> "is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?"

In a word: Yes.

The borderline (and sometimes not-so-borderline) criminal behavior of some software/hardware makers, coupled with often exorbitant costs for a device that will either be destroyed (via being cheaply made) or totally obsolete in a few years makes me quite leery of trusting or relying on a modern smartphone, much less actually spending my own money on one. Especially when my company provides me with a phone, POS though it may be.

If you can afford a 20TB RAID *and* have enough data of value to warrant *retaining* 20TB, then you can certainly justify the expense of a tape drive and corresponding tapes to back it all up.

Tape is not dead, contrary to more than 3 decades of claims otherwise. It is, in fact, perfectly alive and healthy, and well worth using (with a proper backup/rotation scheme) when you have that kind of data volume to store.

I've worked for Arcus/Iron Mountain and Recall both, and I can't tell you how many times over my years with those companies I've heard someone say "We don't need off-site backups" or "We don't need tape, we just have the IT guy take the hotswap drives home every day", only to have them come crawling back in tears weeks, months or years later when they've lost everything.

Because tape is a dead and obsolete technology too, just like people have been saying it will be with every new storage advance for more than 30 years, right?

*sigh* Let me guess, you're either between 15 - 25 years old, and/or have never worked in enterprise-class I.T.? Otherwise, you really ought to know better.

Before I ever entered I.T. professionally 20 years ago, people had been claiming the impending death of magnetic tape for more than a decade. at least, yet it is still with us today. Sure, the round-wheel tape is more-or-less gone, but tape is still going strong.

Similarly, SSD's are not going to completely replace mechanical storage any time soon, if only because as solid-state memory improves, so will mechanical devices continue to do, and they will almost certainly have a place in modern computing for many years yet to come, barring some as-yet completely unforeseen revolution in materials science lowering materials and production costs while raising quality and value to thresholds well beyond anything currently predicted. Then again, the same advance (such as room-temperature superconductors) could have wide-ranging positive impacts on both technologies, increasing memory operation speeds in SSD's while eliminating the mechanical bearing from HDD's and providing similar performance increases.

After all, I'm pretty sure that if I dig back far enough, I can find at least one thread - quite possibly one I made substantially similar comments in - on this very site from ~15 years ago with someone saying much the same thing about how optical (or magneto-optical) is going to make tape/mechanical-drives obsolete. Now we know optical disks have a life-span before they degrade, making them useless for long-term archival storage, and I couldn't tell you when the last time I saw a mini-disc was.

This is very common in large, enterprise-class businesses with significant numbers of PC's dedicated to end-users, as this methodology is used in various ways to provide security (to the enterprise, while simultaneously robbing the end-user of theirs in favor of the business'). The services provided by companies likeZScaler would be perhaps the most common use of these types of MITM attacks.

Ah, I can understand that fear, but there's really no reason such a system can't be generally safe and reliable, especially as there is no need for the lasers to be on at all times, and its not unreasonable to believe one might be able to source a fairly low-power laser that would still have the desired effect on CCD cameras while being reasonably safe for at least short exposures to the human eye, just in case a motor stops working properly or the like.

Titanium is paramagnetic, meaning that while it is attracted/reactive to the presence of external magnetic fields, it retains no magnetization of its own when removed from said external field. In this specific usage case, magnetization of the part would not be of concern any more than it would be for any other titanium prosthesis.

So, in fact, does everything you have ever seen in your entire life: otherwise, you wouldn't see it.

The key is the specific frequencies (notice the plurality) of light reflected. The human cornea, like a camera lens, has a rather unique and readily identifiable reflected spectroscopy, and both are easily differentiated from the other.

Seriously, not an NP-hard problem. As is usual, people are trying to make it out as more difficult than it actually is.

Doesn't need one. This is not an NP-hard problem, nor is the proposed solution. It could, in fact, be done on a relatively low budget. Relative, that is, to the costs that might otherwise come with lawsuits or bad media publicity resulting from "unauthorized" video taken by passengers, in any event.

Besides, if he does the footwork and engineering on his customer's dime, he (and perhaps the customer, as a partner in a joint venture) could come out of it with a product they can market and sell to other similar bus operators, theaters, etc.

None of the tech I outlined is rare, odd, or terribly expensive (excepting LIDAR units, at about $5k each), and can be done entirely with COTS hardware and some customized programming that would only have to be built on top of programming that has already been done in this field. In fact, the PS3EYE or Kinect already has most of the capability needed.

Honestly, I've seen homebrewers do much more complex things (including code), such as the home-built, automated air-hockey table built by a father for his daughter, which not only has to identify the puck, but then do loads of computational math to determine angles, speeds and force loads: what I initially described in my original post would almost be child's play by comparison.

Use lasers with non-visible beams connected to actuated, high speed bases and working in tandem with the on-board video cameras. Pre-map the location - including relative distances between each camera (use laser as range-finder) - of all "legitimate" cameras on the bus, then use a filter to scan for the very specific and unique reflected light frequencies created by a camera lens, and whenever found, point any lasers with valid angles to see it at said camera lens: voila, no more unauthorized video.

You might also be able to accomplish this more easily, without having to map your "legitimate" cameras, by mounting said cams behind some sort of cover that would obscure their lenses from being sensed by the anti-camera-camera by dint of the covers by altering/filtering the frequency of the light reflected by the lens.

If you wanted to try something somewhat more COTS than trying to build and program a rig to do this (though a lot of the basic frameworks for things like high-speed visual target acquisition by sensing cameras and pattern recognition suites are already "out there", if you're willing to dig for them or do some legwork contacting the developers), you might try a LIDAR unit of some variety, though you'll almost certainly still have to do some modifications. I have no idea, however, whether or not the light freq's used by common LIDAR units will interfere with a camera the way more traditional lasers do.

This doesn't even count the fact that optical media is still subject to the same degradation and bitrot that tape is.

And anyone who thinks electromagnetic tape is "dead" is naive or just ignorant. People have been predicting the death of tape for decades, and it's no more true today than it was in the 70's. Modern EM tape is typically rated for 15 to 30 years of retention, and as long as it is not over-exposed to moisture during storage, it has proven to be able to last that long: otherwise, the manufacturers would be out of business because the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies - the majority of whom backup to tape and send it off-site - would have sued them to extinction.

On the other hand, according to archives.gov:

"CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs."

Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?

Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.

What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?

How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.

I'd also really like to see this always-accurate-and-reliable source of information you seem to be purporting exists. You know, the one you can always count on absolutely to be so factually complete that you never need to cross-reference another source of information and research - as any good science or research demands - because it's all-inclusive and has settled all questions of science and history... oh wait, that doesn't exist. The Wikipedia is meant to be one more avenue TO research, not OF it. It contains information and references, and you're supposed to do your OWN research, not use the Wikipedia directly as a source for it. If you can't be bothered to flex your intellectual muscles and judge how accurate the information presented is for yourself, and then choose whether or not the information is reliable enough to warrant further investigation on your own, once again, the failing is yours, not the Wikipedia's: no one else can help you if you're too intellectually lazy to do research, and no source of information is reliable enough to simply spoon-feed you without any chance of error. If that's what you want, I suggest you find religion.

No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.

The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.

Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.

If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.

Nice fallacy, namely your assertion that commercial vendors actually do any work, especially after-the-fact... you know, like all the updates MS has made to the registry editor over the years, or the extensive CLI functionality, and let us not forget their impressively powerful and flexible search/scheduling options they built into Outlook. /sarcasm

You keep using that word ("you")... but I do not think it means what you think it means. I believe the word you're looking for is "I", because if your assertion were true, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD and many others wouldn't exist - or wouldn't exist as they do today - with a huge amount of software being continuously developed by people who are happy to keep doing it so they have the tools they want/need to do what they want to do.

Maybe *you* kept getting ripped off because you were doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I'm going to go have drinks with my buddies from Redhat who get paid perfectly well.