The idea is to separate the five, so that it would be impractical for all five to know each other or to break your trust. So for example, your dentist that you've gone to for 20 years, your lawyer, a trusted coworker, your wife, and your brother in China.

Of course, the 3 and 5 are not magic numbers. You could make it 12 out of 13 if you're really paranoid. You could make it 5 out of 25 if you want very low possibility of your data being lost (for example a large earthquake).

You're reinventing the wheel. Public key cryptography allows a key to be split up, so that you need a minimum of X out of Y pieces to recover the key. Split the key into 5 pieces where 3 are enough to unlock it, and hand it out to lawyer, friends, co-workers, etc.

Have you worked with service providers? From the time you've dialed their number, what is your estimate of how long it takes to get someone on the line who can lock down an entire corporate account? Remember that there's a big authentication issue there - how do they know it's not a prank call?

By comparison, I can get to our server center and completely isolate us and all our data from the Internet in under 10 minutes.

Our offsite backups are put in a metal box and taken offsite. Unless you plan on hijacking a truck, it's a lot harder deleting our data than using a nice control panel on the web.

I think you're severely underestimating the numbers who can set up Roku or DVR on their own. Last year was the worst stretch for pay-TV ever. Apparently, a lot of people are figuring it out, because 8% of US households got rid of cable last year, and the trend has not peaked yet.

But there's a larger issue, because we're talking about two paths in the US. One is more mindless consumption, more cheap Chinese electronics that have to be replaced every two years, more useless channels, more keeping up with the Jones. The other is being mindful about consumption, simplifying life, and reevaluating what's really necessary. Everyone assumes the first path is inevitable, hence all the power saving talk.

Stop being a pedantic asshole.

Of course most people use electricity. My point is that you can reduce the amount of gadgets in your house, which is a better idea than accumulating even more materialistic crap and trying to save the planet my making it "green". Amazingly, a large percentage of the world's population survives just fine without a rotating antenna on their roof.

Uhh... if you don't have cable boxes, they don't use power? Sorry I didn't explain the logic at a 5th grade level. My antenna sits in the window and connects to the DVR, which is unplugged except for the rare occasion there's something on broadcast TV I want to record. The whole mess is on a power strip that I turn off when I'm not watching TV. I use a $35 Killawatt to see how much each device uses, so there are no surprises.

Yes, I have a device to turn my antenna for better reception. It's called "my hand".

Americans are always looking for the technological fix. Does anyone really need TV's in every room including the guest bathroom? Just reduce your consumption and try living a little simpler.

Maybe if you have three cable boxes and a monthly cable bill, you can save a lot MORE money by just canceling cable.

Got rid of Charter two years ago - now I have a ChannelMaster for OTA, and a couple of Roku boxes. Feels nice not spending that $90 a month.

If you look directly overhead, you'll see my point sailing past your head. Obviously no one has run a sub-2 marathon, which is why the statement is true, yet useless.

Everyone knows that poor people don't eat well. But there's a complex nexus of factors involved - upbringing, inability to delay gratification, food deserts, unavailability of transport for large items, no cooking facilities, etc. So when some suburban guy with a car says "well, the poor should just eat more fruit and vegetables", it's not so simple.

If you move your legs fast enough and take long enough strides, you'll be able to run a marathon in under 2 hours.

My statement is just as epistemologically correct as yours, and every bit as useless...

None of your examples are "intelligent". They are the opposite - highly specialized systems that are completely incapable of generalized learning. This is why the Turing test is so effective:

(1) Ask Google Search what's the hardest thing it's had to search for.
(2) Ask Big Blue what it thinks of the Sicilian.

Your watered down version of AI is what the corporations love to push - ooh, our new game has artificial intelligence enemies that adapt to your strategies! Ooh, Siri is artificially intelligent and knows what you want! It's load of bullshit. The whole idea of hard vs soft AI has been promulgated by frustrated researchers who have made no real progress in the last thirty years. As us lay people call it - "moving the goalposts".

The Turing Test is the ONLY test we have for artificial intelligence. Every other year we get some research team or the other claiming that their system is as intelligent as a dog, and now it's just a matter of scaling. The Turing Test is analogous to the test the Patent Office has for perpetual motion machines - if you can't pass the test, then you're not there yet. Simple, and easy to measure.

This will not work. "Available power" is not the same for different people. If you devise your key so that you will be able to break it in 20 years on a fast (projected) computer, a distributed project might be able to break it in 3 years. Remember that in 20 years, you want to be able to decode the data relatively easily, you can't assume that you will have 20,000 distributed nodes available.

Yes, of course you can trust it. It offers +12 resistance against National Security Letters.

This is not "solving" it, it's just following an algorithm which guarantees a solution. It's the equivalent of calculating a binary sum for Nim on each turn and removing the correct number of stones. You don't have to understand anything about Nim, or look more than a move ahead, you just have to mindlessly calculate that sum and remove whatever stones the algorithm tells you to do.

Truly solving a cube would be working out a plan based on that _particular_ initial combination, rather than something like "move all the yellow to one side". I only knew two people who could do that, and it took them on the order of 2-3 hours each to solve a given cube.