I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.

Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.

The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.

The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.

It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.

Ah, but that's just the regular bureaucracy, you can add another order of magnitude if you want a military grade hammer.

The default is to charge you the fee whether you have a tuner in your household or not. This may be less ridiculous now that they provide a lot of other services, but it was also true back when they didn't.

The guy in the story says that there were some wireless options but they were extremely expensive. Just fine them the cost of the wireless service until they install the cable.

Why, indeed?

What you use is noscript, and then you allow only the scripts necessary to get the portal working, and you don't run any flash or java from the portal, etc etc. And you keep your browser updated. It's not rocket surgery. It's not foolproof, but it's best to act as little like a fool as possible.

I'd be more concerned about a catastrophic software failure. Modern drone autopilots have fairly astounding limp home ability, you ought to be able to crash them in predefined locations fairly reliably. Unless, of course, something goes batshit with the electronics and/or software...

A romantic notion, but incorrect. Private fleets account for 80% of trucks and over 50% of OTR tonnage shipped.

I use Keepass backed up a cloud storage drive and my home server. Even if I lose everything on me I can still go to any random computer and access the database file, and open it with a quick download of Keepass. In the event that I lost everything at the airport I'm sure I could scrounge give minutes of computer time from somewhere.

Fine them enough to bring in that line from the telco, installation and service. If that means they're paying for a fiber pull so you can get a fractional T3, so be it. It makes it a simple cost decision. I'm tired of blatantly fraudulent coverage maps, too.

Sounds good. Let's set the fine to be twice the cost of installing the line.

So the law says they can't charge you more because you're on a line which was installed under this program.

Australia is a common law country, right? Is it even possible for them to put you in a position where discontinuing an action is illegal, effectively forcing you to do it? Obviously they passed the law, but would it stand up in court?

I'm trying to think of some legal basis to challenge it. What if the canary required signing with two PGP keys to be considered valid, and one of those keys was held by someone outside Australia? The victim in Australia wouldn't be able to force them to sign the canary, but might still be found guilty for setting up such a mechanism in the first place.