"laughable remnants of yesteryear puritanism???"

Typical anonymous teenage American idiot. The 21-year drinking limit is a very recent manifestation of nanny state activism brought to you by MADD. I am actually old enough to remember when an 18-year old could buy alcohol in most states. Your idiocy is why we don't let kids your age drink. You're all fools.

Getting straight facts often takes a little effort. If you are not using per-capita income, you are throwing around numbers with no cited baseline. What is the top 1% for the numbers that you are using (with references)?

You have provided no credible sources for those figures at a global level. You started off with some random $50,000/yr figure and are comparing that to a completely different population group (wage earners). Apples::Oranges.

Here is another reference: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-need-34k-income-global-elite--half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html. Note that they are using "after tax" income ($34,000), which throws even more confusion into the mix. They claim that 48% of the global 1% live in the U.S.

If 48% of the richest 1% live in the US, we can see that 1% of 7B (global population) is 70M. 70M * 48% = 33.6M. Of the 300M US population, 33.6M are in the global 1%. That matches pretty closely (11.2%) with my earlier figures. And rather far off from 25%.

You are mixing per-capita income (mine) with the income of wage earners (yours). That is the same misleading comparison the web site I linked to was tempting potential donors with.

A clearer picture can be had by looking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

The first big table has "household income" as well as "household size". This shows that one needs to be near the top 10% before you get to "$47,500 per capita" rate that is considered "the global 1%".

I am not downplaying the fact that the U.S. has a lot of wealth compared to the rest of the world. But some of the numbers thrown around are used in a misleading manner. For example, the site I linked to above was trying to get wage earners to compare their personal or household income with some "global per capita wage" and not asking for their household wage and number of household members, which would be a more fair comparison.

The top 1% in 2011 earned $47,500 (individual income) according to the web site cited below. That means that a family of 2 adults would need to make $95,000/yr to fall into the global 1%. For a family with 2 kids, a dog and a hamster, that total grows to $190,000/yr. Remember kids, this is individual income distribution across all people, not family income distribution or anything like that.

Here is the source: http://www.globalrichlist.nl/how.asp

Not a too many American families make it into the global 1% any more.

I completely agree. There is another, related problem that Google needs to address. Users have little recourse when app producers renege on the privacy that was initially sold to the user. For example, I paid for WeatherBug Elite simply because it did not require "phone state and identity" when I purchased it. Guess what? A year later they wanted that information for "Elite" too. I can either accept or not upgrade. I don't upgrade. I have a bunch of apps that are not getting updated because the new perms they ask for are ridiculous. If users cannot maintain the privacy that they paid for, what other options exist for them?

Either privacy has value and must be honored by app producers as part of the sale, or it doesn't and users have the right to block access to private information.

In order to use this light bulb, and before it can be turned on, you must first agree to this EULA...

Candles anyone?

I've used ZFS under Linux for 5 years now for exactly this sort of thing. I picked ZFS because I was putting photos and other things on it for storage that I wasn't likely to be looking at actively and wouldn't be able to detect bit-rot until it was far too late. ZFS has detected and corrected numerous device corruption or unreadable issues over the years and corrected them, via monthly "zpool scrub" operations.

I have been backing these files up to another ZFS system off-site. But now I'm starting to look at other options because it's looking like I can begin doing it more cheaply than even my free hosting of a box I bought can provide.

Amazon Glacier reduces the cost of S3 storage by an order of magnitude, making 2TB of storage cost around $20/month. For a backup copy, it's hard to compete with this, even just buying a USB drive to stick somewhere... You do have to be careful about recovery though, they charge based on peak download speed (a very weird pricing).

And can never pass through a metal detector unmolested...

Fail!

Let me explain how this works in management-land.

"We're not going to back fill."

A good manager will take the raise and accolades for cutting costs. And then leave for greener pastures while the references are still positive.

It's all Win-Win. The company saves money, the manager gets a raise and a better job. Everyone wins.