The entire point here is your data isn't even for you when there's a damn good chance that you will never look at 90% of it ever again.

Convenience is not a substitution for pure, unadulterated laziness. Buying a huge warehouse doesn't fix the problem of hoarding any more than buying a larger hard drive does.

Not even with a "good" camera does the average consumer generate that much data, especially every single day. Remember that more pictures have been taken with an iPhone than any other piece of image-recording hardware in human history, so even owning a "good" camera these days is considered an oddity.

And 10 shots per second outputting to RAW file format is hardly recreational. You're not sharing those over MMS with the grandparents, and Kim Kardashian doesn't take that many pictures in a day, and she wrote the book on selfies. Literally.

I guess the "hard" part to understand here is you accepting the fact that your usage profile only represents 0.001% of society.

And my original point still stands regarding data hoarding. No one is going to sort through terabytes of data when you die. No one.

It's harder for me to listen to users justify their "need" for several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes of storage for their personal archives.

Call somebody a pat rat hoarder in real life and they'll likely become horribly offended. Accuse them of the same thing in virtual space, and they wear it like a badge of honor.

I wonder if the average consumer realizes that when they die, no one will give a shit about going through terabytes of crap.

Uh, we also label those things flying around in zero gravity "ships" too.

This logic is fucked no matter how you look at it, but hey let's keep inviting the Navy to steer those nomenclature meetings across every industry...

That "shadow" system you speak of could in fact be the catalyst we've all been waiting for to push the majority into IPv6 space.

Oh yeah, brilliant answer to equality in IT.

Don't suppose we could find enough common sense to short-circuit this process before the lawsuits start flying...

Before completely writing it off, perhaps we wait and see what useful things could also come of this technology, to include funding the original research with "immoral" profits.

The economic "system" in front of you today is slightly divided between the 99% and the 1%.

And that gap continues to grow more and more every day, with the "system" not really giving a shit about those who are now unemployed, unless you want to define Government welfare as an acceptable "system" for the future.

There will have to be a considerable model shift in the future. You may only have one citizen working for every 20 people. We can assume families won't grow that large, so this does mean a single income supporting more than one household.

That model doesn't really exist today other than by force (taxes), and it will be interesting to see how the great divide will handle that.

...US Laws.

'nuff said.

No, seriously, can we please stop being shocked and appalled over the (ancient) concept that a US Corporation would beholden a US Citizen with any form of communications service that also contains a back door for the US Government? The OMGWTFEFF attitude is wearing thin.

US Corporation. US Laws. CALEA is twenty years old now. You have no Right to privacy anymore with any US-based communications service.

Oh, and according to this Administration, you just might be a terrorist if you think or assume otherwise. Have fun.

Gee, sure would be nice if our elected representatives went after the NSA like this when it comes to protecting user privacy...

I mean we're only talking about illegalities on a Constitutional level, being performed by a government agency and paid for by US Citizens. What could possibly go wrong...

You hinted towards the very definition of "waning" in your description, especially identifying yourself as one of those rare individuals who still purchases their music, and in a 30-year old format.

Do not simply dismiss those "streaming services". If they don't comprise the majority of music consumption these days they likely soon will, and reflect an impact similar to the one Netflix has had on video streaming.

Sure consumers like MP3s, but consumers are also really fucking lazy. They don't even type the name of a song into a device anymore, they just speak into their Beats-enabled cell phones and out pops damn near any song they want. This kind of user catering can really only be done with a rather massive online streaming service.

And there are now several to choose from, with perhaps the most important factor for the average hipster being the price; free.

Are you sure those personnel aren't just idle all day?

No, that's not a stupid question. I'm asking this because of your assumption that 1.1 million active duty personnel are doing jack shit right now, and thus have plenty of time to go pull guard duty.

It's not like they're maintaining a global presence or anything...

Yeah, you're right. That's insane.

Almost as insane as a the practice of changing a product ever so slightly and re-branding it under a different name in order to avoid further lawsuits and bad publicity they would receive from the previous formula riddled with side effects or fatalities.

Perhaps we should learn to look through the forest being planted in front of our eyes, or at least ask why it exists, because it would certainly appear this type of activity is not always about simple greed like patents.

Fraudulent, eh?

Tell that to the parent of a dead child.

Let's have an intelligent discussion about this. That would include admitting that bad shit can sometimes happen with medicine.

To sit here and generalize that we've never suffered even a single fatality due to a reaction to a vaccine is demonstrating a level of ignorance that even religion cannot attain.

That's cute.

And I suppose when the new 29-year old social media hipster junkie walks in the room and introduces themselves as your new CEO, I'm curious how you're going to propose your new-and-improved hiring mantra.

Or are you gonna just tell him to get off your lawn too..