To back up a few GB, why are you making it complicated?

First, if your home fire safe is not media rated, then don't count on any media surviving a fire, the firesafe may prevent paper from burning, but don't count on it keeping any electronic media from melting or degrading. And a fire safe is no guarantee, my sister lost her house and *everything* in it -- the only thing recognizable was part of a 100 year old cast iron stove, and the remains of the brick fireplace, everything else ended up in an unrecognizable pile of debris in what was left of the basement, there wasn't even enough left of their thousand dollar gun safe to be found in the debris.

A few GB is *nothing* -- just encrypt it and email it to yourself, set up multiple accounts with different email providers if you don't trust that Google will be around for the long haul.

If you had tens or hundreds of GB of data, then I'd say use a cloud provider and migrate your data to a new provider if that one goes out of business. I keep my data in Amazon Glacier -- for $10/month (it's mostly old family home videos converted to digital along with a lot of TIFF photos). If I needed to recover the data all at once, I could send them a hard drive (plus a fee) and they'd restore to that hard drive and mail it back to me.

I don't think you understand the limits of a siphon -- the maximum rise along a siphon for water is 32 feet (the same limit as the limit for a suction pump, which is why well pumps are at the bottom of the well) -- any higher and the pressure within the liquid drops below its vapor pressure and bubbles form, breaking the siphon. It'd take large pumps and a lot of energy to pump the water over any significant rise - even if you extract some of the energy on the way down, you don't get nearly as much back as you put in.

Since the Salton sea is below sea level, you could tunnel the water in -- though it would take massive pipes/aqueducts for enough water to flow for significant energy generation.

My Nexus 5 went into a reboot loop, after a lot of research online (and taking the phone apart to see if the power switch was damaged (it appeared to be working fine with a good "click" when pressed) -- I managed to get to boot by repeatedly and rapidly hitting the power button while it was booting, then quickly unlocked the phone and rebooted into safe mode by holding down the power button.

After it booted into safe mode, I left it in the charger overnight, and in the morning, rebooted back into normal mode and it was fine. Mostly. It was no longer in the reboot loop, but kept powering itself off throughout the day.

I replaced it with a new phone, moved my SIM over, and then the Nexus appeared to be fine, no more poweroffs, no reboot loops, I used it as a Wifi-only tablet for a day and then it got a Lolipop 5.1 OTA upgrade, so I upgraded. It's been over a week since then, and it's still working fine as a wifi-only tablet, I haven't tried moving the SIM back

I still have no idea what was wrong with the phone, maybe it was a hardware problem with the switch, or maybe it was a software problem. My Nexus 7 tablet (also running lollipop) is fine.

I replaced my Nexus 5 with a Samsung Galaxy S5 -- I really like the S5 (and removable SIM), but I hate Samsung's Touchwiz interface. I really wanted to stick with the Nexus line, but am not willing to pay $700 for a 64GB Nexus 6 when the S5 cost about half that and I wasn't going to buy another Nexus 5 after what happened to this one.

Any company that falls for the "Buy your-company.sucks before anyone else does!" deserves whatever price they pay -- they can't buy up every .sucks domain for every permutation of their company name, so why bother? Is "http://microsoft.sucks" significantly worse than "http://micro.soft.sucks" or "http://microsoft-inc.sucks" or "http://microsoft-really.sucks" or "http://microsoft-software.sucks" or any of the other thousands of permutations of the name?

Even if the employer files for H1-B revocation, it can take months to process that paperwork, so generally if an H1-B holder loses their job they have a bit of time to search for employment - they'll usually be able to transfer their visa to a new employer if they find a new job within 30 days. My company just hired an H1-B applicant that was in this situation -- his employer shut down suddenly, he was jobless for about 2 weeks before we hired him and filed for the transfer.

No INS agent is going to bang on your door and take you away the day you lose your job.

While some H1-B's may scrimp and save up money to send home (or take back home with them at the end of their employment), most H1-B's I know spend most of their money just like everyone else - on housing, food, transportation, entertainment, etc. Likewise, if they are only in the country for a few years, they will have paid social security and medicare taxes that they will not get any benefit from (though they may get relief from some or all of their social security tax obligation if they are from a country with a totalization agreement with the USA -- mostly European and (some) Asian countries, notable exceptions are India and China)

Yeah, I thought the same thing as you when I saw the headline. I'm a little less interested to learn that if you open your data to the public (even if you didn't mean to), it's viewable by the public.

Or to find the engineers that can spot the missing parts of vague software specifications -- just because a user asks for something in the specs doesn't mean that he knows that the case he wrote up doesn't handle all of the options the software will encounter in the real world.

He may ask for software to generate quotes for manhole cover manufacturing, and only ask for a radius because clearly that's all you need to describe a round manhole cover, yet the smart engineer will ask how to handle the other shapes. Few companies want an engineer that blindly adheres to specs even when they don't make sense in the real world... that's more like a job for consultants so they can get paid to do the work and the paid again to do it the right way.

My wife is Japanese and never heard of 'Esperanto', when she learned English in school, they taught English. Though she's been away from Japan for about a decade... and out of school for 2 decades.

What adversary would we going up against that is so powerful that being able to track ships leaving harbors in the USA is useful information for them, yet not so powerful that they have spy satellites or high altitude drones that could give them the same (or better) information as an observer on the ground?

In any case, this super spy with a cell phone is going to have lots of other ways to communicate these code words, even without a cellular network, he can use Wifi, a plain old analog phone, coded IR light communication to a compatriot on a nearby hilltop, VHF/UFH radio, satellite phone, etc. Ships move slowly enough that he doesn't have to have a phone in-hand at the time he sees it go past.

How do they know that he accepted the papers? The wife already gave her attorney access to her account, so surely the court must see that the person using the account is not necessarily the person that it belongs to. Maybe the wife knows his password and she can log on to his account and "accept" the papers on his behalf.

If you're driving down the highway with your foot on the brake, then you *need* one of these systems.

That doesn't change the fact that the big one *is* right around the corner, it will come, lives will be lost, hundreds of billions of dollars in direct costs may be incurred, and taxpayers will be paying much of those costs in disaster aid since many homeowners are uninsured, and even for those that are, the funds backing their insurance may run out in a large quake.

Though I guess building a large metropolis on top of known earthquake faults is no worse than using flood disaster funds to build right back in the flood plain.

Sounds like powered alcohol has greater volume than liquid alcohol, so it's even harder to smuggle:

http://www.palcohol.com/

Sure, you could put the powder into a canister labeled "flour" and smuggle it in that way, but you could also put everclear alcohol into a bottle labeled "water".

The problem is that people like you who want to work on their car are becoming more and more rare -- most people just want their car to be reliable and if it breaks, take it to the garage. Few consumers want to open the hood and fix something -- myself included.. at one time I did all of my own oil changes, tuneups (back when a tuneup meant replacing points, condenser and rotor), brake pad changes, etc. But I won't touch a modern car, I'd rather just take it to the garage when it breaks (which is rarely with most cars, my VW is 4 years old and the only maintenance it has had in all of that time is 4 oil changes - 10,000 miles between each).

So you may say that you'll only buy a car that you can work on, but as those cars become harder and harder to find, eventually you won't be able to buy one. I used to say I wouldn't buy a phone that is sealed and doesn't allow battery changes or have a microSD slot. Those phones are getting harder to find, even the new Galaxy S6 doesn't have an easily replaced battery or an SD slot... the last phone I bought is sealed without a battery or SD card slot.

Doesn't that apply to most jobs? If an accountant works well and gets most of the numbers right, he never gets credited, but make one huge mistake that costs the company huge sums of money, and he gets fired. If the Marketing Department works well and brings in lots of business, but makes one huge PR mistake that offends customers and drives away customers, then they get fired. And so on.

IT isn't the only department that gets little credit when things go well, but gets big blame when they don't.