GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

Because this is Slashdot, and it makes him cool.

individuals and businesses, made aware of the risks, can (and are supposed to!) make their own decisions

No, most individuals are at the mercy of whatever their employers decide, even if their employers decide that yes, they need to be at their jobs today even if it means driving in two feet of snow. Yes, they're quite "free" to quite their jobs, in the same sense that you are "free" to move to Somalia if you're unhappy with having a functioning government.

No, they don't. But a lot of academics like to think they do.

Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.

I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).

This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.

You don't follow my logic because it isn't what I said. It's not my logic. It's just something you inferred. "When the economy is bad, communism starts to look better", is not the same as "The economy is bad. Communism will be better. Join the Party with me".

I've got 3 2 TB USB drives (encrypted -- about 700GB free). (1) Main drive with my data. (2) Backup (which get's synced nightly) and (3) one at my mother-in-laws house in a drawer.

Every year I buy a new drive to replace the (1). The old (1) becomes (2), the old (2) becomes (3). And (3) gets wiped and either given to friends/family or ebay. Also, drive (2) and (3) get swapped every week or so the "off site" drive is never more than a week or two out of sync.

I've been following a version of this procedure for 15 years (starting with IDE drive drawers) and increase size as necessary. So far I haven't had a drive completely fail once, although at the tail end of the life cycle of one I was begging to get some SMART errors.

Not only is that obvious on its face, you can see it in the statistics: the more "statist" and regulatory governments have been, the less well economies have done and the more income inequality we've seen.

That's an awful lot of un-quantified stuff. You can have fun measuring these things in oh-so many ways. I propose to measure oppression in Stalins per acre, and economic outcome in chickens per pot. Fair enough? Let's get some real analysis started now...

East coast snow storms are notoriously difficult to predict. I'm not surprised that even with modern technology they still can't get it perfect. In addition to the dynamic nature of the low-pressure circulation interacting with the coast and the gulf stream (like a hurricane) you've got the all-important freezing temperature line. It's even worse than "a line that might shift" though, because if the cold air intrudes under the warm you get freezing rain, not snow.

I grew up in that region (DC area) and it was always like this. I have no envy for those forecasters.

One of my fondest memories is of the 1978 storm. Hit in the afternoon, 2" predicted. 6PM, forecast increased 6-8". Next morning? Most of us had 24", some hit 36". I wonder if modern tech could have done better.

More often than not though, it seemed like DC always got cheated out of snow when I was a kid. Rain, sleet, snow that got rained on and turned into a soggy mess. Beautiful snow that you could play in on your day off was just all too rare.

This issue is at the core of a lot of misunderstandings about security in general I see. People expect to be able to solve security problems by creating a framework of rules. Sometimes they're societal rules (aka laws), sometimes they're software like writing a client that can only access a server in a particular way, and assuming no one can access your server in a way not supported by your client (hint: other people can write code, too).

Writing rules won't keep people intent on harm from flying drones at things they want to damage. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out how to keep those drones from doing damage EVEN WHEN they aren't following the rules.

A Phalanx-style interceptor with beanbags would probably work, and be comically appropriate for a threat posed by glorified toy helicopters.

If they regularly advertise you have to activate via a VPN, it's a pretty good bet they're not a legit reseller.

If the cost of the product is always vastly cheaper than anywhere else, it's a pretty good bet they're not a legit reseller.

Really? Do tell. What are these attacks that have been stopped by mass surveillance and could not have been stopped by good old-fashioned detective work?

Terror attacks are rare in the United States. They are remarkable precisely because they are rare. This is why anti-terrorism powers are overwhelmingly used to investigate non-terrorism offences, and the vast majority of terrorist attacks foiled are ones that they made up.