Actually, it's fairly easily shown that if we continue our current exponential rate of population growth and resource usage, we'll use up the entire Milky Way Galaxy in 2,500 years. That's assuming nonexistent magitech FTL drives which contradict our current fundamental physics theories.

Or, we could stabilise our short-term rapid growth and learn to live on the one accessible habitable world we have, like we did for the past few million years. Our choice.

By the way, any future that has economically viable space colonies in it will also have economically viable greenhouse cities in Antarctica, the Sahara and the Australian outback first. Because they'll be much cheaper to build, require no launch costs, don't have to be perfectly airtight, and you get atmospheric pressure, water and oxygen for free. Also, in the case of war, plague and political tensions, ground-based semi-closed environments will be much less fragile and more survivable than sealed orbital tin cans.

Any space activists keen on setting up some of those first?

Simple: wait 296,000 years for Voyager 2 to reach Sirius.

Oh, did you mean developing faster-than-light technology that will let us send probes to a star within a human lifetime, and with an energy output less than a supernova? We'll get right on that. First up, falsifying General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and String Theory; shouldn't take too long...

Kidding aside, it seems like the 1960s Golden Age of GR was the last fun time; there really was a sense that we could engineer spacetime fabric Real Soon Now. Who knew what those wacky mesons did? Warp drive was just around the corner! But from the 1980s on, fundamental physics became the Science of Nope, You Can't Ever Have That. Science fiction in particular hasn't ever really recovered; it lives it its little parallel universe where the big future dreams of the 1930s live on.

Pray that the data isn't stored in a country that has oil!

YES. This is exactly the problem.

Those of us who understand the tech already understand that Facebook's Newsfeed is not a 'dumb pipe' and that it runs an extremely opaque and proprietary filtering algorithm. We realise that a lot of posts get silently dropped; we constantly switch from 'Top Stories' to 'Most Recent' to try to counteract this. Many of us use Twitter instead and crosspost to Facebook because we know that Twitter tends to deliver all posts rather than silently screen them.

But non-tech-savvy people - our parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts - don't realise this. They think that the posts they see on the Newsfeed are exactly and only what their friends are saying. They think that if they see something with a thousand Likes, it's because their friends like it too. And why wouldn't they? To them, Facebook is a messaging service, not a media service. They know that TV and newspapers filter and select content. But they don't see Facebook as a newspaper. Their prior examples of messaging services are the telephone, post office, and then email - all three systems are ones that place a very high priority, almost a moral imperative, on the message always goes through unchanged without alteration or censorship. If they thought about it - which they generally don't - they'd expect that there was actually something in the user contract that specified this, because hey, isn't that the way things have always been? Isn't there something in the Constitution about freedom of speech? They don't realise just to what extent the Facebook terms and conditions say 'we reserve the right to hide posts from you, and not pass your posts on'. They don't realise that Newsfeed is far more like Rupert Murdoch paper than the Post Office.

That's the scandal here. It's shocking and it should be shocking to all your non-techy, non-cynical friends to see Facebook proudly talking about how they deliberately manipulate people's Newsfeeds to not actually be a representative sample of their actual friends' actual posts.

Keep the focus on that. The scandal is about censorship, free speech, and trust, not the esoterica of experimental protocols. It's important.

It means that the uninfected humans have to shoot it in the head. Or stake it through the heart. And quickly, before things get worse.

Kinda like what Adobe has been trying to do to ColdFusion ever since they acquired it as part of the Macromedia deal.

Considering that Terry Gilliam is still very much alive it might just be because your jokes suck.

Like the last left-leaning government that did more damage to the nation's healthcare, social security, employee protection, financial market regulation and other sectors than the previous conservative government could've ever dreamed during its 16 years of majority?

Even with languages that share a common ancestry, these programs still have trouble when it comes to context, as shown in the following screenshot on the same topic.
http://www.androidcentral.com/...

In this case the software tried to translate "move", which the original text uses in the context of "cancel the lease on your apartment and move to a different address" (German word would be "umziehen") and instead picks the German word "verschieben", which is the translation in the context of "grab and item and push it until it's no longer in spot A but in spot B".
Unless the software can actually factor in the context (as Google's search algorithm often tries to do), Murphy's Law will still have a field day with words that can translate into several different and distinct ones in the other language.

The NSA probably wanted more time to exploit it.

14 billion? That's less than it costs to supply that little adventure in the Iraqi desert with toilet paper!!!

That US lap dog's EU membership has become a cancer that's been festering for decades. Nowadays they're almost nothing beyond that.

Look at what Jim Cameron's brother Mike does for a living. Extreme stuff like that is in the family's blood.

It'll turn out just like how they abandoned Firewire once there was finally enough hardware on the market to even take note of it.

Glad somebody pointed this out. The Forbes writer, and the Slashdot headline and introduction are extremely, and in the case of Forbes intentionally, misleading. Who knows, the numbers may well be true. But to say that "Actual Results were Leaked" is a crock of shit; this is just some Putin-sock-puppet human rights "council" *speculating* on what the true numbers might have been. Sort of funny that his own people are saying this, but not actually informative. Makes you more suspicious of Forbes than anything else.

You could use all 4 SATA ports for HDDs, and install using a USB optical drive or stick when needed (which won't be very often..)