Our closest cousins among the great apes sure do as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Well, ya, picking "off site" as the next office in your building would not be so good. :)

I knew one place in an area that was prone to rather bad weather, and their "off-site" choice was a guy's house about 10 miles from the primary site. Sure, it sounds good if the building burns down. Not so good if the area is flooded. His response was something to the effect that his house was 10 feet higher above sea level, so it was "safe".

That didn't matter. The tapes they were backing up to were never checked. They had no disaster recovery procedure in place, and when the day came that they needed to recover from a tape, they found out it hadn't actually recorded anything in years. Oops.

Sometimes being in the same country isn't really a good thing. If your primary site was Kiev, and the backup site was Vladivostok, things could have gotten touchy during that whole Soviet Union collapse thing.

We like to think the same can't happen here, but just as easily we could find that New York and Los Angeles end up in two distinct countries, possibly with other countries in between. I guess worrying about tax records from 1986 wouldn't be such a big deal then.

Truly spoken by someone with a seven digit ID. Anything about dinosaurs or related kin is definitely News for Nerds and as such is Stuff that Matters to many of us who wouldn't have seen it otherwise. Now, get off my lawn.

Exactly. You can't defend against every threat. The best you can do is go with redundancy. The chances of one site being destroyed by fire, flood, tornado, or loss to burglary is slim. The chances of 2, 3, or 10 sites all simultaneously suffering the same fate is very very slim.

I didn't even know FlightAware had a program like their ADS-B FlightFeeders I checked their map, and I'm a bit farther North in my area than the nearest feed, and there's a large gap to the next.

I have some questions for you. Hopefully you read this. What services accept hobbyist input, besides the ones in the article? Is there hardware you recommend for cheap and reliable?

I only took a quick look through, so I have more reading to do. Is there a software that reports to multiple services? Like Cumulus for my PWS reports to 5 plus two of my own personal feeds.

I've had a weather station up for a few years, and it's been feeding off to APRS/CWOP/FindU, MetOffice.gov.uk, PWS Weather, Weather Underground, Weather Underground, and my own twitter feed and web site. It's nice putting up a resource that can be useful to everyone. As I understand it, that data is in turn aggregated by major weather services to give better weather reporting and forecasting. It helps the weather stations report with resolution down to "It's raining on X street, but Y street is still dry."

It's also useful so family and friends can check on the weather here. Not just "some reporting station within 50 miles, here", but "right at his damned house, here". When I'm away from home, I can check the weather there, so I know what I'm going home to.

It would actually have the opposite effect. Rather than willingly taking on co-conspirators, a would-be attacker is more likely to be paranoid of everyone and not let anyone know his plans.

That brings us full circle back to the "He was a nice guy. Very quiet. Kept to himself. He didn't leave the basement much. We were really surprised to hear about [some action] on the news."

Without co-conspirators who turn on him, or accidentally trusting investigators as co-conspirators, or getting caught buying supplies, that makes them much harder to find until the attack happens.

I'm not saying that investigators instigating someone who could be an attacker, into actually doing an attack in a horribly flawed way (like a bomb made of 2000 pounds of dirt) is a good thing. I don't know everything that happened. I've only seen a few news reports on this one. If he really was the instigator and the investigators just provided some technical "assistance" in making a dud bomb, that was probably a good thing.

If they just picked a random target with little interest, and convinced him that he must make the dud bomb so they can bust him in a terrorist plot, that's something else entire, and they will get bitchslapped by the courts for it.

Hopefully, the said trapped newbie programmer will give up on complaining at the door rather quickly.

And, yes, you're correct, that was suppose to be "or". As they won't find a dehumidifier, soda, ice, or fruit, most of those arguments won't matter.

The finest mechanical lock pick isn't much use against an electroncially operated solinoid acting as a deadbolt.

I think you over-thought a joke. ... unless those are what are being yelled at you by a child behind the aforementioned door. :)

"The Kanji isn't that bad, once you learn it."

Aye, there's the rub.

Mostly, but there is a significant Latin influence in Germanic languages, and Gaelic languages as well, and thus the Latin influence comes from pretty much every side. Much of the distinctively Greek influence is from Gaelic.

Give the kid a computer, and programming book.
Install an electronic lock on the door with an interface to the computer.

Give them simple instructions.

Write a program to unlock the door.

If you get out, you can eat again.

If you can't, you will die in this room.

A person typically dies without water in 7 days, and without food in 14 days.

Good luck.

Some were over telegraph wires too. I like this story.

Atkins continued to call Cuba and finally came back the words, clear and distinct: "I don't understand you."

With those words, international voice communication began.

... and Verizon is still asking "can you hear me now."

... and this guy keeps answering the calls. I feel his pain.

I'd be willing to wager that intelligence monitoring of international phone calls started right about the time international phone calls were first available.

This article says the first trans-Atlantic calls was in 1927.

This article says government wiretaps started in the 1860s.

So Gaia banged her little sister and made the moon? I assume rule 34 has already been satisfied for this, right?

You're probably better off. Working for the big Silicon vendors is over rated. You can make a six figure income working for a small firm, as well, without the hype and hyperbole.