I did this exact job at my work for a year and a half. I still assist that group from time to time. Where I work we destroy hundreds of drives a day, so obviously we had a machine that would do the job.

For remote sites, however, it took us a while to come up with a good solution, so here's what we did in the meantime, and what you can do also, at home:

Get yourself a technical screwdriver set... yes, one that will work on those screws on the hard drive. Their exact name escapes me at the moment, as I just woke up. Since you know what I'm talking about anyway, get that. Exactly that.

Anyway, open up that puppy, and remove the platters from the spindle.

Generally your platters should be metal. If this is a rare case where they are glass, smashy smashy. If not, get some vice grips, channel locks, pliers, whatever is handy, and fold that platter over like a taco.

We sent a sample like this around to all the major data recovery outfits and they all quoted 5 figure sums with zero guarantees. They probably could get some data off it, but who is going to pay $10k+ to find out?

At that point, is the data secure? About as secure as you can make it without some crazy.

We would do other things after that point, but it was mostly out of due diligence/paranoia than actual data security.

I think the point is that the downfall of Office will be the downfall of all of this software. You pick your battles. If you pick the battle of Libre vs. Star vs. Open you've picked the wrong battle (Linux vs GNU/Linux anyone?).

For a second I thought that they had developed a DRM scheme that would start playing Pop Music 30 seconds into whatever you were listening to. This is much better.

Why would they build a datacenter in California? Electricity is quite expensive there, which is the majority of the operational costs for a datacenter. If I had any money invested there I'd get it out.

Thought about it some more.

Copyleft is just a Copyright.

You cannot have left without right.

Typical. Instead of just defining what copyleft is and isn't we get into a dickering match with people that have more money and resources. Let's get to the point already. In small bites so your grandma can understand in less than 2 minutes.

Here's a start, under typical creative commons copyleft:

Copyright - a way to make sure nobody plagiarizes your material, so you get credit for your work, usually with a motive to make profit.

Copyleft - a way to make sure nobody plagiarizes your material, so you get credit for your work, with little regard to how that material is used, copied, improved, changed, etc.

The main difference being copyright can be used in a Daffy Duck method. "MINE! MINE! MINE!" and copyleft is generally a "Hey, if you want to use this to do something else with, go ahead. Just make sure I get credit."

Flame on.

You did see that it's an Australian site, right? The prices aren't in USD.