I liked the part about the triangular PC case.

Life imitates art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Gets me every time.

I'm following the E-CAT stories because I am really curious how Rossi is managing to fool everyone over and over again. It seems like everyone knows it's a scam, but nobody knows how he's actually pulling it off. That is the interesting part: I want to find out HOW he's doing it.

"FOOLS! I have invented a USB device which can collect votes from the Internet and drive a knife through your heart!"
http://achewood.com/index.php?...

It also entails all of the safety issues of an airplane; the platonic ideal of a "flying car" is as safe and intuitive as a road car.

They'll never top such an epic story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

By the time the bag of garbage is offered as evidence in court, the compostable portion will likely have shrunk to below 10% by volume.

I favor the solution of everyone on Earth living in one mega-city the size of Texas: http://joshblackman.com/blog/2...

I recall hearing a few stories about amateur astronomers and/or teams detecting exoplanets. See this previous Slashdot article, for example:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Is this the kind of thing that you're interested in?

If anyone on Slashdot has made a major career shift into the sciences later in life, I would be very interested to hear that story.

I once had a RAID5 array with 4 disks on my home computer. Two disks were connected to the motherboard, and two were connected to a SATA PCI card because the MoBo didn't have enough SATA slots. One day, the PCI card had a little hiccup, and two of the 4 disks got out of sync. The array was toast. Note that my RAID5 array contributed to this failure -- it would not have happened if I had not been running RAID (and if I hadn't made a poor configuration choice). Fortunately, I had a backup.

RAID is great for protecting mission-critical systems from HDD failure when uptime is a major concern -- but it can also cause more problems than it solves. Now, my business server uses RAID but my home computer does not.

For my office data, I have an external HDD that uses rsnapshot to create incremental snapshots every hour, day, week, and month. The server data is also mirrored to each desktop in the office, and my laptop, daily. For offisite backups (other than my laptop), I use duplicity to backup to Amazon S3, which costs about $3 per month. I realize that there are some security issues with this setup.

I store my offsite backups at my office. To do this effectively, I use three backup HDDs. One sits in a SATA dock at home, and mirrors my data every hour. The other two are at the office. Every so often, I take one of the HDDs home and stick it in the dock so that it updates to the latest version of my data, then I bring it back to the office. Next time, I take the other HDD home. This ensures that one of the HDDs is always offsite, and all three of the HDDs are never in the same place.

The obvious downside to this is that I have to remember to carry my HDDs back and forth. I haven't done it for a few months now. I suppose that an automated and encrypted rsync solution would be superior, but I honestly don't really care about my data very much.

This. I'm using mine outdoors right now, and the display is really suffering from reflection. This is unfortunate, because it's the ideal machine for me to use if I want to take my work outdoors on a pleasant afternoon. It's still usable, but less so at certain angles. And it helps if you wear a black shirt.