Are you serious?

I've stopped playing games on disks because it's so annoying. I definitely prefer Steam over a disk check.

Though I play primarily indie games, so most of my Steam games are non-DRM anyway.

If you can afford to sell a game developed in America to Russians at a high enough price to make a profit, then you can sell the same game at the same price outside Russia and make the same profit. Or will the games companies sell at a loss to Russia, essentially meaning that non-Russians have to subsidize Russian sales?

I dont remember that, I remember "well spoken and clean cut" or some such.

He represents Delaware accuratelyaccurate I'm embarrassed to say.

Also to rent an ip address isn't free.

It's a body of methane, not water, and it is chemically much more closely related to oil than water. So it arguably makes more sense to compare it to the amount of oil on earth than to the amount of water.

I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.

The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.

I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or discard photos?

It comes to understanding the methodologies. What makes each effective? What are their weaknesses? Do you have enough good people who can execute them?

Waterfall is often appropriate, especially when it comes to physical world engineering, or for software products that cannot and will not be changed. Agile is great when you are committed to fully automated testing, have a committed stakeholder who is an active participant, and can deploy on demand for low cost.

But many clients now expect instant updates like they experience with their iPhone apps, and it's very difficult to deliver like that with waterfall. Agile is the answer, but for legacy projects that lack adequate testing, it's a big challenge to migrate to agile, and requires the business be put on hold while the developers clean up their technical debt. Most businesses can't afford such a shift.

That way is also not a guarantee of success. If management is implementing their imagined-perfect new organization structure, they are often blind to the problems they are creating, believing the problem lies with the underlings who "aren't trying hard enough", or "don't believe in the vision."

Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.

...could easily lead to a doubling in size of Denmark's Lego stockpiles...

No but if you got a government request for your keys you'd know about it.

The government "request" would come in form of customised malware and you'd never even know you got hacked.

If google gets such a request you wouldn't know you were compromised.

You aren't gonna know, no matter what.

It isn't like they are sending l33t hackers to break in and get the data.

Schmidt isn't an idiot, despite how the press like to portray him via selective quoting (note that TFA does not provide much context for this quote). When he says Google is the safest place to put your data, he's probably comparing Google to other companies that provide similar services, not some hypothetical fully self hosted system - bearing in mind self hosting of email is rapidly going the way of the dodo even in business situations (it died for home email a long time ago).

Given that Yahoo still have not fully deployed SSL everywhere let alone encrypted their internal datacenter links, and if Microsoft have a similar effort they aren't talking about it, there's some evidence that he might be right. After all, if you get a government warrant for your data you're just as stuck as Google is: not much you can do about it. On the other hand, you are unlikely to secure your infrastructure as well as Google does.

But Google makes money from targeted advertising

Google makes significant sums of dough from paying corporate customers who use Google Apps. These clients can switch off advertising if they like. These are also the places where some of the most sensitive data is stored.

So Google have both the financial means and incentive to solve the end to end crypto problem for such clients. The difficulty is not financial. It's technological. Matching even just the feature set of Gmail with end to end crypto is insanely hard, and that's before you hit the "everything is a web app" problem.

The point of forward secrecy is there are no such keys to seize. The "master keys" are only used for identification, not encryption. So whilst a gov could theoretically seize Google's keys, this does not help them decrypt wire traffic. They'd have to do a large MITM attack, and to get everything? They'd have to decrypt and forward ALL Google's traffic. Not feasible.

Good use of applied cryptography means that realistically the only way for a government to get data out of it means requesting it specifically from the providers. In places where the warrant system has been vapourised (which certainly includes the USA and UK), this might not seem like much, but it does help prevent fishing expeditions.

Your local makerspace would be a place to look for one to play with. If you just want to send a file to a neighbor and have him print it for you, http://www.3dhubs.com/ is a site where you can hook up with local printer owners who offer this service.