain located about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The Energy Department is set to file an application with the NRC in mid 2008 for a license to operate the Yucca Mountain permanent nuclear storage repository in Nevada, which would hold radioactive waste underground from more than 100 nuclear power plants, along with the tons of leftovers from the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The permanent storage site is...

Mother Nature may prove to be the most cunning bioterrorist of all ! Scientists have discovered evidence Influenza virus are "warehoused" in lake ice; then released during spring thaws to infect other creatures-including humans.

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD) said on Tuesday it would buy rival McData Corp. (MCDT) in a $713 million stock deal, bolstering its line of equipment for data storage networks to compete against Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO). Both companies sell equipment that boosts the efficiency of corporate communications networks used for data storage, with Brocade best known for mid-range products known as data switches, while McData's market share is strongest in directors, which are high-end versions of data switches. "It's made sense for them to come together to take on Cisco for a long time," said Glenn Hanus, an analyst...

Sydney, Jul 8 (ANI): An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete. "What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," ABC quoted Prof. Renugopalakrishnan, a BSc in Chemistry from Madras University...