I enjoyed the video (I never considered debunking the conspiracy theorists from that angle), but would disagree with categorizing your friend as "moderate." Especially if you've sent him that link and he still chooses to believe the landings were faked.

The youtube video in the linked story explains the game pretty well. It starts as an autonomous competition, with double points for any goals during that time. Then teams are allowed to take control. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itHNW2OFr4Y

We don't hear about other competitions because...
A. They weren't founded by recognizable name like Dean Kamen
B. They don't have over 50,000 international participants
C. They don't hand out $16 million in scholarships
D. They haven't been around for 20+ years
E. They aren't based in the USA, which is where the majority of Slashdot's readership is located

I'm not saying we shouldn't have coverage of other robotics competitions, I'm just saying there are reasons we hear about this one in particular.

Some more serious advice:
1. Remember you're competing as an alliance, not a single team. I didn't see anything mentioning if the alliances are created by participants, will be predetermined before the competition or randomly selected at the time of the event. Synergy between your bot and those of your alliance members could overcome opponents who build and function as individual bots instead of alliance members.
2. Don't do the same thing as everybody else. You've got to get crazy in your ideas. If you want the chance of a spectacular success, accept the risk of a spectacular failure.
3. You may be able to combine defense with offense. Check rules for any limitations on size/shape/blocking opponent goals. The first thing that popped into my head was a bot that deploys a huge clear sail/net in front of one or more goals, funneling attempted shots down into itself, which it then fires at the opposing goal. It wouldn't need to be very mobile, but would need resistance to opponent attempts to shove it out of position.
4. Playtest the hell out of whatever you build, in as many different scenarios as possible. If the rules don't forbid swapping components based on opponent and/or alliance members for a particular match, use that to your advantage.

In*ter*es*ting - adj.
1. capable of holding one's attention.
2. arousing a feeling of interest.
3. oh God, oh God, we're all going to die.

If it's gonna be THAT kind of party, I'm gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes.

That's my favorite.

The only thing AV provides is a false sense of security. With AV, you're waiting until AFTER an infection occurs and then HOPING the AV company you've chosen has A) seen the malware before, B) bothered to add a signature to their definitions list, and C) is actually capable of removing the virus.

Better ideas: Turning on AppLocker & running most of the time as an unprivileged user. Check out OSSEC for use as a File Integrity Monitor and Host-based Intrusion Detection System. Disable unnecessary services, remove unnecessary programs, use an ad-blocker, a "default deny all" firewall policy and get a 3rd party patch manager to keep all your non-MS bits up to date. Secunia PSI is a free patch manager/vuln scanner for home use - there are others.

For a detailed description of just how bad AV is at protecting systems, check out the following blog post at computer-forensics.sans.org:
http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2012/04/09/is-anti-virus-really-dead-a-real-world-simulation-created-for-forensic-data-yields-surprising-results

This will go over about as well as the old Ananova.com website. Am I the only one who remembers that crime against journalism? It was like having the news fed through Xtranormal.

Here's a brief BBC story on Ananova, for the youngsters who have no idea what gramps is ranting about this time: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/606855.stm

Pro Tip: don't search for Anthonology (the collection of short stories including On The Uses of Torture) on Google's Play store. It isn't available in digital, and Google assumes if you're searching for Anthony you must be a perverted freak of the highest order. It's hard to explain to your wife why an anthology of yaoi is in your search history. "No, honey it's OK... I was really just trying to find a short story on the uses of torture." Yeah... saying you were looking for a torture story doesn't really make things better.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is definitely on my list. For those that haven't read it, I would describe it as equal parts a continuation of WarGames (if they didn't avert nuclear war), Paranoia (the RPG), and Saw. Shake well. Others that deserve a mention that I haven't seen yet:

Living Will, by Alexander Jablokov. A man diagnosed with Alzheimer's creates an A.I. preserving his own personality. You know pretty early in the story what the A.I.'s final duty to it's creator must be, which only makes it more heartbreaking when the time finally comes.

The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke. Techies are hired by a cult to build a computer system to document all the names of God. The cult believes when all the names are recorded, the universe will end. The techs are convinced they need to get as far as possible from the cult before the final name is recorded and their belief system is shattered.

What Eats You, by Norman Spinrad. Absolutely trippy first-person debriefing of a cop after a horrific "incident" in a brutal future L.A. where personalities are injected like drugs. Did I mention the cop telling the story is Joe Friday? Then again, ALL on-duty cops are injected to be Joe Friday. Like I said: Trippy.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. The ending may be "happy" for a couple protagonists, but damn... what a depressing way to get there.

I can't stomach $60 for a game, either. Being a cheap bastard, I don't start buying games until they've been on the market for quite a while. The last title I bought at release for full price was C&C3:Tiberium Wars about 5 years ago (wasn't worth it). This strategy has worked well for me -- I have no plans to buy a "new" game anytime soon. In fact, I just bought The Witcher yesterday ($2.49).

Assuming a relatively low sales tax of 6% and actual retail price of $69.99 for BF4, the total price of BF4 would be $74.19.
For that money, right now on Steam I can get Fallout 3:GotY, Fallout: New Vegas, Dead Space, Dead Space 2, Saints Row: The Third, all 6 "X" games, 3 "Hitman" games, Trine 1&2, 5 "Prince of Persia" games, and both "Penumbra" games for a grand total of $70.90. No tax.

BF4 may actually provide quite a bit of good gameplay, but I have a hard time believing it would provide more hours of enjoyment (or higher quality enjoyment) than two Fallout titles, two Dead Space titles, and SR3. If BF4 has a pipboy and lets me beat pedestrians with a huge purple dong, I might change my opinion.

Some advantages other than price: major bugs tend to be patched, possible DRM removal by the developer or availability of DRM work-arounds (ex:no-CD), video drivers have had time to be optimized, reviews and community stabilize, user created content available (depending on title).

It's kinda sad what a few Google searches can turn up. http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/ Of course, searching from his own computer wasn't exactly bright.

In the article @ Rapid7.com, HD briefly mentioned WarVOX - another one of his pet projects - as a means to find targets. And that lit the bulb over my head. Yes, the vast majority of what goes on is going to be boring as hell. But don't just use this on "a" target. Wardial to find a crapton of them, automate recording audio from the targets, feed it into some transcription software (cheap solution: perhaps leaving vm for yourself in Google Voice?), and alert on keywords. Let it do its thing and just check in occasionally to hear 20 second clips around whenever someone says "password" or "lawsuit" or "IPO"... whatever tickles your fancy.

I'm with Alranor. Having spent several years on subs, sometimes in "interesting" locations, I second the notion that "burn it with fire" is likely used if there is threat of capture due to the need for speed of disposal, and also because it doesn't matter how the sensitive data is stored... paper, mag tape, hd, ssd, dvd... high enough heat destroys them all. It also doesn't require anything to still have power to "write zeros".