Nothing is new under the sun.

The same ancient rule still applies: Caveat Emptor.

If you throw money at someone with no contractual guarantee in return, there is simply no protection for your money. It's still your money - throw it at whomever you want. But don't expect sympathy because you "lost" it if the person wastes it, eats it, or somehow fails to execute what they said that that would.

As kickstarter started generating large sums of money the conmen and shills naturally have taken notice.

...what if they collided, and both missions suddenly failed?

OK, I'd have to admit that would be kind of hilarious (setting aside the decades of work and hundreds of millions of $$ invested).

I live in the exurbs of a major Metro Area (Minneapolis/St Paul).
The *best* I can get is 20mbs, at exorbitant prices. The best normal price option is 10mbps, which was the very best possible residential until about last March.

So you're saying we should "give" everyone 10mbps because that's so horrible?

That, simply, is nonsense.

No, no Bono. You're confused.

"Music that cannot be pirated" != "Music that won't be pirated"*

*because it sucks donkey balls

Those foolish over-65s.
They voted reflexively, after reviewing trivial issues like:
- the SNP's assurances that Scotland would be a member of NATO and the EU were completely wrong (both the EU and NATO rebuffed the 'automatic membership' that the SNP was asserting they were entitled to)
- losing their currency (The British public was 2/3 against letting Scotland keep the pound. The Exchequer had said no, and most economists said the 'Sterling Union' proposed by the SNP was a stupid idea)
- The departure of most major Scottish business southward - hell, even the Royal BANK OF SCOTLAND was leaving if "Yes" won the vote...
- SNPs domestic agenda that pretty much amounted to a Socialist Utopia funded entirely on North Sea oil that they felt they would automagically inherit without contest (never mind revenues have been falling there for a decade or more)

Essentially the SNP's platform was "if everyone does what we say should happen, with the most optimistic interpretation of everything possible, nobody disagrees, and Britain pays for everything, it'll all be hunky-dory...probably" was an exercise in extended political farce that only had currency because Cameron (stupidly) gave it credibility.

Let's remember too that the referendum was NON-BINDING. There was promised a referendum, and then "we would act in the best interests of the Scottish people"....that's all.

Maybe - as has been abundantly proved in many other contexts - the 16-18s that got to vote were easily swayed by emotions, having not thought through the issues seriously and more likely the 65s just barely countered them?

FWIW, I think this would be a brilliant time to do as some conservative MP suggested and re-write the 1707 Act of Union to enfranchise each 'kingdom' within the UK equally, and no longer allow a bunch of whingers in Glasgow to play the tune.
I admire much about Scotland, but this referendum seemed to be playing to their stupid side.

Except that doesn't actually seem to matter.
People in the most godforsaken areas of the planet, well past their carrying capacity, continue to have children like it's going out of style.

If you claim "people can't live in that dense a space because there's not enough water" I'd point to the Sahel.

Isn't this sort of a 2014 version of the phrase "Let them eat cake!"

Parallel statements:
Poor people shouldn't have to ride the bus, we should all just give them cars - and not crappy econoboxes, something nice.
We should give homeless people luxury condos on the seaside.

I mean, if you're talking about a SUBSIDIZED service, shouldn't it BE subpar? Asserting otherwise is to say, in effect, "people who can't pay for stuff, should get stuff as good as everyone else"....no? Why, then, would anyone pay for anything?

Last I heard, the catastrophe FUD from the AGW ecomarxists was that mostly everyone's going to die from it anyway.

So really, most of them won't.

You link one paper from Harvard on "why terrorism doesn't work".
I'll refute that by pointing to:
1) 8 guys sneaking onto planes with boxcutters and crashing them into buildings is terrorism
2) 15000 psychos taking over chunks of country with astonishing brutality is not terrorism (as referenced in that paper), and 'thousands of psychos taking crap over' HAS worked* repeatedly through human history; from the "Barbarian invasions" of Roman times, to the Huns, the Mongols)

*maybe not in the longest scales, but certainly enough to enmiserate a generation or three.

Fdd isn't a coding thing, it's a shitty-manager thing.

And that's in every business everywhere.

I might have said that as coding drops down the labor ladder (ie the margins become tighter, profits less, that such muggy be more common...but at least in my case, some of the tiniest post little companies I worked for had some great managers, and the great wealthy ones had more assholes....So no, I'd guess that it's universal.

...it won't have a single thing I need.

Is that irony or coincidence?

So just to be clear, then:

Ice Forms: global warming
Ice Melts: global warming
Dog crapped on my sidewalk: global warming
My shoe is untied: global warming

Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time.
Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.

Personally:
- back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or
- just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' things forever just becomes silly. If you have the only unique recording of some substantial historical event, that's one thing. If it's your child's first steps, understand that while that might be important to you and maybe even to them, nobody else cares about it. Really. While losing it would be sad, it wouldn't be tragic. After all, there are billions of person-years of lives that have vanished, unrecorded, and life goes on.