Why the desire to scold people for attempting to fix a broken HDD? Even the referenced article seems to want to underscore the idea that it's impossible. I personally have recovered data from failed drives (including modern ones) using the freezer, the hammer, the heat, the platter swap, the PCB swap and just removing the cover and freeing a stuck component. I've failed but more often I've succeeded. Clearly the people shouting about it being impossible are not using real-world experience to base their opinions on. For most people the $2-10K recover fee is simply out of the question and in their case at least attempting, though increasingly extreme measures, to get the drive to spin up one last time is the most rational choice since the only alternative is to toss it in the trash.

The Internet wasn't invented by the "Internet Protocol" (though the name is pretty catchy) let alone a lower-level transport protocol like Ethernet. If we honor Ethernet then we might as well honor the Telegraph and Ponies and Pigeons. The reality is that at a certain time people started actually wanting to interact in a massively distributed, asynchronous and autonomous way and they used whatever was handy. Nobody "invented" it.

Does a privately funded scientific facility produce better science than a public one? For one thing, if a "science news" conglomerate owns its own facility, won't it naturally be biased towards reporting on discoveries made by itself?

Correct, 38 megapixels, still peanuts in the world of gigapixel astronomy cameras (Pan-Starrs, HyperSuprime-Cam, etc) but the deep-depletion E2V CCD is in a different class than an SLR CMOS senor and a lot of interesting things could be done with it. Sometimes an instrument is so expansive it precludes risky science but something this size could be used for a lot of interesting things. Especially interesting is that it's a single chip. Most CCDs that size are mosaics but this one is a single massive chip, apparently the size of an entire wafer. that means they don't have to dither (take several pictures offset from each other) to fill in the gaps between the chips which means it can take full-frame images faster than a mosaic camera.

Comparing a hypothetical science instrument to an old grade of consumer device is poor hype. A better comparison is the 1.4 billion pixel camera on Pan Starrs that has been on the sky for two years now or the 340 megapixel CFHT-Megacam that has been on the sky for over nine years. If LSST is delayed much longer, a 3.4 billion pixel astronomy camera will sound like 8 megapixels in an SLR does today: obsolete.

Essentially: how to use an open-source license for something created within a closed-source framework? Clearly it's possible and it happens often with code developed for a closed-source language (like IDL or Matlab for example) but Sharepoint is not really a programming language and I don't know if your creative work can be extracted in a way that it can be licensed separately. I think that's what other comments were getting at by suggesting that you create meta-code like a how-to. That's probably a good idea if Sharepoint does not let you extract your site as an unencumbered expression of your creative work. I think liability or potential for profitable derivative works are pretty much non-issues for something like this but a GPL is a good idea if you can get your work into a form that you have the right to license.

I didn't find any discussion of what may have caused the lack of randomness. Presumably it was a particular implementation on a particular platform of RSA key generation and presumably they know what it is. I would be interested to know too.