Exactly. Good encryption makes cloud backup a perfectly safe option. Encrypt your stuff something good and secure like GnuPG, stick it in one or more cloud providers, and then just worry about backing up your keys. Keys are small enough that you can even keep your backups as hard copies, and you only have to do the physical backup once instead of every week or whatever. It's a pain in the ass to type hard copies in correctly, but printed paper survives a lot better in a fire safe than digital media. Keep one easy to use digital copy and one heat-resistant paper copy in your fire safe and do the same in a safe deposit box somewhere.

I've been emailing myself important encrypted documents for years and letting gmail index them for easy retrieval. I can't imagine going back to dealing with having to regularly get physical media backups somewhere off-site and safe. It's just bits. Use computers to move them.

I rather suspect it's the Vineans using magma to create artificial land for themselves.

...as long as they're cool with all of our multinational tech companies doing the same favor for the Chinese government. I mean, laws are laws, right?

Properly stored tape has a lifetime of decades. See if your hard drive will spin up after sitting for one decade.

When I was 7 years old I learnt Basic on a Ti99/4A, and that didn't stop me from running through the woods, climbing trees, riding bicycles, etc.

This. And it's way scarier than brutality. If the cops don't cover for each other and they can't file false reports, you can usually avoid getting roughed up or shot by not getting physical with them (although recent videos show for certain that even that's no guarantee--it just protects you from malice, not incompetence). Once they start filing false reports and backing up each other's lies, they're effectively beyond any control. They can do literally anything and get away with it, and a force that has unlimited power and no oversight will attract and eventually be dominated by people who will abuse it. That kind of culture is what turns healthy democracies into pre-industrial hellholes and keeps pre-industrial hellholes from ever developing into healthy democracies.

I'm willing to cut the officer a (very) small amount of slack here. People are calling it a "cold-blooded" shooting. It looks like more of a hot-blooded shooting. They'd been struggling and he was amped up. Hitting the guy with the TASER and having him not fall probably scared the hell out of him. He wasn't able to handle himself properly and he did a very wrong thing. He should answer for that just as any of us would answer for it if we shot somebody after a fight. But falsifying the report? That's fucking cold-blooded. Planting evidence (if that's what that object is)? Terrifying. I watched the video and was distrubed by the shooting, but casually dropping an object next to the body and calling in that he had a weapon? That gave me chills. That's the sort of thing that should be a capital offense if anything should. That's a direct, premeditated attack on civilization. None of us are safe.

I use MxTube on (jailbroken) iPhone to store offline copies of youtube videos I want to watch, there are no ads left there except for the discreet bottom banner in the main menu of the app itself. I have to store the videos because my commute train goes through big no-reception zones most of the time and I only have a 2Gb/month plan anyway, I grab the videos at home from the wifi the evening before.

I would so use an official Youtube app that would let me store the videos locally, even with the ads. I have no adblock on my browser - if the ads are annoying I just go read something else and never return.

Pretty sure this is the last option figuring on the poll.

Because Photoshop is THE standard. GIMP lacks several key features for commercial use.

Most patterned contacts are printed with arrays of dots and are easy to detect. They also don't move as the iris expands and contracts, which is a dead giveaway.

Most iris scanning equipment doesn't attempt to detect patterned lenses. It is, however, possible to detect them.

As for retinal scans, I don't know of any places where they're in general use and I'm not familiar enough with the failure modes to know whether contacts would affect them.

I'm definitely interested in expert input from somebody who confuses iris scans and retinal scans.

You can "get past" an iris scan with patterned contacts, but patterned contacts are also detectable. If they're enforcing a "no patterend contacts" rule, you're going to have a very hard time going undetected.

It could be even more interesting than that. My idea works something like this:

1) These things aren't so much visas as a "right to employ one foreign worker of class X." It should be transferrable with minimal friction. Just register the owner of the token and the name of the employee you're using it for.
2) If you want to hire a foreign worker, go right ahead. By his start date, you just need one of those tokens. Buy it at auction from the government when new ones are issued or buy it on the secondary market.
3) The worker himself can bring his own token. If he's a kick ass engineer with a lot of cash in the bank from kick ass engineering, there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to pay his own way and get rid of market uncertainty.
4) Those tokens can be broken down by job class (tech, medical, etc.).
5) The tokens have a shelf life before they expire. If you only need somebody for a year, you can buy one that's expiring in a year. Or by one with 2 years left on it and resell it if you're up for taking some market risk. The same can use token after token and stay here indefinitely as long as somebody is willing to pay.

The most interesting thing that I can see about it is the information it gives us. The prices of the various work classes would tell us how impacted each profession is. The prices of the tokens at different maturities will give us a "yield curve" that is actually a market projection of future demand for a given skill set.

Another benefit is that the best and the brightest really do get the right to work. We don't deport a genius who was worth an extra $150K a year just because of some paperwork snafu or bad luck in a lottery. We don't give a buffoon a visa just because he was in the right place at the right time.

I've been kicking it around for a while and I haven't figured out any obvious flaws. I'm open to hearing any if anybody has ideas.

It seems like we could easily get around this problem by restructuring the system so that visas are auctioned off and can be resold. If it's possible to underpay an otherwise equally valuable foreign worker by $20K, the market price of the visa should build that in and do away with the profit in doing so. Even better, we can look at the market price for visas an decide whether the tech industry is telling the truth about shortages.

Unless I'm reading the statistics incorrectly, that's a difference of nearly $1.4 billion dollars in Q4 of last year alone. Mr. Cook may believe in it that much, but he's not spending his own money. If you're going to spend $1.4B in investor money, make sure you have a *really* good explanation when the investors ask you why you did it. Apple isn't just Tim Cook's vehicle for social change. It's also a company that makes tech products for profit.

Given that, it seems like he's picking his battles pretty wisely and getting a solid amount of public response for his buck.