In November, some guy at the local mall went to several shops and asked the young women on staff to help him find stuff on lower racks. He then took some "upskirt" pictures with his camera phone. When he got noticed, he ran out of the mall.

Police reports in December give the follow up. Mall security went back to the cameras and found the guy. They tracked him outside the mall running to his car. The parking lot camera got his license plate number. License plate number was sent to the local police, who picked him up at home.

I have mixed feelings about the 'all cameras, all the time' thing. On the one hand: "good - they got the creepy guy." On the other hand, I'm also now REALLY aware that if I decide to leave a passive-aggressive note on the windshield of a guy who parks right up against my door, I could likely expect a visit from his friend-of-a-friend who works in a local police department.

There are some reports that while it was finished in that last invasion, the library was already pretty much dead from budget cuts and infighting long before then. http://io9.com/the-great-library-at-alexandria-was-destroyed-by-budget-1442659066

Sounds similar to some of the struggles in the US.

Arggh - qualification - The "Lawyers, politicians and lobbyists" have no souls.

They have no souls - we'll have to select the clergy to send based on their own merits.

When someone comes and says we want to take everything you have and enslave you then just say "okay."

I know this was somewhat in jest, but I'd like to point out the next step. After they've enslaved you and they decide to expand their operations, they hand you a gun and say "you're in the army now". Disagree and be subjected to things worse than dying. At least, that's how it's worked for thousands of young boys in Africa.

It seems like the phrase "government money" is dropped in here just to bait arguments. Was there any doubt it was government money? If it were private money, would that be a problem? Wouldn't it be a different problem? Wouldn't "public funds" or "a state/federal grant" have been the same or more accurate?

From TFA: "The program is being funded primarily through a $540,000 federal grant, with a small match from the local governments." TFA actually has a lot of other good 'geeky' detail, like "3-5% of traffic [is already] broadcasting in discoverable mode".

I feel like someone is trying to raise the "oh, the waste!" card.

c) were guaranteed backpay

Actually, the only "guarantee" on the backpay was that they got it the LAST time we had a shutdown. It could just have easily been written to not include it. Add onto that the fact that many people live check-to-check (or near enough) and things could have gotten REALLY BAD for your friends if this had gone on more than a month or two.

Nothing sucks like eating into your savings, putting as much as you can on credit, and then trying to pull money out of your retirement fund. Even with backpay, you're down quite a bit.

No to USB storage, it defeats part of the point of having a RAID.

Unless you're supporting a fairly large local user base, software RAID over USB should be fine with a decent CPU and RAM behind it. That would also give you portability to another machine if the existing one dies (being tied to a specific chipset for hardware RAID can be a dead-end.)

There are a fair number of older Atom-based laptop/netbooks that would fall into this category; you probably can get a used one for nearly free, and just stick more RAM in it. Some of the older benchmarking I've seen (about ten years ago) showed software RAID only using 5-10% CPU. And unless you're using SSD, I'm pretty sure that processors have improved faster than disks have.

Since it's planned for a NAS , you're likely to be network-constrained anyway, so the speed aspect of RAID may be lost. I've got a single Atom netbook hooked to a couple of external USB enclosures, and I spend MUCH more time waiting for network than anything else.

If it makes it any easier for the MPs, I'm sure that Google would just be willing to block off the UK instead.

Based on some unpleasant experiences with a USB printer that had a neat internal short, my impression is that a device has to be really nasty to just die when subjected to excessive attempted current draw by a peripheral.

I've killed one "iHome" and nearly killed another when trying to recharge various devices.

In one case, I put a completely dead "iPod Classic" in the top dock and after an hour noticed a nasty electrical smell coming out of it. It also was no longer was charging and wouldn't play any audio. Unplugging and waiting a few days, then trying again, resulted in no-go. I disassembled it but didn't see anything visibly wrong. Oddly enough, these older iHomes were DESIGNED for the iPod Classic.

Later, plugged an iPad 1 into the USB port of another iHome and noticed the funny smell again pretty quickly. I unplugged and everything seemed to be OK, but wasn't about to break another one.

I saw this on the Jetsons. George Jetson goes to work, pushes three buttons, and goes right back home.

What we've seen over the past 50 years is a growth in per capital GPD, much of it due to automation. This should have led to more pay for less work, or same pay for less work. However: the median income has held steady while the "top 0.1%" has taken off. Instead of everyone working 10 hour days and getting a livable wage as the efficiency would indicate, we have people working 40-50 hour weeks for less money, while a select few get a LOT more for it - effectively getting thousands of hours of income for each week of work. The tying of insurance and other benefits to a floor in minimum hours of work made this condition worse. I know of many people, parents and artists mostly, who would LOVE to have a professional job of 20-30 hours/week and are even willing to take proportionally lower pay to get it, but our current (US) system doesn't allow it.

Robots taking jobs isn't a bad thing - there's less work to do overall. If there are fewer hours of work to go around, then either everyone works fewer hours for the same pay, or... a few people work "full-time" and everyone else gets shafted.

Quite a few sci-fi books have looked at this. I think Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" visited a future where our protagonist worked at a junkyard where they took brand-new, off-the-lot cars and crushed them. The car builders had full-time work - the crushers had full-time work, too. That's messed up.

Ah, yes. There was a fire several days after the crash test. Chevy also indicated that the crash-testers failed to have the battery inspected after the testing as recommended in the owner manual. In the end, Chevy built a box around the battery, and the testers learned something new about electric cars - "read the manual".

That was a fast slashdotting. Running on DSL? Isn't there a way for Slashdot to test these sites first?

Or, maybe Slashdot can post the CoralCDN link for the article instead of (or alongside) the regular link?

I know, there are plug-ins, GreaseMonkey and other ways of doing it, but on the user side.

http://www.coralcdn.org/

From TFA:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which runs the Service, has asked for funding that would increase that supercomputing power even more...

In our current political 'climate', I don't see that happening. Things seem to be run by a group of people who disbelieves all science, and another group who thinks that all government spending is bad, and a significant overlap between them.

As a sibling post has said, we've got enough trouble getting them to pay for replacing dying weather satellites.

All while trying to kill student loans and a health care plan which both MAKE MONEY, all in the name of saving money.

Ported to another carrier in less than two hours, got enough data with equivalent minutes for ~$20/Month cheaper to not worry, and haven't looked back. If they had worked with me as a loyal customer I would still be with them, and it's stupid... it's much much MUCH more cost effective to keep a good customer than it is to try and get a new one.

So: who did you go to?