My point is I've been there and done that. The between the lines problem is the paranoia about losing something you might want some day and the point of rebuilding systems like this is to see if you can delete it. It's fun once but beyond that a time blasting exercise when it would be better spent coming up with a preservation scheme so you don't end up with even more junk in the future.

I've been rummaging around on old backups and cleaning out my stuff and have once again run into my expert-like paranoid backups and keepsakes from back in the days (2001).

Yes I read it, and I've been there too, hanging onto a pile of old crap because I though I might want too look at/use it again one day. Having not done so for years, I tried exactly what he did and realized after a couple of times the effort is not worth the reward, particularly if he is trying to figure out he still should keep it.

Delete it. If you haven't used it for years you never will. You're only buying yourself a mountain of lost time trying to recover and look at the same files you probably already elsewhere. Instead focus on how to stop creating the problem in the future. You've already taught yourself the lesson the hard way that there is such a thing as too many backups, at least when making them all over the place inconsistently and without scope.

Get a CM for your notes and miscellaneous cstuff. Wikimedia works great for this and you can be sure will be around a while. Use git to manage source code, scripts and text files. I find a common repo and one for each host works best. Keep large binaries in a single big software folder, Do the same for images, movies, whatever but keep them all grouped together. Back all of it up as a unit. Put all new stuff in there in the future. Do not let yourself deviate from using whatever scheme you come up with because it's the only practical way to insure you keep your stuff without having a million copies of it later.

I understand deleting it may be hard, but if you're like me, you probably have accumulate millions plus copies of files if you're including whole copies of OS's in your backups. You might try md5sum over important file types but checking and deleting by hand will take an incredible amount of time.

If we could limit photo matches to just arrest records, that would be one thing but although I don't have time to look up a citation, it's also being done against drivers license photos and it's not hard to see it extending out from there. Also, I never said the technology to do real time scans was available today, only that it will be in the near future. We also don't have anywhere near complete camera coverage but you don't even need anywhere near 100% to make life oppressive. And yes, there are evidentiary rules for photo lineups as with all evidence. I am not saying the police would set about to convict a man they thought innocent, but if they think you are guilty and you are not, you could be in for a world of trouble. This is also more than about what the police might do to. In the wrong hands, it devastates the foundation of freedom the U.S.A was built on.

And yes, public spaces are not private. You also only have privacy in your home only through abstract interpretation. Some things the forefathers could not foresee and I believe the ability for the government to "watch" everyone is one of them. This is a start in the wrong direction and the time to stop it is now.

I am not concerned about this crime but rather how this technology can and will be used. I suppose one could argue this is no different than using fingerprints to catch a crook, except it is vastly more than that. AFIS only contains a small portion of the U.S. population’s fingerprints, mostly those who have already committed a crime. I doubt who decides everyone should be forced to give up their fingerprints and DNA while they’re at it to complete the database would have his job very long today, yet facial recognition doesn’t seem to bother a lot of people even though it’s being implemented all over the place and will ultimately go light years beyond what the former two can do.

It’s unavoidable. Because far too many have already surrendered to the idea that “public” space means the government can watch you, at some point it will. It’s damning. An image with a likeness and couple of witnesses who agree it looks like him is far more tangible to a jury than some dry facts and scientific testimonials. It’s inescapable. When combined with data mining, the government will have the perfect capability to track and essentially know all peoples movements, anywhere, anytime. Then it’s simply a matter of having in that does not like the fact you did to get the finger.

Police state would imply they're always watching you, whether they arrest you on the spot or come by later. There's also no real line for the police to cross except better technology and that will come.

Like it or not, there are plenty of powers reserved for the state denied to the people, so this is a weak argument at best and certainly not much of a moral one. I'd argue natural law states that murderers should be killed as the whole purpose of laws against murder is to stop them from happening to us, a reverse of "kill or be killed" and most also believe in taking back what was taken. As much of our current law was derived from natural law there's nothing inherently immoral in it.

That said, I do believe in the death penalty very much, as strongly as I believe in our justice system to apply it inconsistently and unfairly. It's for this reason, I do not support state sanctioned murder, unless committed in self-defense.

The tablet PC is not new. It preceded the iPad and Android tablets by several years but the technology sucked. It's better now to the point that a tablet PC is workable and for my money, MS is proving the point well with the Surface Pro line. The iPad succeeded where the previous tablets failed because they reduced functionality down to media consumption only while taking advantage of the then more advanced technology to create a far more elegant design. It’s still not suited to real work while the Surface Pro actually is. I welcome it. I have an iPad and I hate having to switch to my laptop every time I think of some small bit of work I need to do. There is a huge market for a device like this among business users and less casual home users like me. I hope they succeed and if it brings them a windfall of new money. That’s exactly as it should be.

And apparently I didn't hit my head hard enough before I posted that.

...Gives new meaning to "rack you brain" for the answer.

One of the ways I always did homework and still use today is by pretending I am teaching someone else. This method works great for logical subjects like math or science where there are proofs, facts and well defined theories, less so for more disorganized and subjective material where rote memorization is required but it can work there too if I can get into the "story". It never fails to bring up, those "wait a minute" and "what now" and "why do it like that" questions I hated having on test day. At least in school, when I got to the point I could "teach" myself, I always made an A+.

Better or Worse, getting more credit and using it responsibly is the key to getting even more credit, particularly the more difficult products like lines of credits, construction loans, restoration loans, business loans and so forth. It's also the key to getting higher balances on new and existing cards. After totally destroying my credit during college, the first card I got again had a $500 limit. 5 year later, I had three cards and about $20K and needed it all to pay for a European business trip that ultimately would be reimbursed by my employer.

A few more years, I had six cards and close to $100K. I also had a $220K mortgage on and $400K house. A builder was preparing to replace a beautiful field beside my house with 60 town homes. I knew I would hate it but that I could also rent my house out for much more than the payments, so I did and bought another $350K historic house with a $260K mortgage while keeping the other. Being almost 100 years old, it needed nearly $120K in work. I paid part in cash and got a line of credit for $60K to finish the job. Done and 8 months later, I refinance the $60K back into the first but the house was now worth $550K, so I made nearly 80K on the deal. I then closed the line of credit. I still have the six cards.

Yes, I've been fortunate but I make an average IT salary. Many can do much more, some may do less at first, but anyone can find a smart ways to use their credit and it pays to develop it. There are three basic rules: One, always pay on time. Two, try to show some but 1% utilization. Three, never close old credit. You can still pay off your cards and avoid interest on rule 2 by letting the statement cut and then paying. For rule 3, with time and a good record, you can probably get your provider to upgrade your card without changing it, so it never has to be closed.

One might assume some 35 years after the advent of PC revolution, there are more than a few grey hairs running around like me with infinitely more knowledge on how to secure a computer than some smart mouth tweener. Having spent years securing their computers, I would not trust any child of mine to do a better job than I would and it's time to put the tired meme that kids know tech better than their parents to bed where it belongs.

No one knows the actual origin of the term "cloud computing" and what it means can legitimately be different depending on who you ask making the effectiveness of the term fairly useless. The only reason non-IT folk latch onto it is because there's a component of "I don't know what's going on" that they can understand and it makes it seem friendly. The op was merely pointing out why it's not.

BTW, the cloud symbol was most often used in the 90's on network diagrams to indicate frame-relay links between sites back before dedicated Internet access was common. There was an aspect of "don't know" associated with it because it used shared links, did not guarantee delivery and frequently had service interruptions. Wikipedia sites this as a possible origin of the term but I think it is the origin of the term having seen how suits quickly latched onto it when it was shown in demos and presentations. Not understanding was something they could grasp.