And isn’t the central office’s provision of voltage a point of failure in itself? No central office in a disaster, no dial tone.

Toyota.

It was a long couple of months. Seemed like a year.

I think that when writable CDs first came out, we thought that they would last forever. And in some sense they do last long enough. The other day I found a CD binder full of games and a few backups from 1996. The most surprising of all was a collection of photos that I thought had been long lost, and with a little rsync running over and over and over, I got all the files off intact and saved them to my Flickr account.

The most important thing to understand, I think, is that we have to look at digital storage as a convenient and temporary medium and that anything longer lasting would need to be hard copied. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a better likelihood of survival. Pictures can survive by pure chance for a couple hundred years. We’re lucky if our current stuff will handle a few years, much less natural disasters and history itself.

For many, the cloud seems to be a utopia, but corporate and national politics can make all your treasured media disappear without warning, and none of the free services give you a guarantee of safety if something craps out on their systems. And as for paid cloud services, ask yourself if anyone will bother to take care of it after you’re gone, or if anyone will bother to archive it, or if your family will just toss it aside even if they are able to get them as part of your estate. Ask yourself who you’re saving all that for. Are we just digital hoarders?

Google Music: Google Play lets you store thousands of sounds and there are mobile and web apps for this.
Subsonic: You need your own server for this, but you and your friends can all have servers and share logins.

So the users can have crappy passwords all they want until they’re warned of a breach? Garbage.
That’s like saying its ok to run around in the street until you get hit by a car.
Best practices are there because you should always use them.

No matter what you think of the Cloud, you have resilient cloud like Amazon that goes away sometimes, or you can have cloud like Everpix, that refused to give me my pix after they went to price model and told me “screw you” and is about to go away forever.

Nothing is permanent. Eventually some natural disaster is going to make a huge chunk of data away for services that are not geographically redundant.

In China, the maps should show Taiwan as a province of China.
In the rest of the civilized world, including Taiwan, the maps should show Taiwan as its own entity.

Gosh you're right. There's no software that ships with critical bugs these days.

So are you of the Android bigots, Blackberry morons, or Windows ignorantly hopeful?

They are only exceptional in the number of their own people they have killed in their history. And with all his bluster about great Russian history, I do very much tie Putin into that part of their history. They’re not fooling anyone with their faux peace blabber. They just one to keep one more client madman on his throne. Unfortunately, as there are no good options in Syria that do not involve

        a) killing the wrong side
        b) staying home and watching the carnage
        c) killing everyone

Russian’s entertaining stupidity is just one of those three options. Taking away Syrians chemical weapons will just be like holding the bully’s gun while he knifes his victim to death.

Or unfair to assume that this phone service is really nothing more than two cups connected by a string, which everyone stands in line for their 5 minutes, primarily to receive a ransom call about or pay a ransom for their relatives kidnapped by a cartel.

He’s right for the same reason that private business has never opened Antarctica. It’s not as safe and cheap as taking a bus across town.
That is not to say we should not explore, but exploration has always been backed by military and governments because of funding. It’s one thing to kickstart and get a balloon up into near-space, but completely another to get out of our neighborhood of the solar system.

This was my comment back in 2002 about Star/Open Office
http://www.computerworld.com/news/2002/story/0,11280,73896,00.html

Gore is trying to be the next Tesla. Excuse me while I use by Gorebook Pro to get on the Gorenet and buy some more of these Gore carbon credits to power up my house before Hurricane Albert hits us at category 28.25.

Using Category for hurricanes is as useless that fucking red-orange-yellow-green terror alert from the early-to-mid 00s. Why don't we recognize that having a category 2 to cover range of 3 mph is patently ridiculous.
Just measure the hurricane by how fast the winds are! 250 mph winds? That sounds fucking fast! I'd better get inside!

Also can't we just agree that Al Gore should be wearing white paint on his face, a plastic red nose that honks when you squeeze it, and rainbow hair? Or are we insulting circus performers by calling him a clown? Nothing like live TV to prove what an idiot Al Gore is. He's becoming borderline Dan Quayle!