Be careful relying on DVD's for archival. I ripped all our discs a couple years ago to ease access and found that for a few I'd waited too long. Disks do de-laminate and sometimes moisture and fungus gets in. (The Pirate Bay was very handy to recover the few discs that went bad. Was able to recover not only the movies but the DVD extras as well. Thanks Pirate Bay.)

... out of hand, consider that for every other species extant on this planet the singularity already happened: It was us, humans. To think that it can't happen to us is simple hubris.

... when GNU Emacs had auto-saving and backup versioning at any keystroke granularity you liked thirty years ago. Next we celebrate the boon of split screen editing.

In the face of hard radiation life gets smaller, not larger. Expect really hardy bacteria, not giant reptiles.

... that we have courts to redress grievances so that people can go there instead of, you know, forming a mob and lynching somebody. Does this mean that General Mills is now OK with the ropes and torches and all that whenever someone gets sick or thinks they got sick from a General Mills product? Fantastic.

What does Snowden care about free speech rights in his country of exile? The important aspect for him is that while the U.S. might drop a commando team into any Western Hemisphere country to retrieve Snowden and then say "umm, sorry" afterwards, they aren't going to risk that with China or Russia. I'm surprised the U.S. didn't just let Snowden go to Ecuador or Bolivia or wherever and then extract him. I guess that could still happen.

I'm reminded of the Road Runner cartoon where the Coyote paints a stripe that leads off the roadway and into a rock face. Let's hope no one in the Netherlands both enjoys our cartoons and has a mischievous streak.

We're back to where we were in the 1950's

... and honestly nothing of value was lost. Sending people to LEO is about as worthless a goal as sending them to Mars in some flag-planting stunt. Human beings just aren't built for space travel as it currently exists. We should be putting 100% of our efforts into robotics and AI so that radiation-hardened machines can do whatever it is that's still worthwhile to do in space. Then we don't have to waste money on man-rated launchers, waste space and weight for human sustenance and habitation, or waste time and effort designing missions to bring people back alive and sane.

... until the farmer with knowledge of plants and herbs poisons their dumb asses.

There could be some natural reservoir of the virus that was already nearby but is now on the move due to climate change or habitat destruction. Or maybe some unlucky souls found this new vector.

We've lost all tolerance for risk or voluntary harm in the pursuit of a larger objective.

Last month I watched the Sochi Olympics and before that the Winter X Games. People are willing to break their arms, legs and backs and yes, even die for my entertainment, in exchange for little fame. People who climb and die on high mountains pay to suffer. We have no shortage of risk takers. What we lack are any stated objectives worthy of someone putting their life on the line.

Permanent human settlement is the only goal worth someone risking their lives in long term exposure to the hellish conditions of space. Instead of pussy-footing around with more flag planting missions, just say that we are going to do it. If we're not going for that, then we might as well leave it to the robots.

Too bad getting to common sense took eight years.

We didn't need seatbelts back then, neither. Being flung from the backseat into the windshield during sudden stops was a rite of passage when I was a boy. People was just smarter and stronger back in them days.

Well, there is this thing called buffering where you store data for a while so that if you need again it's still available locally. Storing 30 seconds of video on either side of the current position and making it randomly addressible isn't too much to ask. In fact Netflix does do some buffering, but the interface to it is so bad that it hardly matters. A simple seek backward still takes too long.

Netflix doesn't even get rewind right, something my lowly 11 year old TiVo got right on day one. "WTF did he just say?" Hit the instant replay button and jump back 8 seconds. With Netflix it's as if someone there has to get up and change reels any time you want to skip backward.