So let me guess, you're one of those "IT bridge trolls" who build and hide in indecipherable structures and hoard troves of secret passwords, holding their organization for ransom, and mumbling and grumbling to themselves.
While thinking they're pretty damn good at their job, they are actually a worst nightmare scenario waiting to happen.

The solution to data longevity is such things as:

-Redundant storage

-Globally distributed storage

-Fragmentation and reassembly of data (so no host is responsible for content, since it is all just fragments)

-A protocol whereby the network monitors how many copies of a datum there are and creates more copies if it can't find enough.

-A protocol that automatically migrates data fragements to both newer host storage and more reliable host storage gradually over time.

-Re-wrappable encryption protocol

-Onion routing for access

-An economic model such as quid pro quo storage sharing (you store some of anonymous others' fragments, they store some of yours, no money exchanged.

-Storage of metadata and programming language execution environments and programs (with instructions) along with data

The term "atheist" is embedded in a language framework that considers theism normative and thus "a"theism as aberrant. (Theism: noun: belief in the existence of a god or gods, esp. belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.)

I reject this entire language framework, and its framing of theism (belief in god) as normative.

I would prefer to think of myself as someone aspiring to be a rational, appropriately skeptical realist.
While I agree with a right to freedom of thought, I take a dim view of the prevailing "irrational supernaturalist" (theist) mindset.

Followers in organized "irrational supernaturalist" religions should wake up and realize that the top leaders in their hierarchies don't actually believe in god. They believe that maintaining the pretense is a great way to maintain inordinate amounts of social and economic power. These leaders, if intelligent, are clearly manipulative cynics of the highest order.

"so it can use anonymized IDs"

kind of like, say, bitcoin addresses:

"A Bitcoin address, or simply address, is an identifier of 27-34 alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 or 3, that represents a possible destination for a Bitcoin payment. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin. For example, using Bitcoin-Qt, one can click "New Address" and be assigned an address. It is also possible to get a Bitcoin address using an account at an exchange or online wallet service."

> "Now, the interesting question is why, specifically, we would consider that the GMO is riskier than a wild conventional crop"

We are coming to a point in genetic engineering technology where entirely custom organism genomes will be able to be created with four bottles of chemicals: (A)denine, (C)ytosine, (T)hymine and (G)uanine, a computer code specifying the desired sequence, and a computerized melecular assembly machine. Limited examples of this have already been carried out, and its general application is not far off.

The appropriate term then becomes "synthetic biology" not the more limited "genetic modification".

We already see genes from distant species spliced in to other species (fish genes into tomatoes etc).

The answer to the "why more risk" question is that the combinatoric possibilities for novelty of genome and novelty of effect are much greater in genetic engineering than in evolutionarily selected natural mutation.

Ordinary mutation has characteristics like that it is usually only an incremental change (genetic-informationally) from the pre-mutated genome. It is true that even incremental informational change in the genome can lead to large effects in the phenotype (the organism), but with current day and near future genetic engineering, there is no longer a restriction to incremental informational change to the genome.

Most variations will, as usual, not be viable, but if one is by chance or design, it could easily be very different than anything seen in earth life so far, because its synthetic genome can be arbitrarily different.

Direct health effects of GMO foods are IMHO only the third most important potential concern with GMOs.

The first concern is that whatever you have engineered, it is self-reproducing and could potentially take over a niche in a whole ecosystem, displacing other species or naturually adapted varieties, and you in general could not stop this if it happened. So eco-systems then become fully the responsibility of human biology tweakers.
This seems generally unwise. The consequences of such ecosystem shifts is too complex to be predicted.

A second concern is that each genetic engineering modification needs to be fully assessed separately from all others, due to the complexity of the systems into which they are being inserted. Or at least, very narrow equivalence classes of modifications need each to be individually, and in combination, re-tested for long term effects, viability, viability and effects of likely mutations of the tweak etc, each time they are tweaked.
The cost of such repeated and long term safety testing is well beyond the capability of the companies producing the products, so we can be sure that such rigorous, long term, and repeated (when product is varied) testing is not being done.
Instead, smaller numbers of specific tests on a subset of engineered varieties are generalized in alleged applicability and conclusion, to save money.

So there is still a lot of know unknown and unknown unknown out there, and it is the kind of product that in general, self-reproduces and also expands in range.

Best movie I've ever seen!

Hey, what the hell?

If you think that way, rather than: The purpose of conversation is to tell people what I'm thinking, then you will be a better communicator.
Listen, process what the other person's motives and needs are, and take the opportunity to learn something from them or their perspective.

It you think you know it all already, you are already done, in any business or endeavour.
If you think you know it all and can only pass on information, you are not really that valuable a contributor, because you are probably working hard and cleverly on the wrong problem altogether.

There is always something to learn by active listening. You get more out of conversation that way; appreciation, and knowledge, cumulatively.

I wasn't referring to any particular party, although the genious mods who modded my post flamebait must have a pretty clear idea which party fits my description.

Touchy much?

use the Internet again.

Good point. But why for the love of (all that may or may not be holy in your particular jurisdiction) did you have to reference the cucumbers and bananas?

The most that a court should be able to do is ask Google not to continue caching content that has actually been removed from the various other Interweb servers by court order.

This is like arresting the person who points directions to the brothel to a tourist.

Sounds like the kind of overreaching and arbitrary judicial decision you might find in say, a country run by CENSORED-BY-GODWIN.

Power is in the national interest.

Grant please.

QED.

Unless you are a supporter of that party that believes that ignorance and truthiness is power, of course.

The market may provide the most cost-effective workable solutions, but if we define the problem as "stop contributing to global warming, humanity" it is pretty clear that governments have to set a significant and growing price on carbon, then we can let the market sort out the solutions.

Right now, the market provides no incentive to solve this problem. The market seems generally to be unable to look ahead further than a decade, and the fossil-carbon-based energy economy emissions problem is a multi-hundred-year debt being accrued by us.

Only the insurance industry seems to be starting to price in global warming into the cost of insurance, but that industry is too small a piece of the global economy as a whole (and the market as a whole) to turn the steering wheel of the entire economy. By the time the market reacts to this problem, it will be way too late, and the market will no doubt shift to how make profit off the various economic, health, and warfare disasters that ensue from global warming, fresh water scarcity, and widespread crop failure.

In the short term, the Microsoft report is about natural-gas fuelled fuel cells.
New analyses are showing natural gas to be about equal to coal in CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per amount of energy output.
The reasons are basically two-fold. One, there is a lot of gas escape and energy usage during the extraction and transport of natural gas, and two, natural gas is methane, which when it escapes into the atmosphere is 20-30 times worse in greenhouse warming effect than CO2 over a 100 year lifecycle in the atmosphere.

Now if microsoft was talking about putting in really large fields of PV or solar thermal electricity generators around each data center, and generating the hydrogen from water, then that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but then in that case, is hydrogen the best energy storage medium for a solar data center? Maybe molten salt (heat storage) or compressed air or underground pumped hydro or sodium-sulfur batteries would be better than compressed or liquid hydrogen.