Should be "not in an equatorial orbit" (left off the "orbit") and I should point out that only a narrow strip on the east coast of N.Z. in that region has much of a population, so anything coming down on the mountains or west coast is very unlikely to hit anyone or even end up on private property. Due to all that ocean, sea and unpopulated mountains it's like having a launch site in the middle of a desert but with the advantage that you can ship stuff to it easily and local infrastructure can feed everyone.

Your complete guess that they will run out of money quickly aside, please take my question seriously, since the question was about why they chose it and not how viable the company is.
Given some other launch company you have no such feelings about, would Canterbury be a likely choice for rockets aimed at the ISS which is not in an equatorial? The class I took in orbital mechanics was well over twenty years ago and I've never seriously applied what I learned in it, but you sound so certain here that perhaps you've got more of a handle on it. Apart from the obvious advantage of failed launches not having to go over much land before going over a lot of sea/ocean, is that lattitude (~43 degrees south) useful for inclined orbits such as the one the ISS is in (resupply launched from ~46 degrees north)?

The claimed advantages of launching "deep in the Southern Hemisphere" are bunk

Are they aiming for the ISS?
It's not in an equatorial orbit and maybe Canterbury is around as far south as Baykonur (real spelling is in cyrillic) is north.

Possibly means a plain text email with a string the user has to copy and paste instead of some html so the user just has to click on it.
People have got powerfully angry at such an inconvenience on this site when I've put a URL in a post and it's shown as text instead of a handy little link.

What surprised me was that a second e-mail was also sent containing the password (in cleartext) to access the document

The HR manager at a place I used to work at would send both in the same email.
However I still couldn't read the stuff he sent out since the key and document had to be used with a specific version of MS Office that was new at the time.

Ships have enormous crews for those moments when too many people is not enough. The rest of the time there are plenty of people and burnout is not supposed to happen.

You still assert that inputting an encryption key into a process is massively complex.

No, just massively stupid and directly opposed to the entire operation of having something to come back from when the shit hits the fan. It's a situation for physical security and not something to keep yourself and a few others in a job because nobody else has the keys. Being one office fire away from the org never having access to some data ever again is what backups are supposed to prevent and not enforce.

This is the bar you set:

Please give up on the juvenile pissing contest and name calling and at least attempt to aspire to your HR granted appropriation of a professional qualification that you shoved in my face earlier. I wrote what I wrote above, stuff about devising procedures you should recall, stuff about self documenting you should recall, and not the words you are putting into my mouth.

If so someone should seriously work on trying to cut down on the amount of cocaine heading into Redmond.

I see the problem now - you didn't even try to understand my example. The point of the example is that with AMANDA the instructions on what to do with the files (eg. how to fall back as far as "dd" and "tar" if that's all you've got and you are in a hurry) are in the header as ASCII text. That's why if you can't work out how to restore a single system from that in a couple of hours you are really selling yourself very short. That's how such things should be. Self-documenting as much as possible. No arbitrary bullshit since it doesn't go down very well when half your time is taken by fending off users who want to know when you'll have things back as they were.

A bit before 1970 many places, even Egypt, South Africa and Indonesia had nuclear weapons programs (which didn't get far) - plus even Turkish and Australian governments were considering starting one. Turkey got as far as trying to get approval for a CANDU reactor to make weapon material (as India successfully did later to make their first bomb) while Australia just talked about it at high levels of government leaving us to read about it in sheer disbelief years later when the papers were released.

and a good number of the population

Shrinking rapidly since the majority of the population is very young.

I've also always wondered why the U.S. put all its money on the Arab countries instead of Iran

Follow the Saudi money into the pockets of key US political figures for decades and you have the answer.

No. I think they are doing what I'm doing and buying Win7 for people's PCs because they want people to have Win7 to give them a desktop instead of a block puzzle with hidden offscreen controls.

Last decade, when you were doing this shit

Bit longer than that and still doing it. Why bother to quote something if you haven't read and comprehended it?

Twenty-year-old back-ups?

Indeed. Even though that's a bad idea with media life and formats there's a lot of material that fits that description, especially in the geosciences and some other applied sciences. It's something I have to deal with several times a year with some clients even providing tapes from the late 1970s.

Losing an encryption key is one of the most minor risks I can imagine

It's both potentially a complete showstopper and totally unnecessary in the first place. I don't really understand why you cannot grasp the concept.
I'll restate something above in another way - if you can't work out how to do a bare metal restore on a single system with all the needed data on media that you can read and the right hardware then somebody has seriously fucked up. That guy that worked there should have put something together in such a way as someone with a moderate skillset can work it out, or someone with detailed instructions can do it with very little in the way of skills. Requiring a key that can be lost is a major fuckup waiting to happen. You suggested you wouldn't be able to work it out in a couple of hours - I think you were selling yourself short to try to make a point just as your ridiculous strawman in my name "with no foreknowledge of their systems" WHEN THE ENTIRE POINT is to PROVIDE FOREKNOWLEDGE OF THEIR SYSTEMS by having disaster recovery documents designed to be read by the least skilled person capable of doing the job.