The publicity is everything to the terrorists. Censorship is, in some ways, even better for them, as rumours (which they can start) can make unseen footage far worse than reality and the Streisand Effect works just fine, bringing people into discussions.

No, this isn't something you can fix in the middle. You have to fix the users, instead. You have to damp down emotional responses and increase rational duscussion. There is no terrorism without fear, there are no causes without fear.

Eliminating the instinct (it's not an emotion, it's baser than that) of fear us impossible - and probably unwise if possible. But damping it, and raising calm rationality, is possible.

And it will not only make video nasties unimportant, it will make the terrorists who make them an endangered species.

You can't fight terror with blinkers or peril-sensitive sunglasses, or even with weapins. Because terror is in the mind, be it their mind or yours. And to fight in your mind the ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, a warplane is a very messy, expensive and stupid solution. You can only fight mind with mind.

Skepticism != Cynicism.

When the distinction becomes blurred, you no longer have skepticism.

All things should be questioned. That doesn't mean forever.

All things should be subject to scrutiny. That doesn't mean wasting cycles.

Once an issue is settled, it's settled until new data brings it back into question.

Things should be fixed before they break, not after, but only with something verifiably better. If it's not verified, it's not better.

Enough of the common sense that you yung 'uns lack. Back to the boot process.

The original boot process was never great. A very limited range of states, temperamental scripts, poorly documented behaviours, wide variation in precise behaviour between implementations, potential vulnerabilities, ghastly completion time, horrible dependencies, etc.

This has been replaced with an alternative that is new, shiny and creates exactly the same problems but in a completely new way.

A pox on both your houses.

Still, six is better than the two runlevels offered by Windows, which are even slower, even less stable and even less secure. What's worse than pox. I know, Ebola on Windows.

The lot of you are a disgrace. All three systems are less designed than congealed. And the Unix man pages were written by Vogons. Drunk Vogons. Practicing poetry whilst smashing snails with hammers.

Roombas (and variants) are common household robots. YouTube has a lot of videos about Roombas cleaning a room while being ridden by a cat. Sometimes the cat is wearing a shark-suit.

Therefore, as this project progresses, Roombas will start to hunt cats in the neighborhood in order to get them to sit on top of them while they clean a room.

Or TFA is massively overstating the research and the concept and even robotics.

I don't know what's worse: being blown out of the sky with explosives or having to stay in Phoenix.

I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?

Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):

NCWIT senior research scientist Catherine Ashcraft cites the 2008 Harvard Business Review study "The Athena Factor," which found that "56% of technical women leave their private sector jobs by mid-career," she said. "But 75% continue to work full-time, and approximately half of these continue to work in technical occupations.

Check my math, okay?
100 tech women
56% leave the private sector (56 in this example)
75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example)
~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)

So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.

What's the percentage of men who leave tech in mid-career? How does that compare to the 35% for women?

In her position as a professor of computer science at Union College, Barr found contextualizing computer science classes led to an increase in female enrollment.

I don't mean to sound mercenary here, but isn't "money" a major motivating factor? Paying the mortgage and such?

I'm reminded of the old joke:
"What famous event happened in 1732?"
"George Washington was born."
"Very good. Now what famous event happened in 1743?'
"George Washington became 11 years old."

It must be an old joke alright, cuz I've never heard it, and it ain't funny.

Correct me if I'm wrong but... would you happen to be rooting for India by any chance?

Because instead of holding corporations to their promises and showing them who owns the tanks, governments in the west have spent the past 10 years selling themselves to the cheapest bidder, with treaties allowing corporations to sue governments if they dare pass laws that impact profits.

Sometimes I wish we had a king with a big ego, who'd on as much as the proposal of such a treaty arrest all those corporate bigshots and hang them publicly.

Not that I had any trust in them anyway.

Blu-Ray, and indeed any modern optical storage, is very short-lived precisely because it's designed to be cheap. The laser disks used to store the Doomsday Project in Britain were still readable after 20 years. Modern optical storage decays typically within 5. Less, as the density goes up. And failures take out far larger percentages of the storage.

Magnetic tape is still the only trusted long-term backup medium. I wouldn't suggest it for something like Facebook purely because of seek times, but it's hard to think of any viable alternative.

With Blu-Ray, to guarantee to avoid complete disk loss, you'd have to be re-archiving the entire archive annually. That adds an enormous invisible cost to the project. They're not going to do that. Which means there's guaranteed loss of backups. How much depends on the exact storage conditions but it won't be pretty.

As for better ability to withstand conditions, it again comes down to the nature of the storage. Optical disks are highly vulnerable to a lot of things that hard drives are not. Overall, optical storage usually performs very badly in comparison, as the things hard drives are vulnerable to are cheaply avoided but the things optical storage can be attacked by are usually a lot harder to deal with.

I'm sure you're aware that none of the above formats (tape included) are considered "archival quality" - they just don't have the sort of durability required by that categorization. No known digital format does and there's nothing you can do to stabilize them. It's a big research area. For now, tape is considered the only method that is economic and durable, with the lowest loss of data per failure.

They often do. Before, they always did. Absolutely standard practice.

It would be better if the government wouldn't buy anything, even from vendors of vendors, without full accounting. If you can game the system with shells, you might as well not have a system.

Having said that, there's a lot of creative billing because of the specifics of how the paperwork is done, and there's a lot of creative bidding where costs are deliberately deflated or ignored (all for the very best of reasons, I'm sure) with the upshot that the actual cheapest bid isn't necessarily the one that's cheapest on paper, and where actual costs can be 2-3 times the provisional guesstimates.

And, no, contractors actually don't charge a lot. People get out of government work and into purely private enterprise not because the jobs are better (they're usually far worse) but because the pay can be double. That's why government contractors get such a bad image. That's not where the talent pool is. The "get up and go" got up and went. The brain drain is not pretty.

If government wanted people with skills doing the skilled jobs required, they need to outbid the Googles of the world. They need talent with the calibre to get the job done right. The first time. Talent that doesn't have fighter pilots blanking out from lack of oxygen because they actually bothered to design things that work. Talent that doesn't have glass-cockpit aircraft carriers dead in the water because of a division by zero error in a Windows application.

The starting price needs to be higher. Much, much higher. Not only to be realistic, but to be realistic with the people needed to MAKE it realistic.