The moral of this story is:
1) The TSA and assorted related three letter agencies don't give a crap about due process or warrants anyways
2) If you're travelling through the USA (into, out of, or stoppover in), either don't bring any electronics at all, or only bring freshly wiped stuff with absolutely no personal data on them. Blob up your personal files into a passworded file somewhere on the 'net that you can download when you get where you're going, and don't carry the URL for it on your person.

3) Encrypt your hard drive, make sure to shut down before walking through security, and remember "I do not recollect" was good enough for Reagan.

Where does the shit go ? Do they have a place for two more months' worth of crap ? I mean - seriously...

I predict HuffPo will tell us how awesome that is, too.

Mum has passed away, and I miss her sorely.

Does AOL still exist ?? WTF ?

There sure are. Just read the /. comments on anything climate-related. You ain't gonna believe your eyes.

Ceci n'est pas un password.

I said nothing about coming doomsday. Further down on this page, I am explicitly stating as much, and am proposing a solution. For a problem that, yes, we do have.

Develop and industrialize at large scale a clean way ( solar ! ) to produce massive amounts of hydrogen, and a safe way to store it. Convert from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Now. Convert from coal to solar for electrical power generation, with hydrogen buffers and arrays of fuel cells as storage and back-up. Now. I am not a "help, the world is going to end" - screamer. I am simply stating the obvious.

of climate change deniers.

Of course, we're not going to do anything about the problem. Of course not.

In particular with regards to gender roles.

So, time was women were for making babies and raising said babies. Men were for protecting and providing for the women. That was the roles society prescribed and there wasn't a lot of deviation from it. You did see outliers that didn't conform, but by and large that's how things were basically due to necessity. You notice many animals follow a similar structure. It is what is needed for the survival of the species.

Well that all changed, of course. We now have the problem of too many humans, not too few. Also many of the household tasks that used to take a ton of time are now automated (try washing clothes by hand, it is a full time job almost). So society changed. Women didn't need to place their worth in their offspring anymore. They could choose to be what the wanted, do what they wanted, and still be valuable. It wasn't about popping out babies.

Well, this is the other side of that: Men's value now no longer needs to be in providing for a family. They can have a family, or not, they work, they can stay at home, etc, etc. For some men, that means staying single.

However, some people, like this dude, have a problem with that. They think that men should be required to be providers to be considered "real men", should be required to fill a particular role in society.

Or, in some tragic cases, from getting from next back to former.

being that many of them won't pass on their genes, nature will take care of it

Unless of course this is horseshit. Video games aren't new, porn definitely isn't new. Both have been around and easy enough to get for your average middle aged man that we would have already witnessed this social breakdown. Yet our genes carry forth, my children's schools are over capacity and building out. The desire to play video games or look at porn as an alternative to genuine social interaction has *always* been there. At the same time, most of us realize it's synthetic, the potato chip of the interaction (not to mention sexual) world. If anything video games and the internet are recreating the social isolation that used to be far more common when there were few people scattered farther from each other, and the best choice you had was writing a letter. As far as I'm concerned, being able to retreat into our heads more is a positive step forward, allowing us to defeat the lock-step committee approach to thinking we have depended on more heavily in the past 50 years, and allowing individualism a chance to reign again.

There is only the perception that these things are new, and that perception is useful to get funding.

In the 80s and 90s. X terminals and the like. Sooner or later the users want their power back. It will be interesting to see what happend this time around.

Not surprisingly, we neither trust our web browser, the company providing the software, nor the network it all operates on. The majority of things I use my PC for, I am not ready to release to "the cloud".

While I'm glad that hollywood starlets think the cloud is safe enough for nudes, all that proves pretty thoroughly it's not safe for anything important.

I develop on a Lenovo laptop, which ( only ) has an SSD. Anytime I get something done I consider of "historic importance" ( which may simply be simply be a file added to a project, a new method added to a class, an enum having gotten a new value, an interface's signature changed ) I do a commit to version control, with a relevant comment. Version control lives on a server with spinning disks ( RAID-5 ). That server "backs up" to another server - with spinning disks - by rsync, once per hour. THAT server gets backed up once a week.

The build server uses two SSDs in RAID-0, and gets its input from the version control server.

So my single point of failure is the VC server's RAID controller.... Yes, it would be better to have that RAID-5 array mirrored, by RAID-1. to another RAID-5 array. It would take an entirely new server to realize that, sadly enough. I still have to come up with a better idea, though. Not being dependent, in any way, on SSDs for business continuity is already an achievement in and by itself. Or so I believe.

It boils down to

1) not being dependent upon SSDs

2)Moving dependency upon SSDs away to dependency upon other hardware, namely RAID controllers....