The government can use whatever system it wants, and if there aren’t components on the market it can justify a make work program to domestically produce them.

Governments were able to run perfectly well without high density removable storage, why is it necessary now?

Why would it want to get rid of floppy disks?

[–] PanArab@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's a cost to maintaining old technology, at some point it becomes higher than transitioning to new technology. People have known that since ancient times, that's why the Neo-Assyrian Empire chose to switch from Akkadian to Aramaic.

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml -1 points 4 months ago

There’s also a cost to transitioning to the new technology.

Normalizing arbitrary size removable media makes physical exfiltration much easier because no one is asking why you’re using an illegal technology in the government building.

Floppy disks are not able to identify themselves as a keyboard and release a payload of keystrokes on command, or hide entire soc computers complete with network adapters.

There is also the matter of retraining on an institutional scale, and if you think it’s as simple as “put this into the computer, not that” you’re woefully underinformed.

Just as an aside, it’s pretty fraught to compare a language transition caused by centuries of forced resettlement to switching the kind of computer thingy government employees use over the course of two years.