About 30 years ago, "wind farms" were built in several places in California where the wind seems constant, not intermittent. One is in the San Gorgonio Pass along I10 between Beaumont and Palm Springs. Another one is in the Altamont Pass in the hills near Oakland. In both places, with what was then primitive technology, the constancy of the wind still justified the construction of these "wind farms". I have seen both installations, and I have never seen them idled by a lack of wind.

Similarly, there are places where sunshine is so prevalent that solar power would have few interruptions during the day. Unlike wind power, however, storage of electricity during the day is needed for use at night.

In the meantime, Southern California Edison has outages at all times of the year. These are not the result of unreliable generation sources. Instead, these are the result of not performing any kind of scheduled preventive maintenance on local portions of the distribution system.

I see the the following problems --

For at least 20 years, I have had a full beard. Since I am mostly (not entirely) bald on top, I do not get a haircut more than once in two months. When I get a haircut, I also get my beard trimmed somewhat short. Will facial recognition allow me to drive home from the barber shop?

I do not have a mobile phone, smart or dumb. When I leave my house, I want to leave my phone, computer, garden, etc behind me. Where would this feature send the photo?

I never got E-mails from Micro$oft about updates, vulnerabilities, etc. Instead, I have an RSS feed from US-CERT (computer emergency response team), an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Yes, they do have a few useful functions.) US-CERT not only notifies me about Micro$oft's alerts and provides links to them, but that agency also notifies me of alerts from other companies.

The link to subscribe to the RSS feed is http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/cu....

I bought a new Hamilton Railway Special conductor's pocket watch with the first paycheck I earned as a computer programmer in 1962. Since then, I have never worn a wrist watch and do not plan to wear one.

I retired the Hamilton when I got a pocket Casio with a calculator, alarm, and count-down timer. I now have an electronic pocket watch with a round dial and hour, minute, and second hands; it also shows the date (but not the month or year). I have to reset the date when a 30-day month ends. When that happens, I recheck the time against a global array of atomic clocks that are tied to the Internet; I find it keeps excellent time.

Yes, I was a computer geek in the early days of geekdom and remained so until I retired. I do not own a smart phone or even a dumb cell phone. When I leave the house, I prefer to leave it entirely -- phones, computers, etc. But I do carry a watch in my pocket on the end of a chain attached to my belt.

By the way, during much of my career, I was the go-to person for issues relating to time-keeping and the rotation of the earth on which time-keeping is based. This was for various projects involving earth-orbiting, military space satellites.

How about a fine and prison for making a false complaint or warning about a copyright violation?

Exposing your skin (arms and face are sufficient) to sunlight is supposed to reset your body's clock when you travel. Even with such exposure (including on my bald scalp), I suffer the equivalent of jet lag when we change our clocks between standard and daylight-savings time (summer time for those outside the U.S.). It sometimes takes me 2-3 days to adjust to a 1-hour change.

There are no falsehoods involved in what I said (other than perhaps using hair dye to hide the gray). Omitting information such as the date of a college degree is not lying if you really received the degree.

In any case, a prospective employer is lying if they say you are not qualified for the job when they really mean you are too old.

When seeking employment, there are strategies that can be used to help defeat age discrimination.

Remove the gray before an interview. Clairol and Clairol for Men (and other such products) can be your friend; alternatively, visit a good barber or hair salon. Pick a natural-looking color. Men should remember to color their beards and mustaches. This should be done several days in advance so that accidental coloring of adjacent skin can be washed away. DO NOT persist in coloring hair, however; this is suspected of increasing the risk of cancer. Do not wear false hair; it is too easily detected.

When describing education, do not mention in what years your degrees were granted.

When describing employment history, only go back 10 years.

Do not mention spouse, children, and especially grand-children.

Do not mention expertise in obsolete computer languages or hardware.

If you are a victim of age discrimination, however, think very carefully about legal remedies even if you have solid proof. There is a U.S. Supreme Court justice who previously was the head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While in that earlier post, he deliberately sat on over 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired and prevented action. (Anita Hill was merely a side distraction.)

First of all, I assume you are serious and not trolling (as some others who replied have asserted).

My son died in April of 2013. He lived with cancer for four years and then took four months to die. During that time, he ignored my pleas to create an estate plan with an attorney. I am still trying to unravel his estate. Divorced and without a will, his son (my grandson) is his sole heir. My grandson is 6 years old. After my son died, it was too late to create a trust for my grandson. Instead, I had to go to court (several hundreds of dollars in court fees, legal fees, and even appraisal fees) to be appointed the guardian of my grandson's inherited estate. (His mother is the guardian of his person.) I will then have to return to court every two years to report on the status of the guardianship. In the meantime, NO ONE had authority to pay my son's final bills. It took seven months after my son died before I had legal authority to collect his credit union accounts, IRA, Roth IRA, and multiple 401(k) accounts, by which time several bills had already been sent to collection. All the legitimate bills have now been paid, and all known assets have been collected (the last, just a week ago). In July, I will transfer the balance of my son's estate into my grandson's guardianship. That will not end the hassle as I will have to report the status to the court for the next 12 years.

I am thus on a campaign that every adult needs an estate plan. Even if you have no heirs, even if your estate is small, you need to provide binding instructions on how to handle your assets after you die.

Before my son started actually dying of cancer, my wife and I started a complete overhaul of our own estate plans. With the exception of our IRAs and Roth IRAs, all our assets are in trusts. We each are the other's beneficiary of the IRAs and Roth IRAs, with the trusts the contingent beneficiary. The trusts require two trustees, currently my wife and me. If one of us dies or becomes incapacitated, the replacement trustee is already identified in the trusts. When we are both dead, the replacement trustee must appoint another trustee to have two. CONTINUITY IS VERY IMPORTANT. Our credit unions, bank, and mutual fund group all have copies of the relevant portion of the trust documents to ensure they accept this continuity.

Now for the original question: In California, where my wife and I live, a bank safe deposit box is NOT sealed if one of us dies. The box remains available to the other persons who are listed at the bank -- with their signatures -- as having access to it, which includes our daughter and will eventually include our replacement trustee. The complete original documents for our estate plan are in the safe deposit box. Right now, I can see a ring binder with a copy. The replacement trustee has a copy. A list of all our accounts is in the safe deposit box. An inventory of our mutual funds (IRAs and Roth IRAs) is in the safe deposit box.

In a sealed envelope in the safe deposit box are a floppy disc, a compact disc, and a printout of my OpenPGP public and private keys and my OpenPGP passphrase (the latter otherwise exists only in my brain). (I chose three media since I have no way to predict what formats might become obsolete before I die.) That envelope also contains a list of all my important Internet passwords, which are encrypted on my PC.

I have an unencrypted list on my PC titled "Where Is It?" that describes where everything should be found: checkbooks, bank statements, insurance policies, durable powers of attorney for health care, mutual fund statements, deed to our house, etc. When I update this list, I E-mail a copy to our daughter; another copy is in the ring binder with our estate plan. Also in the ring binder is the paperwork for our purchase of burial plots.

I have accounts at four different financial institutions. To serve a search warrant, they would have to know which branch of which institution houses the particular safe deposit box containing the "magic" envelope. If such a search warrant were successfully served, they would still have to find my external hard drive or serve another search warrant on my house to access my files. Since none of my files contain evidence of a crime, such warrants could easily be challenged.

As for keeping my master pass-phrase in my head, the 5th Amendment protects me in the U.S. I understand that in the U.K., however, failure to give the police your master OpenPGP pass-phrase can result in a lengthy prison term.

I never use cloud resources. Too many users have been severely inconvenienced if not outright burned by cloud services that have been hacked, suppressed by some government, gone out of business, or gone down for several hours. I keep all my data where I can access it, either on my PC or on a removable hard drive that I store remotely from my PC but easily reached.

I encrypt my most sensitive data. No, I do not rely on some corporation's declaration: "Trust us. We are good. We will protect you." Instead, I use an OpenPGP application that has been reviewed by outside experts and that I have installed on my PC. The data on my removable hard drive are encrypted. Some of my PC files are also encrypted. My pass-phrase, without which my private key is useless for decryption, exists only in my head and in an envelope in my safe deposit box at a bank. My private key is on my PC in a non-standard location. If somehow someone else were to access my private key, I have a much greater problem than the compromise of my sensitive data.

See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP

I was going to ask the same question. It's bad enough that the earth's poles of rotation describe circles, loops, and spirals some meters across over a year. The earth's magnetic field is even more dynamic. Responding to solar storms, the magnetic field lines can shift many meters in a few hours.

In my lifetime, the north magnetic pole has shifted several kilometers, from an island in the Arctic Ocean to a peninsula in Canada. Furthermore, shifts by the south magnetic pole are not synchronized with shifts by the north magnetic pole.

From the description, the device would say that you are moving while you are actually standing still.

In the end, the administrator organization for Webster's pension plan was fined by the Australian government for not having proper security for its data, for not properly testing its system, and for not detecting Webster's intrusions (even though the intrusions were very visible in the system logs). Criminal charges against Webster were never pursued.

Historically, so-called "responsible disclosure" has resulted in delayed fixes. As long as the flaw is not public and causing a drum-beat of demands for a fix and a possible loss of customers, the developer organization too often treats security vulnerabilities the same as any other bug.

Worse, those who report security vulnerabilities responsibly and later go public because the fixes are excessively delayed often find themselves branded as villains instead of heroes. Consider the case of Michael Lynn and Cisco in 2005. Lynn informed Cisco of a vulnerability in Cisco's routers. When Cisco failed to fully inform its customers of the significance of the security patch, Lynn decided to go public at the 2005 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Cisco pressured Lynn's employer to fire him and also filed a lawsuit against Lynn.

Then there was the 2011 case of Patrick Webster, who notified the Pillar Administration (major administrator of retirement plans in Australia) of a security vulnerability in their server. When the Pillar Administration ignored Webster, he used the vulnerability to extract personal data from about 500 accounts from his own pension plan (a client of the Pillar Administration). Webster made no use of the extracted personal data, did not disseminate the data, and did not go public. He merely sent the data to the Pillar Administration to prove the existence of the vulnerability. As a result, the Pillar Administration notified Webster's own pension plan, which in turn filed a criminal complaint against Webster. Further, his pension plan then demanded that Webster reimburse them for the cost of fixing the vulnerability and sent letters to other account holders, implying that Webster caused the security vulnerability.

For more details, see my "Shoot the Messenger or Why Internet Security Eludes Us" at http://www.rossde.com/editoria....

I retired about a month before my 62nd birthday. I delayed taking Social Security until my wife retired 2.5 years later; she delayed to a month after I started. Instead, we lived on our investments and her meager wages. She had to continue working so that we would have group health insurance through her employer. Then, we paid for continuing her health insurance via COBRA (about 6 months for me and 18 months for her). This was all per a set of spreadsheets that I developed to determine the optimum time to retire and how to finance it.

We are now in our early 70s. Our retirement investments continue to grow faster than we spend them. Until this year, we did not even spend all the dividends and interest. I expect that, by the end of this year, we will again have underspent our dividends and interest.

I manage our investments myself, relying on mutual funds. Of course, this means I am really relying on the managers of those mutual funds. However, the choice of which funds and how much to allocate to each is my own choice. For anyone interested in my investment philosophy, see my http://www.rossde.com/invest2r....

We have a very comfortable retirement. No, I was not a corporate executive, entertainer, professional athlete, or hedge fund operator. For my entire career, I either created or tested software, primarily for use by the U.S. military to operate its earth-orbiting space satellites. No, I did not work for the government; I worked for defense contractors. (See my http://www.rossde.com/retired.... for a brief history of my career.) Our retirement is successful because I understand investing and choose to be somewhat conservative (despite my liberal politics) in how I handle money that might have to last another 30 years (being from a family that is very long lived).