Still more reliable than an optical disc. The real backup is on RAID6

RAID isn't backup.

Maybe it never tried.

That and also more importantly: because nature's idea of "better" is almost never the same as our idea of "better." I think it's wonderful that the performance example that they used, happened to be binding to cancer cells. If cancer doesn't illustrate the vast gulf between us and it, I don't know what does!

Getting a college degree, you actually learn something.

I've run into more than a few people who have made it through college quite uncontaminated by knowledge.

I'd argue that there are even some college curricula that will leave their students less prepared for the real world than if they had just gone straight into the burger-flipper and barista jobs that are the only types of work they'll ever land outside academia. You can identify most of them by the presence of the word "studies" at the end.

The drivers in California aren't necessarily bad, but they are much more aggressive and more likely to do something stupid out of impatience.

California drivers never heard of lane discipline. They think nothing of (as Denis Leary might put it) "driving really slow in the ultra-fast lane," or of passing the aforementioned assholes on the right.

grep "terror" /var/log/mail.log

The article left out that terrorists will be required to send from a hostname that has the word "terror" in it. Failure to do so, is a violation and will be punished!

It sounds like the project you want [someone] to start, does this: reads a config file, looks at what modules ended up actually getting loaded, and then enables/disables config options, writes a new config file. Then your subsequent compiles can be faster and your /lib/modules can be smaller.

I suspect there are two problems for them in being too clear. First, I suspect they can't guarantee to reuse every cartridge - some of them will be damaged or contaminated, I imagine; second, they won't want to validate third party cartridge refills by admitting they actually do refills themselves! I recycle my Lexmark cartridges by mailing them back (with a prepaid shipping label they include with every new cartridge); my guess is they will refill and reset perfect-condition cartridges, recondition damaged or older ones, and recover the raw materials from unusable ones, but they won't want to be too open about the details. The "new" cartridges aren't exactly cheap, admitting they're sometimes actually refills would probably hurt sales.

How is using blu ray cheaper than hard drives?

3 TB will fit on 120 25-GB BD-Rs. At 40 cents each, that's $48 in media costs. If you do like I do and reserve 20% for dvdisaster error-recovery data, you're still only looking at $60.

A 3 TB WD Green will set you back $95. (Want to spring for the NAS-rated Red drives instead? That'll be $119. Their absolute cheapest 3 TB hard drives are a couple of models from Seagate and Toshiba at $90 each.)

The trick is getting BD media into the terabytes and getting it at a price point where it is decently affordable. For example, a 100 GB BDXL disk is $65, but it should be about 10% of that price in order to be a viable backup medium.

My last spindle of 25 GB BD-Rs cost me maybe $0.60 each or so. I could drive down to Fry's right now and pick up a spindle for about $0.80 each. A 4x increase in storage density isn't worth a two-order-of-magnitude increase in price. I would be surprised if Farcebook didn't arrive at the same conclusion.

Going by the numbers from the video in TFA, they're getting over 10k BD-Rs in a rack. While the basic concept isn't new, they appear to have developed it to a considerably higher density.

If they are storing their photos on facebook, they are doing it wrong.

FTFY. I can kinda understand posting stuff to Farcebook so others can view it, but using it as your primary storage medium? That's at least a dozen different kinds of wrong.

ALL AF bases and the majority of the the other services did away with base stickers several years ago and now everyone in the vehicle over the age of 16 has to display a valid Government issued ID to get on base.

All? I'd swear last time I accompanied my father (retired AF) on base at either Nellis or Wright-Patterson, the skycop just asked for his ID, not mine. It might be different overseas, and it's been different here at various times in the past, but unless they've changed things yet again since this past December, they most likely only care about the driver's ID.

make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front

Waitaminute, Congressman. Why would I fund your campaign, if you're not going to vote to give the public's money to me? I thought we had a deal: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

any project or developer that uses it is going to need that backup repository at github anyway

You should have backups of all your projects to media that you control in any case. Google has a track record of winding down stuff it doesn't want to continue (Reader, anyone?), but if you're betting on any source-code repo to (1) not go tits-up (as Google Code might) and (2) not jump the shark (as SourceForge has), you're putting your code at risk. Git, in particular, makes it dead simple to clone a repo and all its history in a relatively compact form, so spare a few GB on a server you control for a mirror of everything you put on GitHub (or whatever).

....and not a word about TrueCrypt? is there any commonly used alternative or people just don't care?

I migrated to FreeOTFE right around the time that the TrueCrypt developers said people should stop using it, about a year ago. I haven't had much reason to migrate back (though TrueCrypt's hidden volume feature was nice to have).