I have my own offsite storage: a few encrypted hard drives distributed among friends. Works great.

It's physically impossible because the power they need is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the power they're going to get. It's as simple as that. Passive RFID works because the power it needs is on par with available power. Again, it's just that simple.

So, as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. What they have is not passive RFID.

They were in an offsite Amazon data center - offsite from the instances running the live site. Still, they are not immutable, if you have right credentials you can erase them. So, if the data center hosting their live instances was wiped out by a tornado, the data would survive in the offsite location. Here a criminal with a password was more powerful than a natural disaster. Of course this was because they used one set of credentials for everything. They shouldn't have.

The company doesn't work for the stockholders. The company has a mission, and the stockholders who don't agree with it are simply not your stockholders in the first place. They don't bother. The founders of a company are free to set the mission as they see fit. The mission doesn't have to be 100% profit- or ROI-oriented. It's perfectly possible to have a public corporation that's after greater things than money. Just because for example Microsoft isn't set up this way doesn't mean it's a law of nature. Far from it.

CS is a subfield of mathematics. It's useful in software and computer engineering, but it's the engineering field you should be talking about, not a subfield of what is, in essence, an art. And yes, I do agree with Lockhart. Wholeheartedly.

I don't know what kind of magic sauce would allow one to have "IT in the cloud" setup. Windows clients with roaming profiles quickly get to be a drain even on a gigabit network. Even without a roaming profile, anything that isn't the boring old secretarial style work will require a decent bandwidth. Most media work or CAD work can't really be done over your typical cable internet. Those who would most benefit from an "IT in the cloud" type of a service - small businesses - really can't afford having gigabit links to their premises. Neither do I think that the bandwidth from any particular Amazon instance is where it needs to be. Does Amazon run their instances on machines/blades with 10Gbit links?

My wife's camera has a 32GB SD card, and she fills it up regularly. We have terabytes of family photos, and it's just occasional shooting, she's not much into photography, and those aren't raw files either. I don't think it's a very unique kind of a situation.

They did have offsite backups, but the credentials required to wipe those backups were the same as the credentials needed to access the live site.

I'd go farther: if you're a small business, plan on dumping Micros-anything ASAP. If you can reuse the hardware with someone else's software, great, but that's only an added benefit. Micros is now spoiled goods. Everyone and their mother is doing POS these days, I think it's time it became commoditized as an open source project.

What is it with everyone and their dog that they think U.S. laws apply to citizens only? The fuck? Are the people who think that way really that dumb? Protip: law applies to anyone present within the jurisdiction of said law, unless a given law specifically states otherwise. The only group of people that is treated specially within the U.S. Constitution are native people ("Indians").

Steep learning curve would have been good. To have a steep learning curve means that you learn quickly. What they had wasn't a steep learning curve. It was a nearly flat one: you learn and learn and don't make much progress at all.

Improving the build quality is an act finely balanced between improvement and profitability. They can't halt everything while they make improvements. They have a production pipeline and can't continuously rebuild in-process launchers because then they'd not be launching for a few more years. What you see is their chosen locally optimal point between latency of a launch vs. launch throughput.

There's no such thing as antibiotic soap. There is antibacterial soap. Those are very different things. The antibacterial compounds can't be and aren't taken internally and have nothing to do with antibiotics.

Ah yes, the AC problem. I concur. Initially I'd restart the car while driving (no need for starter!) and it usually cleared it for another 20 minutes or so. Eventually I wired power through a manual switch directly to the A/C clutch to override the silly climate controller. I only managed to freeze the evaporator once or twice :)

One stereo problem is due to poor mechanical design of the front panel board, the traces crack and it doesn't respond to keypresses anymore. I repaired it twice before the car was totaled.

Shocks and engine mounts, yes, exhaust from the manifold back, yes. What a pain it was.

That 1st gen S40 was a nightmare. I owned it. It saved my life, but I don't miss it at all. All of them are lemons as far as I'm concerned. At least I got it for cheap. I don't think it was US made, though.