I would seriously consider the Wikimedia Foundation, publishers of wikipedia. Particularly in the third world, this sort of freely available information is vital.

Back in 1999 or so, I was asked to do something similar for my church. (Believe it or not, people were really coming to church in the middle of the night and using church computers for porn. Actually, 'person'.) At that time, there were no good OSS filtering proxies, so I settled on a simple solution: accountability. We setup a squid proxy with a login requirement, and then we emailed the account holder a list of all the websites they had visited each day. Instantly, we had no porn problem.

Not sure I'd want to take this approach in an academic environment; a great deal would depend on the school, the age of the kids, and the values of parents, but I thought I'd mention it.

Nowadays, I'd just use a filter in the router forcing all DNS requests to go to OpenDNS, and use OpenDNS' content filtering. It's not as fine grained as you might want (it only works at the domain level) but it's still pretty effective. In this area, there's no such thing as 100% -- all you can do is try to keep it down to a dull roar.

Philosophically, I have a problem with any country that thinks so little of children as to allow them to be killed before they're even born.

A quick google reveals that a 1.5TB LTO tape costs $40. I saw brand new 3TB seagate hard drives at MicroCenter the other day for $99.99. So, you want to store 3TB.

You can either do it with tape, and all the problems that implies, and a rather expensive tape drive, or you can use cheap disks for $7.75 more per TB. I'd go with the disks any day of the week.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- managing identity is a quintessential government function, and should be handled by the government online as well. The basic problem here is that we should have a nationwide, and possibly global, single sign on system, with our rights protected by clear and unambiguous legislative features. Nobody thinks that the issuing of drivers' licenses should be done by private enterprise (or, if they do, they're idiots.) Why do we think online identity is less important?

And, in the 1950's, computers filled a room and cost millions. Now, my iPhone (actual cost around $500) can probably equal all the processing power and on-line memory in the world at that time. Costs will come down, steadily, as the technology matures. With PV, prices will continue to go down as the market continues to grow. That's the way technology works.

Seriously, building such things is not a "cost" but an investment. Just allocate the whole cost of the past several Middle-Eastern wars to your power bill and see how it goes for ya.

Yeah, but Apple has been known to engage in this sort of behavior before -- censoring fairly inoffensive content or code because it offends their corporate "sensibilities." Witness the publishing, then revoking, of the Exodus International app.

I don't want the people who make my MP3 player deciding what books I'm allowed to read, nor what websites I'm allowed to visit, nor what apps I'm allowed to run on it. The only reason Apple should ever censor content is because it violates some applicable law. If they're not willing to do that, then they can't be trusted with the keys to my digital kingdom.

And, btw, I'm not an Apple-hater. I own an iPad, and an iPhone, and several macs. But when I buy content, I tend to buy from Amazon whenever possible, because I find them to be more trustworthy.

In some cases, the problem is not in the drive but in the on-board controller circuitry. If you're desperate, and you have a 100% identical drive, you can swap the controller boards and that will often work.

My first job in "the industry" was in a PC repair shop in 1991. Back in those days, we had a huge crop of bad Seagate 40MB (yes, that's "mega" children) hard drives. The usual problem was that the spindle had frozen up, and if we took the circuit board off and gently tapped the spindle, you could often (about 75% of the time) get the drive to start spinning again long enough to get your data off.

Hard drives have gotten a lot more reliable and a lot smaller since then. I don't know whether this would be a wise thing to do with a modern hard drive.

I've long argued that authenticating identity "online" is a government function, just as it is a government function to issue me a birth certificate or a driver's license or a passport. A government-run single sign on (or, better, a network of single-sign-on's depending on where your citizenship lies) could be prohibited by law from collating information, and sites that used it could be forbidden from using it for sharing of data. Similarly, sites that wanted to use it could be legally prohibited from abusive practices, sharing your information, etc.

The reality is that privacy is OVER -- and it's been over for a long time. Unless you've bought a tin-foil hat, you're in many dozens (if not hundreds) of databases, many of which share information. The problem? You don't know it, and you have no access to this wealth of information. So let's drag as much of our critical information as possible under government control, where there's at least SOME accountability. Millions of details ... like how to preserve some sort of anonymity if there's an overarching SSO -- but the economic benefits of establishing one would be huge.

Finally, let it be noted that the situation with sso now is analogous to the situation with "information services" back in the 1980's. We could have built an awesome shared information service (a la France's Minitel), but the companies in the space (AOL, CompuServer, BIX, Genie, etc.) were all trying to beat the others by locking you into their product. The free market is not the solution to every problem.

I find it so funny that RIM is now "beleaguered", and it's all due to the outrageous success of Apple whom we were assured would die no more than 10 years ago..

Preach it.

I recently turned 40, and I work with a number of people in their twenties. I consistently finish project faster than they do ... however, this is often obscured by the fact that I give longer (and more accurate) estimates for projects. I've learned a new programming language every year for the past 10 years or so (this year was Haskell; my brain is still blown) and my employer highly values my skills and experience. I have another friend who works as a "project troubleshooter". He is brought in, as a contractor, to save projects that aren't getting completed or whose performance is so bad that they're unusable. He primarily does coding, not management, and makes about $500,000 a year as a consultant in his late 50's.

The other thing I'd observe is that most of the newer graduates never REALLY learned the fundamentals. They think of memory in "gigabytes", not "megabytes", and they tend to have slept through basic ideas like evaluating algorithms. (I recently had to explain to a computer science major from an Ivy League school with a rep for computer science the significance of "big O" and why an algorithm with O(n!) was a bad idea. He was a smart kid, but apparently that concept was just never hammered home.) Likewise for memory management -- all most recent graduates know about memory management is that the garbage collector does it. Likewise, for them machine language is hopefully obscure, and if they were ever confronted with a selector panel their brains would freeze up.

Don't count us old farts out yet. There are advantages to having first learned programming on a computer whose memory was only 5Kb, with a 1 Megahertz processor. (A Vic 20.)

While we're at it, perhaps you could provide one example of a case where Christians have "lynched" a gay person? There have been a few, limited physical altercations, but at the end of the day I'm not aware of any lynchings -- of gay people, or scientists, or anybody else.
 

The problem is that "scientists" (I use the term advisedly) don't confine themselves to telling people what science says, nor do they confine themselves to condemning individual Christians that attack them. Instead, they attack Christianity itself. This has been going on for about 200 years.

I could say much the same about gay rights' advocates. I am sick unto death of hearing them trot out the same old tired dozen or so examples (all drawn from the Old Testament, with no appreciation for the different kinds of revelation that Christians believe in) of how the Bible says X, Y, & Z. What really frustrates me? It's quite evident that in almost every case, they've never read it.