SpiderOak makes Dropbox look bargain basement in pricing.

Never had that happen on any copyrighted books I've loaded into dropbox.

Now, I have had PDFs which were locked by the owner in a way that was unencryptable on the iPad, but that isn't Dropbox's fault.

Success is about being in the right place at the right time with the correct skill set to take advantage of the situation. Hard work is the way you maximize your skill sets to that should you find yourself at the intersection of time and place you take advantage of it. The thing is, not only can't that intersection be anticipated, it can't be identified even when it's happening. Only in hindsight can you look back and realize where the critical moment was when your success actually started. Sadly, most people can't even do that. They believe that climbing the mountain of success was solely the result of having applied their skills and hard work, never realizing that - as the result of fortuitous time and place of their application - they were actually running down hill from that point on.

How do you propose to reimburse people who generate or curate content, such as the editors at Slashdot, or the writers at Cracked or the Onion?

With every content media you pay for the medium (paper, traditionally for magazines and newspapers) but that barely covers materials and distribution. The advertising pays for creating the content.

Just like CableTV. Fooled me once...

I don't actually browse the entire internet and have no interest in guaranteeing equivalent revenue to everyone selling penis enlargements. My share of the burden is only a dozen or so websites visited regular. But since many of those are content aggregators let's go ahead and say I visit 100 x that many websites, and consider these casual visits as equal to supporting the website for an entire year.

This makes $230 / 1,036,878,123 websites (internetlivestats.com) * 1200 = 2.7*e-4 dollars to cover my website burden. And I feel I probably deserve some credit for subscribing to Netflix and Amazon prime. Obviously bandwidth is a better measure of the 'cost' I need to cover for these websites to remain hosted, but averaging over all websites does (in a difficult to quantify way) account for the fact that many of the websites out there even now are not profit-motivated.

I hope the authors of this study were also sure to deduct the cost users already pay due to web advertisements in the form of malware infections, including the compromise of bank accounts, identity, etc.

It spreads out the load the peak - we call it a thrust ring in modern building practice.

The article is likely wrong. There are no high tensile forces in the pantheon, including the dome, at least not what we would consider "high" today. The structure is a (mostly) compression-only building. The oculus is a compression ring and the dome shape is close enough to a parabaloid that any tension forces are negated and the thrust at the base minimized.

Concrete has tensile strength all by itself. If I gave you a rod of concrete just an inch thick you wouldn't be able to pull it apart. Even tension from bending is allowed in the design of modern structures with every-day concrete. There are several modern admixtures that even allow cracks to self-heal in the presence of moisture.

To see real math applied to the use of all-compression spanning structures, consider hyperbolic paraboloid (saddle shaped) or inverted catenary (paraboloid domes) roofs.In some cases (usu. flat-ish roofs) it's architectural and rebar or prestressing steel is required, but for pure utility you can define a curve that keeps the surface in compression and then the only steel that is added is typically for shrinkage and thermal cycling crack control (which is cheaper than using shrink-compensated concrete mixtures). They're rare because they tend to be very labor intensive to form and cover.

And then he still has to hope that the bond strength works out.

Obstructing traffic (including "convoys") is just as illegal as reckless driving, and both can occur when the speed limit is being observed.

Worse that pay-to-play software of dubious quality is the entire lack of support for major applications, and a complete lack of serious productivity and mainstream apps. Many of the apps are poor stepchildren of their Android and iOS counterparts if they even exist at all. A useful, app-style browser is woefully missing (for those who have convertible tablet/laptops, you can't have Chrome, IE or FF act as an app/finger centric if you use them in desktop mode.)

The iOS and Android app stores are full of shit, too, but at least there's some good stuff out there. For MS, all they have is the shit.

You can die from the impact of the impending head-on collision, or you can veer off and save your life, but in doing so you'll be accelerating out of the way of the oncoming vehicle and into a group of 40 kindergartners (including your twin son and daughter), their 3 pregnant teachers, and 3 elderly chaperons (one of whom is carrying a kitten, another a puppy) who were waiting for a bus after a field trip.

Don't worry, your decision to kill them to save your own life was made months ago, right after you bought the car and selected "preserve my life at all costs" as your autopilot setting.

While it's possible that a computer could be allowed to evaluate ethical limits - to play a version of Lifeboat - the lack of information will doom such optimization. The number of wild or unpredictable maneuvers are more likely to be limited, with only simple avoidance options available (stop, avoid within legal lanes of travel). The use of a standard model is preferable, or you would have to know all possible outcomes as well as all possible settings on nearby vehicles.

Seriously. A fast cradle-to-grave spacecraft is 2-3 years. We built Pegsat faster, but it was really just a quickie so that the maiden flight of Pegasus (which failed) has something to carry. Even with all the principal investigator work done, it was a solid 18 months to complete reviews, assembly, and testing to fly a secondary payload in the shuttle.

Even college projects which are more than a half-baked demo last most of a year, and real college research projects stretch through multiple years. She will probably be disappointed when she spends the next two years on a small group of components in one aspect of a spacecraft, though a seasoned engineer would revel in having the time to perfect something like that.

I co-oped at NASA Goddard, and we actually built stuff. At Johnson and in most of the Government offices at Kennedy and JPL it's all contractor management. Marshall had some real space work going on at the time. Ames does more aeronautical, iirc.

I lucked out and landed in a small division that built and flew small expendable payloads and secondary shuttle payloads. We were housed in half of a building that had been converted from a high-bay shop. The other half was still a shop - an actual machine shop - and optical facility. You designed stuff, and then could walk over and talk to a machinist about the project. Finalize a drawing and it might be fabbed on site or sent out, but it came back and got assembled in a clean room that was at the end of a hall of engineers offices. The controls group had benches full of electronics and components - they even did basic balancing and testing of momentum wheels in the same pod as where the offices were.

It was, possibly, one of the coolest jobs on the planet - and I was there for almost 9 years in all. But there was precious little of that in the agency as a whole. We had been moving more and more to contractors over the years - more than half of the people I worked with side by side were actually contractors. A contract would end and be re-bid, and whoever won would hire 98% of the people who worked for the old contractor and nothing would change except who the agency made out the check to each month. At JPL it's all contractors - when my life took me to LA I found out that they don't have engineers, just staff to manage the contracts with CalTech and the other contractors who do pretty much everything. At Kennedy you can be written up for holding a wrench if you're not a member of the union for one of the contractors there. We got out own cleanroom to isolate our team from the rest of those politics when we did integration at the cape.