You've got to be kidding. Gear is easy to replace, especially at today's prices. Photographs are irreplaceable. So what if you lose a few hundred dollars worth of electronics, or even $1-2k? Yeah, that sucks, but it can be replaced, with newer and better stuff. You can probably even get travelers' insurance to handle that.

And when someone steals all your stuff, you're screwed.
Keeping all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea.

Of course, the chances of anything actually happening are slim, but if we have the technology, why not use it?

If you're an American and never heard of her, then you're quite ignorant and obviously never got a decent education. She's an extremely noteworthy person in Americna history. Did you also never hear of Al Capone or Elliot Ness? If you don't know who many big names from the first half of the 20th Century are, then you're missing out on a lot of cultural knowledge that you really need to be considered a "well-educated, informed American".

Chuck Yeager is famous for two things: 1) being the first person to exceed the sound barrier, and 2) being in the "The Right Stuff" movie, where he made the "spam in a can" quip. Not that he wasn't a great pilot, but I think he was made quite a bit more famous by the movie. Earhart only got a movie very recently, long after her ill-fated voyage (starring Hillary Swank, who looks eerily like her).

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but it sure seems like Earhart should have him beat on name recognition.

Orville and Wilbur weren't famous pilots, they were famous inventors. They invented and built the first airplane that could maneuver, instead of taking off, flying a little bit in a straight line, and crashing. They didn't do a lot of piloting.

Earhart is easily one of the top #3 most famous pilots, the other two being Lindbergh and the Red Baron. Earhart gets bonus points because she's female, in an age when women didn't normally do anything besides cook and sew, and did something that few men were brave enough to do (fly around the world).

I don't think they had plastic garbage bags in 1937.

That's assuming you can get enough usable supplies from the plane to do so. What if the plane sank in the ocean and they had to swim to shore, carrying nothing but their clothing? Plus, plastics weren't in such widespread use then as they are now, and those are pretty useful in building solar stills.

No, these were mutant coconut crabs the size of cars. They were the product of experiments by Captain Nemo. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to find refuge in the Nautilus because it was sunk when the island's volcano erupted, turning it into an atoll.

Of course, that's part of her carefully polished public image, but it's all lies, because she doesn't actually do anything for those people. Actions speak louder than words.

Note, however, that things won't be any better with whomever Romney selects as Secretary of State, if he gets elected. It'll all be more of the same.

Calling "the cloud" nonsense is exactly the same as calling the Internet nonsense. "The cloud" is just a stupid marketing term for it, but it's still the Internet. I saw pictures depicting the Internet as a cloud long before "the cloud" came into popular usage.

And calling the Internet nonsense on an Internet forum is the height of hypocrisy.