First, calculate how much money a loss of source code would set you back (e.g. if it means bankruptcy then that's your retained earnings). Next, multiple that number by the combined probability of all catastrophes that would wipe out your data but not kill you or your ability/desire to conduct business. The product is the number of dollars you should spend worrying about it.

Honestly, that number is probably almost zero. If there's a massive loss of data for everybody then our economy is going to collapse and most companies will cease to exist (perhaps many governments as well). We'd probably also lose all the infrastructure necessary to develop and sell games. The government and large companies in vital industries should absolutely care about this, but small companies probably shouldn't.

Most people do not take medication 100% of the time. We're human and it's easy to forget. But, when the doctor asks, it's difficult to quantify and embarrassing to admit. You're free to disregard your doctor's advice, but most people would prefer their doctor have accurate information before giving that advice.

For example, if you don't take your diabetes medication regularly, your blood sugar won't be well regulated. With this technology, it becomes obvious that it's a compliance issue rather than an insulin resistance issue. You now know it's a problem, and your doctor will suggest ways to remember to take your medicine rather than increasing the dose (potentially very dangerous).

For controlled medications, it becomes easier to tell if someone is selling their painkillers on the street. Differentiating drug abuse from under-treated pain also becomes easier. ("You ran out early, I see you took 8 pills at a time and blew through your supply in a week." VS "You ran out early, I see that you've been taking them every 3 hours, so we need to switch to a longer acting form.")

Huh? Modern (e.g. 1950s) hunter-gatherers, living in lands unsuitable for agriculture, spent around 20 hours per week gathering food. How else would they have had time to develop art, culture & language while colonizing the globe? Agriculture was a huge step down, requiring ~100 hours a week until very recently. Quality of life suffered dramatically, but farming supports far greater populations, so it became dominate through military might (and drunkenness). Here, and here are some interesting articles on the topic.

Here is the original source, with more information and less sensationalism. They aren't sure if any user information was downloaded, but are treating this as a full breach. To their credit, they at least hashed the passwords, and chose to inform their userbase rather than sit on it until they figured out if any user data was actually stolen or not.

DNA repair mechanisms are well known, and taught in any introductory-level genetics course. The BRCA system is very well studied due to its clinical significance. The lowest yearly dose of radiation that has been shown to have an effect is 100 mSv, which is four orders of magnitude higher than we're talking about.

Radiation safety authorities have a long reputation of overreacting to low level radiation sources. For example, items that went into a radioactive area, and have measurable lingering radiation, were once (and perhaps still are) classified as radioactive waste. Even if such items were just as or even less radioactive than they were before being exposed. I can't entirely blame them, the radiation poisoning after WWII in Japan was an unexpected tragedy that we hope to prevent in the future, but we know a lot more about radiation now.

That said, linear no-threshold models would predict that everyone should show symptoms of radiation poisoning around 80 years of age, and people in high altitudes long before that. It's not a defensible hypothesis, having no supporting experimental evidence or physiologic rationale. Safety estimates are very conservative, so that's why they assume zero DNA repair, but that's not being realistic. The linear models are a simplification that breakdown at the extremes.

Of course, setting the exact lower threshold is quite difficult, since the population varies tremendously, plus it's somewhat trivial to differentiate between zero and essentially zero. The only time it becomes relevant is when you multiply very small, incorrect numbers (i.e. probability of causing cancer at trivial radiation doses) by very big numbers (i.e. millions of people) and get a number greater than zero.

You can visualize it like blood loss. If a person loses 2 liters of blood, they'll show certain symptoms. If they lose 3, the symptoms are a lot worse, and they'll probably die if they lose 5 or 6. You could likely construct a no threshold linear relationship out of this. But, obviously it breaks down when you say that you'd expect one person to die from blood loss for every 5,000 paper cuts.

A single X-ray exposes you to 1 to 20 microsieverts. For comparison, this is the extra radiation exposure equivalent to living in a concrete building for a week to three months. The average person is exposed to 10 uSv per day.

Any ionizing radiation exposure causes mutations in DNA. Specifically, it ionizes it and causes strange structures to form, like thymine-thymine dimers. Fortunately, we have DNA repair mechanisms that fix such problems. One such mechanism is homology directed repair, which uses the homologous strand of DNA to accurately repair defects in the other strand. (This is the system disabled by the BRCA mutation.) These repair mechanisms obviously have a limit to how quickly they can repair DNA, but that limit can easily handle mundane sources of radiation.

In other words, unless someone gets a ludicrous number of X-rays (e.g. occupational exposure), then modern machines should be harmless (if properly configured). You can think of DNA as RAID1 with additional parity. Unless there's a significant exposure (i.e. 100,000 uSv per year is the lowest level linked to cancer) then your DNA can recover perfectly. So, giving millions of people a single x-ray is not equivalent to giving a single person millions of x-rays, and likely wouldn't cause a single extra case of cancer.

I'm a little curious about the medical uses for the technology. Terahertz EM radiation should have similar wavelengths to Ultrasound, which only penetrates a few inches and lacks resolution. It's very useful, don't get me wrong, but no replacement for X-rays, CT, or MRI (click for images of kidney stones using each modality). Plus, ultrasound is becoming even less reliable due to the obesity epidemic, as it can't penetrate a foot of fat very well. Per Wikipedia THz can penetrate low-water tissue several millimeters, which is similar to visible light seen by the unaided eye.

Dermatologists and Dentists may find it useful, but I'm having trouble seeing the application into other medical fields. (Someone can chime in if there's something, I haven't been keeping up on it.) IMHO, it's premature to consider installing these in the clinic. Before that happens there needs to be some unique and significant benefit, which outweighs the risks, and is cost effective. Until then, keep it in the research labs where portability and miniaturization is less of an issue. We don't need technology in the clinic for technology's sake, it just drives up costs and increases wait times.

Hence why I said lives in cities. NYC has 8.2M people, then it's 3.8M, 2.7M, 2.1M, and 1.5M for the top five cities in the US. There's a long tail, but the population of the US is about 400M, which indicates the vast majority do not live in any of the major cities.

Now, people often say they live in [closest city] for simplicity sake, so it's easy to assume everyone lives in a city. Overall population density has also increased , which makes the US census's "urban" classification kinda useless. So I said "city" to express a concept of places with a population density so high as include dozens or hundreds of people within GPS's margin of error.

For some paper napkin math, the US has an average (and roughly median) population density of 88 people per square mile, with most states around 50 - 300. High-balling that with 500 people per square mile (top five states), that's one person per 55,757 square feet. Most people cluster into families, with an average household size of 2.5, so that's a 373 ft x 373 ft area. Worst case GPS accuracy is within 2000 square feet 95% of the time.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but the vast majority of Americans don't live in cities. In a rural, or likely even suburban setting the phone's location is probably precise enough to identify a single-family dwelling. For apartments, the police could ask the tenants: "Have you seen anyone with a new [phone model] lately?" or "Who works at [other place the phone has been]?". They have alternatives to ransacking 120 apartments.

Not that this is likely to matter much outside of NYC. I live in a downtown apartment in a major US city and my phone easily pinpoints my location to one half of my small apartment, as-are the wonders of WiFi triangulation.

"Unlimited" has a simple meaning -- not limited. Selling a limited plan as unlimited is fraud. Your work internet analogy, while being a decent tragedy of the commons, doesn't really apply since employees aren't buying/promised limitless service. A better analogy (IMHO) would be getting cut-off without refund at an all-you-can-eat buffet, which is sacrilege in the US. Setting limits is fine, e.g. 2 GB or 12 plates of food, but if you sell something without limits then you have to hope you set the price where you make money on average, despite the occasional heavy consumer.

Exploration has always been an affair of the state. The civilizations that maximized short-term gains and didn't "waste" money adventuring were conquered or died out. Human migration is a defining aspect of our species.

I feel your pain, but this is the reason everyone recommends FAT32. I've used NTFS and ext2 for shared volumes before, but the filesystem invariably gets corrupted since you're stuck using hacked-on filesystem drivers with OSes that aren't designed for them (e.g. corruption upon crashing).

exFAT might be an option in the future, but right now FAT32 is your best bet. Personally, I keep my larger files on my Samba server, and media files in a partition created for the OS I plan to use them with. If you really need >4 GB file support, then make a "small" partition for transferring files only, don't store anything on there long-term and don't delete the old OS's files until you've verified they were successfully copied from the shared partition to the new OS's partition.

Alcohol, cocaine, and heroin are all dangerous. Cocaine especially, as it's prone to causing coronary vasospasm, which causes 10% of illicit drug related deaths. Heroin and opioid-based pain killers stop your breathing, although many of those overdoses tend to be intentional (or are least likely so... it's hard to tell given how depressed most heavy users are). Both of these cause all manner of psychological impairments with regular use. Obviously the users rarely notice, but their families or (potential) employers tend to.

Stimulants, like Adderall or Bath Salts are becoming a big problem because they cause psychosis. Some of the synthetic canniboids (e.g. Spice) do this as well. Just last week I was talking with a network engineer who was crawling in the middle of the street screaming that he was "going to the desert to find Jesus". While that's not particularly unusual (about 2-3/day in my city), he was unique in that he only drank a reasonable amount of alcohol (3-4 drinks/month), used nothing else, and had no psych history. The most likely explanation is that he got his drink spiked when he went to a bar (last thing he remembered), and given the negative toxicology screen and other labwork, it was definitely one of the newer synthetic drugs (probably bath salts).

Last night I tried to post a photograph of the supermoon using an image hosting service and discovered Facebook does the same for cjb.net. Which probably explains why my e-mail forwarding address (CJB subdomain) is in a state of limbo (primary contact address, but not valid for logging in).

Speaking of the constitution, I suspect the federal power to pass such a law would stem from the interstate commerce clause. Therefore, a completely non-commercial entity should be exempt.

That is, if the federal government actually cared about its constitutional limitations.