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.

Ditto on the Tree Style Tabs. They're a godsend on small screens that happen to be fairly wide.

They also make more intuitive sense to me - everything on the top bar is static, save the URL. The tabs are on the left, in trees showing where each was spawned from. You can close a single tab or a tree easily. They are far easier to organize in my head that way. I really don't know why that hasn't become a standard feature in a browser yet.

Have some F about Trend Micro, but don't have any U or D - TM is one of the worst AV programs I've seen in action.

Back around 2003, the corporate parent of my little used-to-be-locally-owned business set up a "19th hole" deal with TM. We were told to use TM as our sole AV in our local branch, as we now had a corporate-wide license. We refused, and were told that our AV must then come out of our own IT budget. Fair enough.

Why did we refuse TM? For one, the version we were given at that time had to be installed by hand on every machine. Corporate IT actually went through their thousands of machine and installed the damn thing. Probably using interns, as it wouldn't have been cost effective to have actual IT do that work, despite their sweetheart deal with TM. With an IT staff of 3, only one of which was on desktop support, we didn't feel that it was worth a hand-install on 150 or so machines. Especially since almost everything about TM sucked.

So we shelled out for Norton Corporate, set up a beefy desktop as a dedicated AV server, and pushed the client to all the local machines. 15 minutes of visual inspection plus the help of the rest of the employees found the dozen or so that didn't install properly, and those were dealt with by hand.

A few months later, corporate got slammed with some hellacious worm. TM didn't pick it up at all. In the least. While it spread like wildfire from one of our local corporate goons' laptops onto our systems, Norton at least disarmed all the tens of thousands of copies it placed throughout most of our file systems. (The bastard was doing auditing, and had access to just about everything.)

Corporate was unable to deal with the worm for a few days - we firewalled them off, cleaned up the mess, and got on with life before their IT was able to send us instructions on how to deal with it, and how to fix TM, which it had destroyed in the process. (Yes, every machine by hand, once again.)

So long ramble short - don't listen to TM. Ever.

But therein lies the problem: I personally can find a cow in a field, dispatch it, and turn it into food-sized chunks pretty easily. I can't do that with the millions of insects that are required to make up the same mass of food.

Have they considered the amount of pollution required to collect, clean, and process that many insects? Cows are easy - you turn them loose into a field, and a couple years later, round them up, put a hole in their head, and cut off all the delicious bits. I can't see insects being anywhere close to that easy to work with. Just finding/catching them is going to be massively labor intensive.

No, they don't even choose the least worthless. Skim the firehose and it's clear that some very well worded, descriptive stories are left to rot in favor of nonsensical or blatantly incorrect ones. Hell, one of my submissions long ago was 2 short paragraphs with links and a solid summary. It got rejected for a one line factually incorrect story that linked to a blog which didn't have any links to the original source.

First part, right on. Second part? Dead wrong. Seriously - take a look and see when the last time any serious air-to-air combat was done in visual range. It's been a half century since pilots could see the planes they were shooting at. Guns on fighters are largely an afterthought, or for ground targets. "Dogfights" happen at distances of miles now.

I have a very minimal presence on facebook. But I'm about to drop even that, as it seems half the sites I go to regularly have facebook hooks. I need to take another look at NoScript and see how "allow domain" and then removing Facebook from my whitelist works. I don't want facebook tracking me everywhere I go, and if I'm allowing their scripts by default, that's pretty likely.

The only tiny, tiny counter to your well-thought-out post is this:

The massive user base WoW has can be used against them, should that amazing new game come along. On at least first order, every MMO player in the world either plays WoW, or is good friends with someone who does. When a bunch of people find a new game that blows WoW away, and start leaving WoW, that information will propagate through the WoW network. I've seen it happen with smaller games - suddenly people's game-hours decreased by 90%, and when asked, they pointed to a new game. A steady trickle trying it out became a flood, and within a few months the prior game was a ghost town.

Of course, for this to happen, it's going to have to be something pretty damn amazing. It wouldn't hurt if the first few months were free/game was free either. In fact, I'm not sure you can beat WoW without doing that. You need to recognize that they have all your customers right now.