To get to that point, one has to:

1.) buy airplane tickets, most likely by credit card (I'm sure there's some way to use cash to pay for airplane tickets, but I don't know a single person who's done that in a decade). These tickets give a very good probability as to where you are going to be, when.
2.) check in - in other words, directly inform the airline that you are at the airport.
3.) get onto a line whose exit involves partial undress (shoes, belts, jackets), placing your personal effects on a conveyor belt to be searched, and an X-Ray of your body. ...so now they're using the MACs of cell phones to figure out how long people are going to be in the queue, and we're worried about "privacy concerns"? You're in the wrong place if you're worried about privacy in the security line at an airport.

...and exactly how many games run without an internet connection these days?

Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it; .mint and .ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but most of it ends up in inactive groups and is generally recognizable. Conversely, much of the spamming seems to have subsided - with the relatively small number of people using it in comparison to Facebook or Kik messenger, and those that do being the kinds of people who are going to be able to download and configure Pan or Agent and find a Usenet provider, the 'intelligence floor' for getting in is generally higher than the 'gullibility ceiling' required for a spam campaign to be terribly useful.

The details of what they're looking to do is a bit vague, and it depends on what the real requirements are. In other words, this is a two part question, and the choke point is vague...

Part 1: Getting the data in the door.
I'm a huge fan of Machform for this. It's not free, but it's inexpensive, self-hosted on any garden variety LAMP stack, their support folks are pretty good, and making new forms is a very simple process that you can teach Sally Secretary to do in half an hour. You can download the data in a CSV once the form is done and look at it in your spreadsheet flavor of choice.

Part 2: Doing something useful with the data.
So, you've got a spreadsheet full of names, addresses, and phone numbers. What do you do with it? Do you run a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word? nice and easy. Does this go into a SQL database somewhere? Importing it gets interesting, although I think you can export the data from Machform using PhpMyAdmin. Does it need to go into Quickbooks? Good luck with that, although to be fair you'd need half a dozen interns to copy/paste that no matter how you slice it. ConstantContact? I don't know what mass import tools they have, so that can vary. The list of potential use cases goes on and on, and whether this is a practical method or not depends if "data getting into spreadsheet form" is a solution.

It's been said that a well-asked question is half the answer. If you can provide us with more information as to what's done with the data, and where their current solution falls apart, and what specific uniquenesses are limiting the current setup, more solutions may come to light.

Don't be ridiculous. Flashlights have removable batteries.

The "Show Logic" was that the runway wasn't long enough for the plane to land without taking out a few blocks in the process.

Why they didn't land at the airport with no ground control was what didn't make sense to me - They can communicate with the pilot and all the runways are clear, so why not just hand someone at LAX the phone, let 'em land, and do everything else via Remote Desktop?

(for those that didn't get the joke: http://collider.com/scorpion-p... )

Make sure the tower doesn't have software written by a company that went out of business, but still managed to get an update that can bring the whole thing down, and employ versioning in your datacenter backups...but if that doesn't work, ensure that copies of the software are uploaded to the planes themselves so that, in the event there's a group of socially awkward geniuses that can drive a Ferrari down a landing strip, they can download the software via an Ethernet cable and save everyone.

Both systems have their advantages and drawbacks:

Local backups, advantages:
1.) Lower cost/GB.
2.) Control over data.
3.) Backups done on demand.
4.) Multiple users/devices can be backed up on the same drive.

Local backups, disadvantages:
1.) Backup of mobile devices gets interesting.
2.) Backup schedule needs to be adhered to; most people forget until the day after they need it.
3.) Cost/GB narrows if more than one external disk is purchased to protect against disk failure.
4.) Opportunity cost - performing backups take time and some level of technical expertise.

Cloud backups, advantages:
1.) Streamlined and convenient, so they're generally actually performed.
2.) Realtime backup, usually including versioning.
3.) Simple to do on all form factors.
4.) Additional benefits - sharing, access from other devices, etc.

Cloud backups, disadvantages:
1.) No recourse if data is lost or "shared" on the provider's end.
2.) Necessity of trust that the cloud provider will honor their Super Pinky Promise to not sell your data to the highest bidder.
3.) No guarantee that the cost won't double tomorrow.
4.) Backups make messes of data transfer quotas.
5.) Initial transfer / complete data recovery can take a VERY long time.

Now, the first three Cloud disadvantages can be somewhat mitigated by a decent SLA, but consumer grade cloud services aren't going to have a decent one, and a company who signs an agreement to be sued into oblivion for technical mishaps will be prohibitively expensive for end users - and even then, it boils down to enforcement. Voyager529 Cloud Services, Inc. goes into contract with Jason Levine for cloud backups. 99.999% uptime, no data gets out, and $25/month for 1TB for life, no matter what. Next month, my colo goes belly up overnight, and the servers with your data on it get sold at auction for $50. I file bankruptcy. Go ahead and sue me - you probably won't see your money, and you definitely won't see your data.

It's for these reasons (and others) that I agree with you and do all my own personal backups on my own hard drives, and give an undesirable hand gesture to The Cloud (tm). For the majority of people though, the Saturday spent shopping at Microcenter for parts, 2-3 hours unboxing and assembling their own FreeNAS, installing the software, configuring the storage array, and port forwarding in their router like I did, just isn't worth the hassle. As much as I'd rather people do that (or even get a WD MyCloud), I'm begrudgingly happy that Dropbox and Google Drive and iCloud are all getting better traction because, even though Google/Amazon/Microsoft end up with plenty of that data, for most people, they actually have backups.

"For verification, please say the following words out loud: Propeller. Spinach. Fiberglass. Indonesia."

The system chooses randomly from a list of thousands of words that are easy for an individual to repeat back, but highly unlikely to be recorded and readily accessible to someone using a set of recordings to fool the system.

I completely agree with this - and it gets even worse: who gets trusted? SSO works in a corporate Windows domain because the answer to "who gets trusted" is "the company's internal systems...and it's the company's data anyway." Logging into the company's AD/Exchange/Sharepoint is just fine, because the systems authenticating stuff and the systems storing stuff are effectively the same.

Now on the greater internet, who do we trust? I have a friend who trusts Apple with basically everything, a friend who trusts Google with literally everything, a friend who trusts Microsoft with more of everything than not, and me, who trusts my own systems and no one else's. You own Nine-Times.com, a vBulletin forum for cat enthusiasts. You trust Google and Apple, but not Microsoft. two friends can SSO in, the other two of us can make internal accounts for the forum. Google friend owns androidfanbois.com, another vBulletin site. He allows Google's SSO. Three of us need accounts now.

So, we then do something like the US Federal Government having a standardized "internet identity", available to anyone who wants it. Well, we can forego corporate fanaticism this way, but now we've legislated digital identities and said goodbye to even the illusion of anonymity, and have a digital treasure trove of data for not only hackers and identity thieves (do you REALLY think the federal government is going to have bulletproof security on this thing?), but now you tell me that the NSA isn't tapping all of *that* "metadata", and I've got a password storage device for you. More to the point, if you google 'voyager529', you will indeed see my photo in the very first set of image results, and have a pretty good idea of who I am and what I do. I have a completely separate digital identity that is *not* tied to 'voyager529' in any sense.If the federal government gets in the online identity business, I sincerely doubt I'd get two.

We've eliminated corporate, and we've eliminated government, which leaves us with two obviously-even-worse options: self-signing and crowdsourcing. Self-signing gives us no real concept of who the person is, which is why Usenet devolved into the spam garden it is today. Requiring X number of people already joined to a website to validate that you are who you say you are turns logging into stuff into a popularity contest.

Passwords get stuck to monitors and under keyboards. Password managers are treasure troves to compromise and aren't cross compliant. Possession-based authentication (RFID card, NFC/Cell phone, etc.) makes losing your wallet ten times worse and you still need an issuing authority to oversee unique cards tied to a particular human. Biometrics are nice, but cross-device biometrics still have the problems of password managers, and having all ten fingers enrolled is a good idea, because one lapse in tomato slicing safety precautions and you won't be accessing your Gmail for a week.

No matter how we slice it, "proving that a person is the correct person on the internet" is a problem inherently tied to the problems that 1.) one's authentication MUST be represented as data, and 2.) computers, by design, perfectly replicate data VERY efficiently. Adhering to the first requirement while preventing the second is a problem whose solution will revolutionize computing again.

It's not a silver bullet, but it is a partial solution. 1337hax0r will vpn/proxy from another address intentionally, but he then has to get his whole botnet to do so. Sending internet traffic overseas slows things down tremendously to the point where an end user would be more likely to notice and run an antivirus.Maybe it'll cut it down by 10%, maybe by 75%, who knows...but even a 10% decrease is 10% in the right direction, with relatively minor inconvenience to customers.

Herein lies the matter at hand. You're absolutely right...however, I'm pretty sure Apple would readily say that no iPhone owner actually owns any of the servers running iCloud. Same with Google and their Drive servers, or Microsoft and their OneDrive servers, and are thus trusting their nude selfies to a complete stranger's hard drive.

"Victim blaming" means saying that it's Lawrence's own damn fault that the photos are circulating the internet, and I understand how the following will come across that way...BUT...it's also a relatively fair assumption that most people who are saying 'stop victim blaming' would also say that they may have given more thought to syncing photos to iCloud if they were instead told, "do you want your photos to automatically store themselves on a complete stranger's hard drive that you have virtually no access to?", they may be a bit more hesitant about iCloud syncing.

The better analogy would be this: you have naked photos in a photo album. Since you are a member of your local gym, they give you a locker for free, along with a combination lock. The gym offers to have the stuff from your bedroom automatically moved to the locker (it's a TARDIS locker...), and you agree, in case your house burns down. The gym gets broken into, and all the lockers get ransacked, meaning that your nudes end up in a pawn shop. It's entirely possible for you to have nude photos without also putting them in a gym locker, especially at a gym who offers TARDIS lockers to all of their >100 million gym members.

Between OwnCloud, Torido, PogoPlug, Western Digital MyCloud drives, Synology devices, FreeNAS, BitTorrent Sync, and old-fashioned USB cables, it's completely possible to have ZERO compromise here - all your photos backed up in real time in the event that a phone is lost/damaged/stolen, and that backup living on your own hard disk without annual fees or super-low storage limits, or disable cloud sync entirely and let your photos back up via iTunes. It may not be advertised or all-but-required for an iPhone to work, but it's completely possible for a computer novice to take a single afternoon and set something like this up if they care enough to do so. In this manner, your initial point is very much reinforced - what you do with YOUR personal equipment and how you store it and how it can be accessed isn't my business. that point is mitigated, however, when it involves the use of a hard disk belonging to a third party. You don't have to justify to me if you decide to put your data on Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon hard disks, but they also have very little incentive to justify their setup to you, either. What you (and Jennifer Lawrence, and every other human on this planet) do with your data is indeed none of my business. Knowing the options and gauging one's own risk threshold is very much your business (and Jennifers, etc.), but all the "don't blame the victim" logic in the world doesn't change the fact that "the cloud", by definition, means "a stranger's hard drive"...and if you wouldn't put nudes in a complete stranger's gym locker, don't put them on a complete strangers hard drive.

Nuance ate Scansoft and several other companies. Nuance now owns Paperport, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and Swype. Will Samsung ditch the desktop products if this goes through?

Consider the division of the police force with which he works. His section sees computer crimes day in, day out. He is tasked enforcing computer laws for the city of London (i.e. not metro area, so he's likely dealing with financial crimes "on the internet" and similar), which is a rather tall order...and I sincerely doubt he's particularly concerned about Joe sixpack getting a movie off the pirate bay.
We can laugh about how out of touch he is and how ludicrous it is to suggest a website license, but it's also a reasonable fear that the same infrastructure keeping the pirate bay resilient to the *AA's could as easily be used for worse things that could have a more profound effect on the economy of the region.