Exactly. This article has more "thefuck?" in it than almost any I've seen on Slashdot. And they even missed the lede: the Scifi tie-in is obviously the Star Trek DS9 episode "Hard Time". Duh.

But seriously, life without parole (not a thing in the UK? look into it) is pretty severe, prisons are designed to be brutal (far too effective at punishment and far too ineffective at rehabilitation) so unless we want a whole new section of the penal system designed for "extra" punishment of heinous offenders then we should probably be more concerned with rehabilitating the non-heinous offenders before the prison system swallows the government up.

Or more specifically: "I am a better programmer than the idiot asshole who designed this piece of shit [code I happen to be debugging long after he's gone] so naturally the best course of action is to throw it all away and code it from scratch!"

If it's any consolation (i know it's not) they didnt decide on Bluetooth because everyone would sit back and think, "Oh, The king that united the tribes!" They picked it because, like a lot of new things that need to be named, the word "Bluetooth" was otherwise unused and mildly easy to remember (since it's a combination of two ordinary English words). So, yes, Danes have every right to be upset, but then again if you lose sleep over this it's your own fault.

The corrolary:

"I will pick such obvious names for my (variables, functions, methods, etc) that documentation will be unnecessary! Everyone will just get it! And surely, when I come back to fix something later, it will all make just as much sense as it does now!"

When the CBS show "The Good Wife" copied your Glee saga (in the season 5 episode titled "Goliath and David") right down to the Reddit sleuths uncovering the background noise, did you receive credit or compensation? It would be pretty hilarious if that too were blatantly reproduced without permission...

They have a horde of loyal customers who are willing to pay a FEE just to have "exclusive" access to free shipping and some media streaming. What about that needs to be "sustainable", the goal is merely to make people feel compelled to prefer to shop where they have a vested interest (also known as the human nature to "send good money after bad"). Are they collecting as much from the prime fee as it costs them to ship all that crap? Probably not, but that's hardly the point. The question to ask is: would they make more money if prime didn't exist? Meaning, would all those customers who bought with prime have just shopped elsewhere instead? The answer is probably yes, otherwise Amazon would be pulling the plug instead of doubling down and increasing the rate. The last thing they want to do is drive away customers.

You wont find any auctions that have ended in the $50-75 range, the best i can locate in completed auctions that look remotely legit is $200. Still not a huge cost considering whats involved, but not trivial either. For the 20TB point, the LTO4 option ($500 out the door) seems to be about half as expensive as the cheapest raid cage+spinners option ($1000 out the door) and you still have to juggle 20 backup tapes vs just plug it in, let it sync, and then return it to the vault.

LTO4 tapes do seem to hit a good price/capacity point, but where can you find even a heavily used LTO4 drive for $50? Also, LTO4 (or just about any other drive type) isnt going to just plug in to eSATA or USB3; you need a SAS/SCSI adapter plus a PC capable of hosting it, which balloons the cost.

You missed a 0, he has 20,000GB and the cost for glacier is $.01/gb/mo (not including upload charges). So, Glacier would cost him $200 a month or $2400 a year. Not hugely expensive but if you are OK with a quasi-local copy (offline and stored in a fire safe, perhaps) you could do it cheaper for less, after you hit the 1 year mark.

This is exactly the core issue to protecting his data... I would propose what he really needs is a nuclear launch key style interlock that only lets him access his backup array when both keys are present, and give it to a smart friend (along with a shovel) tasked with looking over his shoulder when the key is in use, ready to hit him over the head if he keys in a command involving dd, fdisk, rm -rf, etc.

Lets start from the top: You *can* plug in an external drive, it's called a complete hardware duplicate of your array (or perhaps for space/cost consideration, a single disk based copy held offline and synced regularly). Not hard and not terribly expensive (i would go with this solution personally). Cloud? Yep the bandwidth and storage even on something like Amazon Glacier would be prohibitive to all but the most financially independent geeks. Bluray doesnt hold enough (even at 50gb/disc you need 400 of them, groan). So, tapes? You bet your ass tapes are designed to do exactly this task, why do you think they are still in use? You can get individual tapes at 1/1.5TB, but for a one man operation they are probably going to cost you more than the first solution (offline spinning disks) and they are a pain to manage properly.

Now what is this doing on ask slashdot? A pencil, some scratch paper, and 15 minutes between amazon.com and newegg.com would tell you the prices of every solution. Oh, right, they need a chance to tee up some targeted ads for Carbonite, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.

In slashdot's defense, they did use the *link to the wikipedia page* of wikipediocracy in describing their role. A golf clap is in order.

Border patrol (and just about every other agency with an enforcement mandate) is already exploring UAV use, what we will see eventually is an air war where unauthorized UAVs are simply shot down automatically.

No because making meth good enough for consumption/addiction is hardly a feat of chemical engineering; meth heads will consume actual shit, poison, air, rocks, etc if they thought there was the slightest chance of a buzz.

His exploits obviously color him as a social engineer (hacker alert!!!!!)!!!

If you are a casual technogeek, save yourself about $4000 and just go on AliExpress and buy whatever knicknacks you are interested in straight from Shenzhen. What, did you think they haven't figured out ecommerce? If you do have the chance to visit (i.e. for work), or are really after niche goods/services (in particular, to start your own import business) then certainly its a great place to go. But if you are just looking to get out of the US, don't go to Shenzhen just to browse around Huaqiangbei. There are plenty of other, far far more exhilarating/enlightening/relaxing places to visit in the world.