They'll never top such an epic story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

By the time the bag of garbage is offered as evidence in court, the compostable portion will likely have shrunk to below 10% by volume.

I favor the solution of everyone on Earth living in one mega-city the size of Texas: http://joshblackman.com/blog/2...

I recall hearing a few stories about amateur astronomers and/or teams detecting exoplanets. See this previous Slashdot article, for example:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Is this the kind of thing that you're interested in?

If anyone on Slashdot has made a major career shift into the sciences later in life, I would be very interested to hear that story.

I once had a RAID5 array with 4 disks on my home computer. Two disks were connected to the motherboard, and two were connected to a SATA PCI card because the MoBo didn't have enough SATA slots. One day, the PCI card had a little hiccup, and two of the 4 disks got out of sync. The array was toast. Note that my RAID5 array contributed to this failure -- it would not have happened if I had not been running RAID (and if I hadn't made a poor configuration choice). Fortunately, I had a backup.

RAID is great for protecting mission-critical systems from HDD failure when uptime is a major concern -- but it can also cause more problems than it solves. Now, my business server uses RAID but my home computer does not.

For my office data, I have an external HDD that uses rsnapshot to create incremental snapshots every hour, day, week, and month. The server data is also mirrored to each desktop in the office, and my laptop, daily. For offisite backups (other than my laptop), I use duplicity to backup to Amazon S3, which costs about $3 per month. I realize that there are some security issues with this setup.

I store my offsite backups at my office. To do this effectively, I use three backup HDDs. One sits in a SATA dock at home, and mirrors my data every hour. The other two are at the office. Every so often, I take one of the HDDs home and stick it in the dock so that it updates to the latest version of my data, then I bring it back to the office. Next time, I take the other HDD home. This ensures that one of the HDDs is always offsite, and all three of the HDDs are never in the same place.

The obvious downside to this is that I have to remember to carry my HDDs back and forth. I haven't done it for a few months now. I suppose that an automated and encrypted rsync solution would be superior, but I honestly don't really care about my data very much.

This. I'm using mine outdoors right now, and the display is really suffering from reflection. This is unfortunate, because it's the ideal machine for me to use if I want to take my work outdoors on a pleasant afternoon. It's still usable, but less so at certain angles. And it helps if you wear a black shirt.

My Surface Pro 3 keyboard is actually larger (i.e. wider) than my full-sized desktop keyboard. I find it to be a very good keyboard, but it's a matter of preference. I find the keyboard on the Macbook Air to be irritating, and a lot of people like that keyboard very much. You can always get a separate bluetooth keyboard that you like better. This is probably the reason that MS didn't bundle the keyboard with the device.

I got a Surface Pro 3 last month, and I totally love it. I do a lot of document editing, and the stylus makes it very easy. After a week of using OneNote, I was completely off paper. In fact, I'm on vacation right now doing business from my hammock, and I'm more productive than I usually am in my office. The screen is almost the same size as a piece of paper, and the high-res display makes it pleasant for reading. The fact that it's so easy to split the screen between two different documents makes it extremely easy and intuitive to input edits. I can't really say whether it's good for entertainment or gaming, because I have never used it for that. But for the office, it's perfect for me. I started using Linux in 2004, when MS was at its worst. Since then, they've improved tremendously and have won back my business. I still run Debian on my office server of course.

I got an Android tablet for the office last year, but I ended up never using it; doing anything useful was incredibly awkward. The Surface Pro 3 is what I hoped that tablet would be. The thing is, MS can afford to throw $1.7 billion at a problem until they get it right, and they have now gotten it right.

Doesn't have the same ring to it. I can see why they picked Panama for the first one.

Lake Nicaragua was considered for a canal even before Panama. The idea has been picked up and dropped many times since, which is not to say that it won't succeed this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Like getting your head chopped off -- no way to see it coming.