C.S. Lewis, Anglican and actually closer to Catholicism in theology, wrote, from 1938-1945, a science fiction trilogy known as the Space Trilogy that explores alien races in the context of Christianity.

I first read the trilogy when I was an atheist, and it helped remove that particular hurdle in my later study of the world religions that lead to my conversion to Catholicism.

You have finally gotten something from iCupertino.

Not me. I tend to shy away from Apple products. In fact, as an early adopter of smart phone technology in 2005 with the Audiovox 6700 PocketPC, after it died in 2009 I just camped out in a dumb phone for four years to avoid the keyboardless iPhone mania, and jumped back in in 2012 with the S3, which was ahead of its time then (and compensated for lack of keyboard with swipe-typing, which iPhone didn't get until very recently).

If my S3 were to die today, though, it'd be a toss-up for me between getting a used S3 off eBay for $200 or $750 for an iPhone 6 Plus.

I've never had trouble seeing small things (though these days glass are required), and I prefer the smaller screen of the S3 over the Note for privacy.

In 2012, the Note and S3 had the same number of pixels. The iPhone 6 also has the same now as those two did then. In contrast, the iPhone 6 Plus has full HD 1920x1080 resolution. You actually get something for the larger physical size! The 2012 Note was pointless.

The new 7000 cars are being delivered to metro and replacing the 30 year old cars first.

More precisely, 38-year-old cars. WMATA took delivery of the 1000 series in 1976 -- which was closer to WWII than to today.

One can whine and wax poetic all one wants, but since we don't have a good archival format, the practical solution today is continual refresh of data: periodically copying data to fresh, and technologically up-to-date media. It's not sexy, but it does address three of the four points at the end of the linked piece (end-to-end data integrity, format migration and secondary media formats). The unaddressed point, access audit trails, makes no sense given the premise stated at the beginning of the piece that "No matter what anyone tells you, there is data that does not need to be on primary storage".

Yes, this is expensive. Yes, it would be nicer (cheaper) if a one-time single format could address the archive problem.

P.S. There is also this gem from the piece:

creation of a collision-proof hash

Of course the whole point of a hash is a mapping from a high-cardinality space to a low-cardinality space, and thus collisions are always a possibility. Collisions are minimized when a good hashing function uniformly distributes the resulting hashes, but given a large enough collection of source documents (no more are needed than the cardinality of the hash space), collisions will occur.

A video streaming provider other than Netflix also relies on Silverlight, and I was able to get it to work using Pipelight (couldn't get Moonlight to work), and only on SUSE (couldn't get CentOS or Ubuntu to work).

It's a strawman argument, lacking an understanding of what actual science and the scientific process is.

And yet it is a common misunderstanding about the scientific method, namely:

"If it can't be proven by the scientific method, it must not be true."

This misunderstanding is false because there are things that are true that we know from outside the scientific method, namely by reason (e.g. Calculus and other philosophy of math) and by faith (religion).

The grandparent comment asks "show me the Spockists". To which I answer, show me where in public school curriculum the scientific method is explained and its relationship to philosophy, religion and truth (or even just philosophy and math, to keep things secular).

I travel a huge amount for work, and I am required to select the cheapest available option (within a window)

Three letters: ADA

Four more letters: OSHA

The $20 for Economy Plus is a "reasonable accommodation." However, if you're able to use frequent flier miles earned on the job to obtain Economy Plus, your case is much weaker.

IANAL, nor have I tried this yet (because I've never had an employer decline my initial polite request).

Tonya Harding got three years probation for bopping Nancy on the knee, and so should anyone who lowers their seat onto my knee.

(And any flight attendant who allows it is an accomplice, and any airline executive who allows it is negligent.)

Optimistically, here in Denver three feet of ash on the roof would be like 30 feet of snow.

Perhaps the five most important words in TFA, omitted by TFS.

From the linked piece:

In hindsight, his remark was a clear sign that the marketing hype around "big data" had peaked.

This is true, and it provides the context missing from TFS: "Big Data" is over as a marketing term. But as technological term and as far as actual implementation, it is the status quo and forevermore will be.

From a technological perspective, "Big Data" has a simple definition: more data than can be stored on a single machine. And this need will only grow as hard drives and maybe even SSDs plateau while of course enterprise data only grows.

Indeed, TFA itself states (that TFS omitted):

A particularly hot sector has matured around Hadoop, an open-source analytics software platform. Many tech companies are writing software to make Hadoop industrial strength and integrate it with new and existing types of databases.

So, from TFA itself: Hadoop is hot, but the term "Big Data" is not.

You are correct that automated scanning combined with reporting to the government is to be expected in today's political climate. However, you would be incorrect if you asserted that the founding fathers expected the asymmetry where the populace could not similarly examine Lois Lerner's e-mails.

Much that is taught in CS today I had to learn on my own because it hadn't matured enough yet to be incorporated into CS programs: multi-threading, unit testing, OOP, SQL, data mining, all of the web technologies, etc.

But perhaps today's graduates will be complaining ten years hence how new graduates just rely on quantum computing searches and don't know anything about pruning search trees.

Seriously, though, to the point, I'd be more leery of those who graduated ten years ago and had not kept up their skills as opposed to those who graduated recently and did not learn skills from ten years ago.

Starting in the middle of the naughts, Safari was replacing ACM/IEEE as being the choice for practitioners. By the Great Recession, when choices had to be made, the replacement was cemented.