In addition to book exchanges like you describe, here in southern Florida in the US we have a "Santa's helper" table every December, right alongside the road. It has a cool tent and everything. The idea is for people to anonymously leave presents for the needy. People can take what they like if they feel the need. It always seems well stocked.

I'm not sure your image of America is exactly complete. Having done a lot of business with EU companies, I'm not sure your image of Europe is entirely complete either.

RE: exchange, etc. If they are relying on the email server to do their document retention then they are doing it wrong. Heck, even if they were just dealing with legal issues like discovery requests that would be the wrong answer. Any organization that has to deal with litigation (pretty much everyone these days) needs an effective way to deal with email discovery request.

I pulled PST copies from the server 15 years ago for discovery requests and spent weeks going through the files looking for relevant information. That was a very expensive proposition - even if you discount the risks of screwing up a discovery request. This is a problem that tech companies solved a long time ago. There have been many document retention / discovery solutions (both on premises and off-site services) for many, many years now.

With the vast volume of document requests the IRS must get I do not believe that they could possibly be making do without a professional archiving/search solution. Please tell me that an organization of nearly 90,000 people that deals entirely in sensitive, private information wasn't relying on local OST files for document retention in 2010. Of course if they were/are, I suppose that explains a large chunk of those 90,000 employees.

We are not talking about email in 1998. By the early 2000's even small to midsized businesses were having to face document retention policies and discovery requests. Whether by implementing in-house solutions like Vault or using outside services to implement email retention and discovery most companies had to have this in place for more than a decade. The IRS has nearly 90,000 employees. Their IT shop is no mom-and-pop operation.

So to claim that all outside email was lost from 2010 is pretty shocking. The client computer mention might be an error, or it might be that an outside email service was being used. If the latter is the case, this should be a huge red flag.

You were kidding, making a joke that they should get the emails from the NSA.

Congressman Steve Stockman isn't. Well, not 100% kidding anyway.

I doubt he's holding his breath.

This sounds very much like the way Microsoft tried to do security in Windows Vista. People did not react well to so many dialog boxes popping up.

Maybe that is why google decided that most people would rather just not have to deal with permissions in any real and meaningful way.

From what I understand, it is indeed illegal to do this in many locations. The rate used as the cutoff is usually the federal mileage write off rate. So if you charge more than 56 cents per mile, you are a criminal. Hurrah for regulation!

Well, to be fair, it does mean that the customer will be paying too much for that cab ride.

Uber works on a fixed price model: I'll give you a ride from X to Y for this amount.

You'd think they could work out something with the government about meters in a case where meters are totally irrelevant.

I would support this approach. Excel is great for business users to prototype calculations and play around with data. When it is time to put what they have learned into practice, ship it off to software engineers and let them turn it into a more stable product for use by the less sophisticated user.

Of course, reverse engineering a complicated excel workbook can be a royal pain in the rear. This is where you learn just how devilish a tool excel can be, with hidden rounding and other obscure effects.

Because until every vehicle is autonomous, there will still be a need to understand the handwaving signals from some guy standing in the middle of the road - he might be a flag man from a construction blockage or maybe just some guy helping out at an accident scene. In any event, with no standardization and no training for the random dude in the street it would be very difficult for a car-bot to understand every possible permutation.

And if you remember watching the first moon landing.....

You are probably right.... for very small values of "ever". But given that there's probably at least a half-billion years before the sun begins to cook our part of the solar system, there's plenty of time to beat "never".

From the Wikipedia article on Helium-3:

They even have a whole section about mining the moon for He-3

Which is funny because the case was decided about a lawyer who wanted to expunge results pointing to news articles about court proceedings involving his personal life and finances. You know, public records that the government maintains and provides to the public.

Truly the court has a dizzying intellect.....

I think his point was valid. Sure, Google may end up having to comply. And their results will become less reliable because of it.

So what happens next? If the data is valuable, and the results from Google (and other public sites) becomes unreliable, how long before Experian or some other data aggregator begins selling their own version of uncorrupted search results and personal data that you don't get to see and edit?

Equally valid, if this really does become an issue with the big search engines, how long before everybody starts using the new startup from Indonesia or the Phillipines?