I like the compression idea. Blu Ray media is cheap per GB, and it's a nice alternative to HDDs if you want to keep two media types (i.e. to have one that resists magnetic damage). Given that media libraries don't change frequently (other than adding new content), this might make some sense.

Still, copying to BR is slow and loathesome, and at 50GB each (or 25 if you go the cheaper route) for home burning it will take a while to off load. Of course, once you have it, you have it.

External hard drives in an offsite vault may be easier; you may be quick to dismiss them. Archive by date or by content and a handful of cheap drives will get it done in such a way that you can easily find what you're looking for if you have to go searching for individual files, and it's quick to recover. You could probably get a backup for less than a grand and it will be pretty fast and easy to store and move.

Paid cloud storage is fine for this, but honestly the bandwidth has never worked for me for that capacity; "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with," well, hard drives. I'd archive the most recent stuff to the cloud (because that's the stuff at the most risk if you haven't off-sited it yet),

Thanks fort he nice replies... "disfavor" was probably strong, in terms of "Actuary", but I meant it more in terms of not having a negative connotation, just not having a rock-star or very popular buzz-word sort of connotation that "Data Scientist" seems to have now. I grew up wanting to be an actuary, curiously -- my father was one -- I got the math degree, I just wandered off into database work, but I do actually see our jobs as very similar. I think actuaries still come in as some of the "best" jobs annually in places where people report such things (http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/news/economy/best-job-actuary/).

But (and don't tell my father this), I've never heard anyone call actuaries sexy (other than my mom and, let's face it, we don't want to go there). Not in the way "Data Scientist" has been hyped. That's what I meant -- no disrespect to actuaries anywhere. ;-)

"Science" lacks a robust definition, but clearly the OP's definition is overly simplistic and narrow. Stephen Hawking has a lecture somewhere (found it: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html) where he talks about the idea of the "positivist" approach defined on the ability to predict outcomes, and I like to apply that definition to Science (Hawking doesn't, directly, but it's sort of an underlying theme). That is, Science becomes the observation and experimentation required to form predictions or cause changes in predicted outcomes.

So Social Science can be a science in so far as it actually informs usefully on how people will behave or provides useful ways to affect and improve the behavior or state of society's future. Computer science is a science insofar as it is required to make computers function as expected (as predicted) -- if you want something to perform faster, you must do the research and experimentation to cause the outcome to be faster. Even archaeology can be a science by this definition in that discoveries are added to a general model of the past that predicted all sorts of things -- ancient society's behavior, glaciation, geological events... "predict" may be a stretch there (except when archaeological finds help predict the future), but in this case the method of building a model of how the world worked based on observation to describe and generalize behavior (of the earth, of ancient religions, or what have you) is a form of prediction; it's just after the fact.

Data Science is very much science in this form; the job of a data scientist is almost universally to predict what the data will say about the future given what it has said in the past. This is invaluable to businesses and while the name may fall into disfavor, in the same way "actuary" which means something very similar already has, the abuse in this article is unwarranted, unfounded, and inaccurate. I will only agree that many who sport the "Data Science" moniker may not actually be doing science by any definition, but that's the individual's fault, not the concept's.

I don't know about "anti-pattern", but they cause trouble because they cause other code to be non-deterministic and it's very difficult to create patterns around that sort of behavior. They're practically the logical equivalent of the "COME FROM" in Intercal, which was originally a joke for goodness sake. I was flabbergasted when I found out people are vaunting code that actually works this way. It's particularly painful in implementations where the "reactions" can override program flow with errors or silent rejection or just running off and doing whatever they want. It's nearly impossible to debug since reactions (triggers) are almost always coded in a language or paradigm separate from some procedural language used to provide the UI or whatever other layer is being reacted TO.

I just don't like it! But that's just me.

Thanks for beating me to this -- it sounds like a simple substitution cipher; even with a many-to-one I'm amazed it would be THAT hard to crack. Of course, looking at the images in the articles I wasn't having a good time telling one rune from the next (there was a series of like 5 "R" looking characters in a row), so maybe it was a high order many-to-one so the trick helped narrow the field.

I'm impressed that such a cipher lasted this long, though!

Or you can just turn in all Audi drivers for the new $10,000 reward!

Ob-On-Topic Follow up... off site backups are BACKUPS... if you archive something off of your production systems (say, because it's outdated), you once again need TWO COPIES (like beta and classic Slashdot!). Putting an entire country's banking records in one place seems like an awful bad idea whatever that place is.

I'm sure I'll keep the newsfeed in my rss for a while, but the beta comment section sucks, so I expect I won't last long as a regular visitor. Unless of course they fix it.

Most voters stick with long-standing ideals that they think will work long-term -- most people will poll to the same party over and over. Only a small percentage of people that are willing to break with their party could be influenced this way (unless their party was doing something particularly silly near a vote). Swing voters matter, of course, but this article generalizes something that is not generally true.

"Why would they seek retribution for willingly dropping all of the evidence in a shredder, letting the bad guys know how to plug the leak, and walking away?"

There's no evidence of that happening! And as many have said, IF the proper channels failed, THEN you could go public. For many of these ongoing issues, the evidence can't be shred, and in many cases doing so is in fact a viable resolution to the problem.

Do we have a single example of one of these high profile folks someone saying "I reported egregious behavior properly via the whistleblower protections, but now all the evidence is gone, but they're still doing bad things so I decided to go public"? I mean, someone had just said "hey, we shouldn't be doing this, should we?" and then everyone said "you know, you're right", and then stopped, that actually sounds like a working system. And we don't know how effective the current system is -- many (obviously not all) abuses may have been stopped via whistleblower protections done properly, but some of this will be classified so that information getting out is both unnecessary and unlikely. And as I said before, we DO know that a few thousand of these a year go on largely without incident.

But even if we grant that going public was the only way, again I think the difference between approaches are vital. Taking precautionary steps to ensure very little classified information gets out, and that the information that does leak is vital to proving the abuse case is far less destructive than taking loads of evidence and giving it to wikileaks or foreign press. Many of the documents so leaked have hurt diplomatic and intelligence concerns in areas that are disconnected from the targeted abuse. That is unnecessary and what I find punishable, and where I think Drake could be treated with leniency due to his diligence in keeping classified information safe.

Lastly, just to be clear, I'm not supporting the actions of the organizations either... I was in DC protesting the Patriot Act with many others years ago because I think the problem is more in the laws that allowed this sort of thing to happen. The problem is that the actions may have been LEGAL, if unethical and not what the voting populace wanted or intended because we let these privacy eroding laws happen in the first place. We need more voters to put pressure on politicians to write laws that clearly disallow this sort of privacy-invasion in the first place; that would make whistleblowing more effective (and hopefully less necessary) because the abuses would be more clearly illegal.

Sorry that's so long, I'll stop ranting now. :-)

In the last 10 years over 20,000 cases have come through the "proper" whistleblower channels that are published (many classified cases are not, and while they could be different, there's no evidence that they are), and I'm not aware of any of these scary retribution stories being applicable to those. Of the 7 in the story, how many considered the large amount of cases that DID go through proper channels, and how many actually tried the process BEFORE violating any laws (like stealing classified information)? The scary examples that are held up are of people who violated the rules in the first place; of the people that followed the whistleblower act's provisions, I don't see examples of this.

I admit the statistics don't look great -- only 20-30% of the cases are settled while 60% are dismissed (the remainder are withdrawn or kicked out), and only a small percent are found completely in favor of the whistleblower. But there's nothing from those 20,000+ stories to indicate that this proper channel is causing retribution to anyone that uses it. It's the people who circumvent the process that are the poster children, and it's a terribly false comparison.

I wonder if there is a minimal instruction set that someone can follow to guarantee the win if they go first. It's one thing to prove a game always winnable, but it's another to write an efficient algorithm to always win in a particular amount of time. Timed Chess playing computers have amazingly complex and cool algorithms, but that's at least partially because chess hasn't been solved in this way.

For example, I wonder what the best first move is. :-)

Manning and Snowden did nothing to follow the rules that grant them protection -- they went straight to the international press; the whistleblower protections in place were not meant to condone that sort of behavior. The better example is Thomas Drake because he at least tried to follow a chain of command and some reasonably "safe" whistleblowing tactics rather than simply dump classified information into the wild. Still, though, Drake does not seem to have followed the proper channels, and those channels are there for a reason and make sense. There is a go-to place to file a whistleblower complaint that provides protection under the whistleblower act (currently the OIG). Telling your friends and colleagues, and spamming other intelligence agencies is not the right approach, although it's much more legal than giving classified information to a foreign government. The big no-no, though, is stealing and hoarding classified information, even if you intend to give it to the right people. The whistleblower protections are set up to protect the whistleblower AND the sensitivity of the information that they are divulging.

Breaking the protections on the underlying classified information is not protected in any whistleblower setting. Now, if each of these people had tried through the proper channels FIRST, without theft, without disclosure to third parties, I would be more sympathetic, but you don't get whistleblower protection by haphazardly divulging classified information outside the proper channels.

The logical fallacy I'm worried about is expecting an experiment to display only a bias for "efficient food gathering". It could be that the extra energy spent in wandering farther for food may be worth it in a natural setting to avoid predators, or avoid stale food, or the exercise may aid in digestion. Maybe the birds liked to hide in the tube, maybe some thought they'd feel trapped. Other people have made plenty of other observations on this post with alternate theories, but there are many many possibilities not related to the one variable the authors controlled for. It may even be due to nothing at all... just a ghost in the machine so to speak that wasn't weeded out via evolution because the birds were efficient enough to survive, eat, and spend lots of energy on other goals.

Expecting Occam's Razor to apply to complex systems in the most trivial ways is part of the mistake. I'm glad the research is done, it IS interesting and I generally approve of expanding knowledge. My complaint is that the author seems so surprised, and that I frequently see this sort of surprise and reasoning lead to or come from an anthropomorphism of evolution (i.e. assigning "intent") where I just don't think it applies. We behave as if evolution selected for specific traits (like those Big Three) because we witness the system in reverse, but if we had evolved into immortal asexual resource-unconstrained, we may see it differently. The underlying mechanisms would have been the same, though -- evolution need not have intent, goals, or this sort of anthropic rationality driving it to be effective and fascinating, and worth studying.

One of my pet peeves with discussions on evolution is the assumption, in general, that any given trait or behavior evolved for a particular reason, or that any one concept such as "logical rationality" can explain the whole evolution of a single such trait. In fact this sounds more like intelligent design than evolution. It's an interesting exercise to track a trait through evolution, but there's a fine line between that and presupposing that every behavior must occur due to some underlying logic.

We're talking about behavior that evolved due to an absurd amount of chaos; how was it not obvious that a "decision becomes more complicated than a simple, fixed ranking of preferences"? And who gets to decide what's "rational"... from a basic evolutionary perspective, anything that has evolved to this point and is still alive and kicking is doing well; it's almost impossible to call any such evolution "irrational", so finding ways to prove it so is just silly. I mean, there's plenty of evolution that seems odd... flightless birds, blind species with eyes, animals that eat their young and their mates... but these species all survive and procreate and carry on from one generation to the next. Why does everything have to be nice and tidy... what's the obsession with "rational"? In fact, the behavior described in the article sounds more rational than the opposite... consider Pandas, who exist almost entirely on one food (bamboo)... these animals are very nearly extinct due to this behavior (some people assert that they would be if it weren't for human efforts to save them). Is that rational from an evolutionary perspective?

I'm sure I sound annoyed, but some times we try to oversimplify things way too much. happy_place is correct; competition could matter, and individual preference clearly exists all over the place... why does there have to be a rationalization? Is it an evolutionary benefit that happy_place likes dark chocolate while their wife hates it? More likely it's just a quirk of evolution, not a grand result of evolution having evolved precisely so that our species won't starve when cocoa is the last remaining food on the planet.

Let me put it this way... given whole of evolution, I would wager that for any categorization of traits that are well defined (such as "rational"), there exists at least one example that is both in and out of that category. SOMETHING has evolved irrationally, oddly, stupidly, and without purpose, due only to quirks of evolution that didn't really get in the way of a species survival, but didn't necessarily help it along either.