You apparently don't know the difference between "some" and "all"...

I don't ever look at my mouse, unless it's hung up on something or otherwise not working. I'm not even sure how I'd break 20 years of training on that front, much let alone why I would want to.

Apple has made some nice mice - this just seems ridiculous.

You seem to think that here in the US we have capitalism. Unfortunately, we don't. The US lacks the political will to ensure that there is true competition in most areas. We give out quasi-monopolies to corporations, and our politicians are well rewarded for keeping those in place.

I'm in a decent sized city, and I have 2 options for broadband internet access - both pretty much the same price. I get decent cellular reception on 3 networks, all pretty much the same price. While my bank doesn't charge an ATM fee, any other bank who's ATM I use does. If I bank at one place that's head and shoulders above the others in the area, how do the others stay in business? Different government agencies use them, thus circling it all back to politics.

The issue is that we're pretty much run by corporations now. All political decisions are weighed on whether or not they will hurt a corporate bottom line somewhere. That affects everything, including banking.

While a percentage of us vote against the politicians that continue this madness, the vast majority are swayed by the hundreds of millions/billions of dollars the corporations pour into elections to keep them as profitable as possible. Why are corporations able to pour millions to billions of dollars into elections? Damn good question. The issue is that it will take people voting in politicians who want to fix that, and that's not likely. Due to the billions corporations will pour into elections to prevent those people from getting elected.

Bank transfers for consumers in the US will generally run in the region of $2 or 2%, whichever is more. Not sure about companies.

In the US, the 30-40 and under crowd does a lot of electronic banking. The 40+ crowd still relies on che(ck/que)s and cash. And by that I mean for both pay and to purchase things like groceries and gasoline.

The last place I worked for, probably 50% or more of the employees got a piece of paper every 2 weeks that they'd take to the bank and have turned into numbers in their account and bills in their hands. The other 50% of us took our direct deposit, got it a day earlier, and didn't spend every other friday waiting in line at the bank.

The US banking system for consumers is probably a solid 10 years behind the EU's system. It's pretty shocking. We don't have a good way to transfer money to each other - going to an ATM and getting cash, or paper cheque are the only real options.

I've got one of the better banks in the US to do business with, (large credit union) and it takes me about 8 clicks and 5 days to transfer money from my bank account to another bank. And $2 or 2%.

I stopped even thinking about my wallpaper about 6 years ago when I realized that I never saw it, because I always have multiple things opened full screen. For the same reason I quickly found out that KDE 4 desktop widgets were worthless for me.

Hell, on login I have Thunderbird and a couple of folders open up. I don't even see my desktop then. I'm guessing I'm closer to a majority with this than a minority. Still, glad to hear you're rediscovering your past.

Well, since you have local copies on all your computers, I'm not sure how "vulnerable to business failure" it really is. At the worst, you just don't have the service. You still have all your files.

But in another couple of years, how much will you remember what you lost? How much will you miss it?

I posted up above about a recent article about us becoming digital pack-rats. Personally, I haven't looked at anything I created 4 years ago in about...4 years. Stuff I created a decade ago? Probably 8 years ago was the last time I looked at any of it.

While I have mirrored TB drives now, and a static backup from about 4 months ago in a crate, the really essential stuff that I have backed up off-site is pretty minimal. Because very little of my data is really essential.

Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?

Really, for that much data, you really want to mirror a couple of TB drives, and then share with your neighbor/friend/family member far away/ like you're doing. On a similar setup.

I think the original question really boils down to, "In this day and age of hundreds of GB of personal data, how do you store it and back it up?"

I read a nice article some time ago about us becoming too attached to our data. That we were really keeping too much, and that we should gracefully let it die. Because really, when we pass away, who's going to want to dig through 1100 pictures of Mexico that we took? Nobody. They'll want the two pictures of us on our honeymoon. The picture a year that shows some kid growing up. They're not going to want to read every email we ever received - they want to see the dozen of when we fell in love.

Personally, I've got a pair of mirrored TB drives, and a chock-full 250gb drive in a box in the other room that has a copy of everything essential from about 3 months ago. My home and work computer each have copies of important work stuff, roughly up to date. If my house burns down? I'm going to lose a ton of shit, including a lot of data. But you know what? I probably don't need 99% of it. I don't need all the music and movies, D&D campaigns, papers I wrote in college, etc. When I set up these TB drives, I made a dir in my home directory that was called "old home dir". I didn't move anything out of it that I didn't need. And you know what? 95% of the stuff in it is still there after 4 months. When I did that a couple years ago, the percentage was about the same.

When it comes right down to it, our electronic data is going to be pretty much the same as our physical data from a century ago. Water leaks, mold, and sunlight destroyed most of our photos and documents. Failed HDs will destroy most of them now. But the world will go on.

Getting back onto topic, look into DropBox. Distributed copies on multiple computers, drag and drop interface, history and version control. Damn handy.

If the acceleration is logged with a timestamp, it's not going to be too hard to estimate velocity in a number of circumstances. Negative acceleration for a few seconds, no acceleration for 30 seconds, positive acceleration...looks like you just stopped at a stoplight. If you put your foot down, it's pretty easy to calculate your final velocity. And as you say, there might well be corroborating evidence from the GPS/tower.

Then why work corporate IT? Work in academic IT areas. I'm back to school after 10 years out, working on a PhD. I've put in some time in IT, and I love programming. Now, I'm working on computer modeling. I'm doing more of the science than the programming, but there's still a fair bit of programming to be done. We have a guy in our research group who is pure IT/programming. He sets up our clusters, scripts up the tricky stuff, works on web interfaces for things - pretty much has free reign to do awesome.

I did the corporate IT job for a bit - I never looked back after I left. That shit blows. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that you can most likely follow your passion somewhere you can embrace it and enjoy both your job and your life.

I use a pay-as-you-go phone. Texts cost me $0.20, and calls $0.10/min, the first call of the day is $1. I don't want anyone other than the people I've given my number to have that number.

I have a preferred method of contact for all the important people and businesses in my life. Those companies that go outside that get the cold shoulder from me. One of my credit card companies isn't going to see any more business from me because they decided one day that it would be a good idea to start calling my cell every few hours. All our contact previous has been by mail or email. If they can't respect that, fuck them. (They got the number as an emergency number while I was traveling. To decide that they can try to call it to sell me shit using it is not cool.)

Yes, once there were telephone directories, where everyone was listed. That worked great when calls cost a fair bit of money, and marketers hadn't started cold calling everyone in that book. Now, we're inundated by marketing. I'm not so worried about identity theft - it's the intrusive marketing that I'm 100% against. The fact that I can't tell the post office to fuck off makes me consider moving all the bills I can onlne, and just not ever opening my mail box. They'll stop jamming shit into it when it gets full.

All this ties back to Facebook - we're running short of new ways to reach people for marketing. Facebook is providing that new avenue. There's a reason they don't have a date of birth, address, phone number, full name, likes/dislikes/organizations/networks/religions/politics/etc on me. It was pretty damn clear to me that when I signed up, it was just a matter of time before it became another avenue for marketing. Unlike the postal service, I can at least stop going there if it gets bad.

It seems to me that this makes it very hard for developers to set any sort of budget, or make any predictions about profit. "We assume that we'll be able to sell 10,000 apps at $1 each. That will give us $10,000 in revenue." Now, it's, "Amazon will sell some number of our app at some price. We can't really guess either, since they are interdependent."

I can't see any serious development business liking this.

Tree Style Tabs - they form a tree, and you can put it on the left side. Merge another line or two at the top, and you'll find that you have seemingly lots more vertical space. I do this on my little EEE 7". But the Tree Style Tabs felt so much better once I got used to them that I use them everywhere now.