How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now?

If you really want to be able to keep your data that long, you need a serious plan. You need to back up everything to at least two separate devices other than your main storage, and you need to keep at least one of those devices off-site so your data can't be destroyed in a local disaster. You need to test your backups regularly to know if/when your medium is failing.

When a medium fails- or if you think it might be about to fail- get a replacement that uses more modern technology, and make a fresh copy. If you are ever about to replace your computer with a new one that can't read your old backup medium, buy newer media that does work with the new computer and make copies while you can still read the old ones. If you keep doing that regularly, you can always have a good copy that will work with your computer. It's more effort than copying to the cloud and trusting, but it means you're in control of your own data.

The real key is to keep making regular backups and regular tests. If you expect to be able to put something into a box and still use it 20 years later, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. You have to keep copying, testing, and updating your technology in order to have a serious hope of keeping up. If you do that, though, you have a very good chance of keeping access to your data at least as long as you have software that will still read it. I have 20+ year old data at work that I can still access because we've been careful about moving it to new media, and because the company that wrote the software is good about backward compatibility.

Only if your claims are too vague to test. If you make a claim that's specific enough to be tested scientifically, you need to have an actual scientific study to back it up. For example, POM just lost on appeal because they made specific medical claims about pomegranate juice that they couldn't back up with results from randomized clinical trials. So if you want to sell expensive placebos, you need to limit your claims to something vague enough that it can't be tested definitively.

I don't know your exact budget as it's not detailed but Axis has made quality webcams for >15 years (I've got a 2100 from ~2000 and it's still running fine) and they support ftp uploading. The small M10s are dirt cheap, but work well. Check out http://www.axis.com/products/m... to see. If you want something fancier look at their higher priced offerings with better features. I don't work there, own stock, resell them, etc, but I've had great luck with their cameras for a really long time.

From the article most of the spending is on things that are beneficial to society as a whole, not just NSA. These include K-12 funding for science fairs, math clubs, and STEM summer camps. Unless the NSA is influencing these in harmful ways, such as pushing ideology beyond the normal "if you do well in school, you could do cool spy work for us" recruiting I don't see a problem with taking their money. Same for the research grants and conferences, which all result in publicly published fundamental research, that help the entire cryptographic and big data communities as a whole. The only program I would have a problem with are any classified research and the sabbaticals to do classified work at the NSA.

Even if the switch to Wayland happens, most people will still be stuck with using XWayland constantly for a decade.

They may be stuck with XWayland for a handful of apps that aren't being updated, but the work to let modern desktop environments run on Wayland instead of X11 is quite far along. Once the basic KDE and GNOME libraries are ported to Wayland, anything that uses those higher level libraries rather than talking directly to X will run under Wayland without needing any intermediary like XWayland. It's possible to log in and run under Wayland rather than X11 today; I have done it on my Fedora box.

No, you could use a conductive rail, like a subway, and rack and pinion system to move the elevator. The rack and rail would add a fair bit more total weight to the building compared to a cable. But more importantly, the motors would have to be much much more powerful! Modern elevator systems have a counter-weight balanced on the other side of that cable, which means the motor only has to overcome friction and the small difference in weight between the elevator and counterweight (which varies depending on current payload). The motor on an elevator like Noah is suggesting would have to provide enough force to counteract the entire weight of the elevator + payload + motor + friction, which is at least an order of magnitude more than a traditional elevator.

But generally, my archive set is large (3+TB) and sensitive (taxes, bank statements, account numbers, passwords, etc) so this solution works best for me.

My guess is that most of that 3+TB is not at all sensitive. The vast bulk of most people's data is stuff like photos and videos that are primarily of interest to them. The amount of really sensitive information like taxes, account numbers, etc. is probably small enough to put on an encrypted thumb drive that you keep on your person. If you really trust encryption- including your ability to select a secure password- you could even encrypt it and store it on the cloud. It still makes sense to keep copies of your bulk data- also encrypted unless you're confident in your ability to keep the sensitive data off it- some place safe, but it would give you an extra level of protection against losing your really precious information.

So if we followed that suggesting, and took 10% of the wealth from everyone in America, including corporations, then spread it around to each person in the US evenly, it would be about $70k per person. Most people would spend it quickly and be back where they started.

This is wrong for two reasons:

1) Many, many people would use a big chunk of the money to pay down debt or to buy capital goods that would last them a good long time. Both of those things would have very large, positive, long-term effects for poor people.

2) The money that people spent wouldn't just disappear. It would wind up in other people's pockets as wages, giving those other people more money to spend. The net result would be a larger overall benefit than just the straight value of the cash handed out.

I assume that some of it is about not wanting to plug in different charging cables all the time. I have several devices that have special cables or docks, and I'd rather not swap those all the time. Having plenty of ports lets you keep them all plugged in even though you aren't going to charge all those devices simultaneously.

Since a site with proper hashing, where in theory the actual passwords are unknowable, wouldn't be on the list.

This is simply not true. It may be impossible to reverse the hash and recover the password directly, but it is both possible and practical to carry out a dictionary attack on a file of hashed passwords. That's exactly why you're supposed to avoid easily guessed passwords and why those crappy passwords are crappy: they're susceptible to dictionary attacks.

They are sentient, of course. We just have a lot of them.

No, good scientists understand significant digits. As far as geological epoch go, the time elapsed between the start of the industrial revolution and the start of the nuclear age is insignificant. Furthermore, while the technology began at the industrial revolution, the impact of that technology didn't have global environmental scale until later on. We don't mark the other geological boundaries at the point where precursors to change appeared, we mark them when change became significant. If you look at graphs of human energy or CO2 output, the knee in the curve does occur at around the mid 1900s. The fact that there happens to be an easily observable geological marker that occurred at that time makes it a convenient dividing point, and as good as any other of the arbitrary dates picked to divide otherwise well-distinguishable geological epochs.

If anything, I would argue they risk jumping the gun too early, not setting the date too late, as there may very well be a much bigger global change in the next 10's thousands of years of which the last millennium will just be regarded as a precursor to.

Just make sure that anything past your legal retention limit is only retained offline.

That won't help much against an attack by an insider, who will have access to the off-line repositories. Of course doing that would reveal that it was an insider attack rather than an outside hack, but the damage would still be done.

Tax preparation software is not a good candidate for open source software. You need domain experts (accountants and lawyers) to be involved to validate the interpretation of the Tax Code; open source projects have a difficult time attracting these sort of contributors. The law changes every year and if you don't keep on top of the changes becomes worse than useless; it becomes a liability. You have solid deadlines; you can't just release when it is ready.