Amazon's Import/Export service (which works with Glacier, their low-cost data archival solution) lets you send them portable drives for a very minimal fee. They can transfer data from those drives to their network at the speed of the drive interface, or transfer it to those drives and send them back to you. I think they accept most kinds of removable media (flash drives, maybe SD cards, not quite sure). Anything that can be mounted on Linux. I would be surprised and disappointed if Google Drive did not offer a comparable feature.

I work as a developer, primarily with MS products. Some of its products (Visual Studio, C#) are great. But overall I have to agree with the parent. Microsoft products usually work well in isolation, but tend to interoperate poorly with products from other vendors, and even more poorly with much older or newer versions of their own. Microsoft and Apple also are historically quite hostile to free and open-source code, although MS has gotten better in this area. Both companies encourage the use of proprietary "black boxes" that come without source and thus the ability to debug, whereas most of the rest of the industry has embraced the value of at least partially open code, specs, and protocols. Finally, the price of being on the MS treadmill is to have to upgrade constantly, test every upgrade, fix breakage that occurs along the way (hopefully minor, but not always), see existing technologies deprecated in favor of new ones, which tend to have a short shelf life. MS products really and truly do not lend themselves to robust, maintainable software, because of the constant requirement for upgrade and churn, a problem much less prevalent in the FOSS world. They are great for prototyping, but if you want to build truly high quality software, you really don't want to deploy it as a rich-client Windows application; it should be Web-based, and/or written using a portable GUI framework like wxWidget or SWT or Unity or something along those lines, and, in either case, there are much better options for every level of the software stack than Microsoft's.

I agree with you for the most part, but just an important factual error here: one most certainly WILL die from a sufficient excess of acetaminophen/paracetemol, possibly days or weeks later, and it is not a fun or pretty death.

If the goal is to exploit the synergistic effects of NSAIDs plus opiates, there are substances such as acetylcysteine which can be added to acetaminophen/paracetemol which make it vastly less toxic, by stimulating production of glutathione, which conjugates the most toxic of its metabolites (NAPQI) into relatively harmless byproducts and thus prevent death by liver failure.

If the goal is to reduce the abuse potential, I'd think that adding low doses of a cumulative but relatively mild poison, maybe an emetic, would do the trick . . something that would cause discomfort but no permanent damage. I'm not quite sure what would work in that capacity, but, given how toxic acetominophen becomes once glutathione stores are depleted, I'd think practically anything would work better for that purpose than that.

(Disclaimer: IANAD or other medical professional.)

Actually, even better, ask the people at KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Red Hat, freedesktop.org, etc., from whence most of what is running atop Linux on a typical desktop system actually originates. The kernel itself still is, or at least can be made, fairly lean and robust. And you do not *have* to use all the other stuff. It makes life easier for end-users accustomed to Windows, but if you want to rip out pulseaudio and udev and dbus and all that stuff because you genuinely do not want or need it, you certainly can.

That is kind of my point. Cities are, by definition, the focus of civilization. In the U.S., they have been allowed to decay into places that more people wish to avoid than not. There all kinds of interlocking and self-reinforcing pathologies that both feed on and worsen this problem: corruption, violence, poverty, poor education, pollution, organized crime, and many more. I don't pretend that these are easy problems to address, but I agree 1000% that they need to be.

Whiny mid-level mafia manager bemoans that his big city mafia has chased away business. Maybe if cities focused on becoming good places to do business again, business might move back. Just a thought.

I've long wondered why they don't wind a few rotations of heat-sensitive wire, measure the coil's temperature and the first few derivatives thereof, and send a signal back to the amp saying "whoa Nelly, cut that back a little/lot/as needed." When I first thought of the idea it would have required fairly complicated electronics, but today I imagine it could be done pretty cheaply.

Your age is showing. :) (Mine too, of course.)

You may not think of yourself as being sheltered, but if you live someplace where random violence is not a serious concern, then, compared to many of us, you are. Drive-bys, jackings, and other attacks against drivers are so common in Cleveland and even some of the inner suburbs as to be un-noteworthy unless someone dies, and rarely reported to police. (Sometimes they are commited BY police.) No one walks if they can help it, and while a lot of people do take buses if they have to, this is what befell a young man just a few days ago, across the street from my old grade school and one block away from Lake Erie, for the "crime" of trying to take a bus to his job at the Cleveland Clinic at 5am.

Cleveland area. (Most years, among the top U.S. cities for poverty and violent crime.). But to clarify I did not say I don't know anyone who *doesn't* have cameras . . only I don't know anyone who lives in areas where they are not needed (referring to the GP). Because I don't know of any such areas. Not in the U.S. anyway.

Those pumps . . . like water pumps . . .may depend on grid power. If it is gone, there is no guarantee that natural gas or water will be available either, unless you've stored some or the equivalent (propane?) yourself.

I don't know anyone who doesn't. Even in the best neighborhoods, bangers, thugs, and (most disturbingly perhaps) rogue cops enforcing rogue, unconstitutional "laws" are only a short drive or bus trip away. As other ways of protecting ourselves are being systematically eroded, having a videographic record of possible robberies, home invasions, or other crimes may represent many people's last line of defense against them.

Three fears actually, not two. It seems to be affecting my brain.

NE Ohio here also (Lakewood). I remember those days in January 1994. Also somewhat snowy in addition to being cold. I remember having a LOT of trouble getting my car started . . . I had to a get a jump-start from a friend. But I don't remember it being very windy then. It's windy now and getting worse. The next 36 hours or so will not be fun. My two biggest fears are: (a) pipes freezing/bursting, since some of them run along outside walls; (b) my wife going out someplace and getting herself stranded; and (c) having to shovel snow while it is blowing right in my face at 30MPH or better. That was not fun when it was 40 degrees warmer than it'll be tonight.

I have a similar need and have found nothing FOSS that qualifies. Everything either has insane library dependencies, or opaque storage formats I can't customize or back up, or is limited to an insufficient number of platforms, or can't handle repeating appointments or tasks well. So, for now, I still use an ancient Palm as my master calendar, and remote into my home PC to store to-do lists of various kinds. But what I'm hoping to do is to write my own simple but flexible PIM, primarily Web-based, with no dependencies on the client side and none on the server except Python and Sqlite. Milestone 1: easy and flexible storage and searching of contact information and notes/memos. Milestone 2: Ability to create appointments and tasks, including repeating ones, with a reasonable degree of flexibility as to scheduling (e.g., "every Monday," or "last Sunday of the month," or "the next Saturday after the previous instance was completed." Milestone 3: Creating a text- and voice-friendly interface, so that it can parse and handle things like, "Doctor appointment for Eric on Friday, February 30 at 9pm" or "Remind me to clean the fridge every week starting tomorrow at 5." Milestone 4: Add ability to notify by e-mail or text, also to process e-mailed notifications. Milestone 5: Secure it enough that I can actually use it. Milestone 6: Add sufficient interoperability with other tools my family uses (probably GMail, Yahoo mail and calendar, iOS, Android, and for now at least (yuck) Palm). I cannot say for sure that the tool I come up with, even if I manage to finish it, will be of general usefulness to others, but I'll probably throw it out onto Sourceforge or Github anway, and people can decide that for themselves.