In some states cities have immunity from being sued, so you don't even have to play the "blame each other game" - just make sure the city winds up with the blame.

I can see a hack that messed up the timing of traffic lights to create a traffic jam, but unless things have changed in the last decade or two, traffic lights in my country have "both way green light detectors" safeties.

If a light detects that it is green and a "conflicting" light is also green, the whole system will reset to a "safe mode" such as a 4-way flashing-red-light.

So, yeah, I think scenarios where a hacker or evil-computer-that-takes-over-the-city that turns the lights to green-in-all-directions is a bit far-fetched.

If I'm wrong, either the traffic engineer who didn't order the safeties put in, the installer who put the wrong thing in, or the manufacturer who didn't build the safeties safe enough needs to be called on the carpet.

Spy vs. Spy.

And dealing with the aftermath of letting them spill into a river or fall into the hands of terrorists would cost less???

Photographs or copies of the front and back of all critical documents and of at least one "monthly statement" of every company you do business with can be kept off-site.

Be careful doing this with your phone though: If you do, dump the photos off of your phone then fill up your phone's memory with something else. Otherwise, if your phone gets stolen someone who has the desire and know-how can "undelete" the phone's memory and, well, that won't be fun.

Your thumbprint and face should be enough to get your Drivers License or state-issued photo-ID replaced.

If you've opened a non-online bank account in the USA in the last few years, your thumbprint is probably on file.

It won't be fast but within a few days you should be able to start reconstructing your life.

Also, if you are in a state where the cops can pull up your drivers license photo in their car, AND if you still look like your photograph, you should be able to prove yourself to their satisfaction on-the-spot. Especially if the car you are driving when you arrive at your smoldering former house is registered to you.

Sure, it might have been exploited while it was a zero-day bug but by the time it made it to /., it was an EX-zero-day bug.

Decades ago there was a "liquid candy" marketed to children that came in small (less than 2 oz. I think) mostly(?)-wax "bottles" that were technically edible.

I'm using "edible" as a euphemism for "non-toxic, but no real taste and other than to gross out your parents or show off to your friends there was no good reason to eat it rather than throwing it away."

Was this practical as a "water bottle"? Not really. Is it "prior art" on any related patents? Possibly, especially against any "broad" claims.

Code war: What the US and the Soviet Union had during the nasopharyngitis outbreaks of the 1950s through the 1980s.

... mission-critical things like banking and providing essential government services should "play it conservatively" and not be at the forefront of technology.

OR, where it makes sense for them to be at the forefront, the "old way of doing things" should be kept around until after the "new" way has proven it is robust enough for the task.

Being "robust enough for the task" means, among other things, not having unacceptable levels of downtime under normal or abnormal-but-common conditions (such as DDOS attacks) and having an acceptable and well-tested contingency plan when the unexpected or expected-but-rare event happens (such as a large earthquake taking out your primary and backup data centers and most of your communications, leaving only your "hardened" disaster-response and other "can't-fail during a public emergency" systems mostly intact).

Back in my day, that thing would've cost $500 per bolt, minimum.

A fork in the universe, I see.
Take it, they will.

Too-long-will-not-read version: There are things we should change now to bring pay into a gender balance, there are vestiges of past practices that will "take care of themselves" over time which will bring gender pay into balance, and there may be things which should not be "fixed" just for the sake of achieving gender balance because the "fix" will be worse than the "disease."

Long version:

The gender gap will only close so far, here's why:

* As long as we live in a society where more women prefer to halt or "downsize" their career in favor of their family than men, women's average career opportunities will be lower.
* As long as we live in a society where child-rearing after divorces falls more on women than on men, the women who have to reduce their work hours or drop out of college so they can raise their kids will drag down the average career opportunities for women.
* It will take generations to "bleed out" the vestiges of past discrimination. If today's boys and girls see that their grandmothers or great-grandmothers were nurses and teachers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doctors and headmasters, they will notice and may choose a career path accordingly.
* If today's boys see elementary-school-teaching as female-dominated, they are more likely to grow up thinking that the job is "beneath them" and not worthy of being paid well.
* Some jobs, such as being an administrative assistant or schoolteacher, are much more tolerant of long career breaks than others, such as science and engineering. They are also much easier to get into as a second career. This means the talent pool of those who could become trained for the job in less than 2 years if they wanted to resume that career or switch to that career is larger, which in turn means wages may be lower.

Here are some other factors that are likely to give one gender an advantage over another but the advantage could just as easily be a women's advantage as a man's.
* As long as we live in a society where girls are "steered" towards certain career fields and men towards others, then unless by chance the average salaries and other career opportunities in "women-dominated careers" is the same as in "men-dominated careers," one gender or the other will have a statistical "advantage" at any given time.
* If - and I'm not saying there is, but if - there is a gender-specific biological preference for certain types of work and that preference isn't countered by some other force such as encouraging people to have careers outside of their gender's statistical preference, there will likely be one gender with a more average pay and career opportunities than the other at any given time.
* There are certain jobs that women, on average, are simply more qualified to do than men, and vice-versa. Fortunately, many of these, such as being a professional football player or professional soprano vocalist, are so low in numbers that they don't sway the averages. Others, such as certain jobs in the military and law enforcement that require strength and endurance standards that men on average are better able to meet, are common enough that the lack of a 50/50 balance in these careers will affect the "average" ratio of pay for men and women. If jobs that are male- or for that matter female-dominated are stepping-stones to other careers, such as becoming a General in the Army, then the effects will be felt for a much longer period of time.

These lists are by no means complete.

Some of these things will take care of themselves over time. Others will require deliberate effort to overcome. Others, such as the (hypothetical?) gender-specific biological preferences for certain types of work, should probably be accepted as not worth "fixing" as the "fix" - encouraging people to take on career paths that would not naturally be their first choice, merely to achieve some statistical balance - is probably worse than the "disease" - having a small, permanent imbalance in male- to female- average earnings.

... "Oh frak."

Go to Great Britain and watch it live on a taxed television set.

Oh, you mean how can you watch it without the hassles of international travel? Why didn't you say so in the first place? :^)

If BBC got smart, it would change its international licensing agreements with companies like BBC America to reserve the right to show all future shows world-wide on an on-demand, a la carte basis. It might have to agree to charge a minimum-but-affordable per-episode fee to not completely gut the overseas television market.

If it did this for future seasons of Dr. Who, for example, it might charge a per-episode fee so that if someone legally paid for each episode, they would pay several times what they would if they waited until the end of the season and bought the DVD. Yes, die-hards with money to burn would do it, and yes, people would invite their friends over just like they do now, but at least it would be legal. It would also be priced high enough that there would be a market for cable networks like BBC America to buy the rights to air the shows. Those same die-hards would probably buy the DVDs anyways because they tend to be the kind of people who like the DVD extras and they like to have them on their shelves to show their friends how much of a die-hard they really are.