We don't bother with anything as common as sand up in shark bay

I live in Perth (the capital of Western Australia not the UK one) I'm 20 minutes drive from the city centre, 15 minutes drive to wonderful beaches, and 10 minutes drives in several directions to bushland remote enough that if I had a heart attack while walking they would never find the body. Australia is a big empty place, your biggest dangers (apart from hitting a roo, or dozing off and driving into oncoming road trains (single lane 110kmph YAY)) is not making it to the next petrol station. Its ok in urban areas, but as soon as you leave metro... better make sure you know your fuel efficiency. But if you do stray off a main road, even by accident, its not like there is any space to turn around. Up in shark bay we pulled off onto a beach carpark and went down a sudden incline over the shells. No way to turn back and the only way was forward and hope the loop put you back somewhere else. Long story short sedan started to bottom out so we lost our nerve and tried to turn around. Big mistake, soon as we left the compressed trail we sank to the chassis at all 4 wheels. No reception, had hike through the bush back to the main road to hail a tourist bus to get the townsite to send out a truck to pull us out.

You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area? Well Apple maps just takes you through a different national park and dumps you there. 45C is also 113F. And there is no phone reception or water. And people have already been stuck for 24 hours

The Camera. Being able to record 1080p video and take 8M photos is huge if you have a kid. Trust me, you want nice photos you can blow up or view full screen but you also want to record incase they do something cute? Now you can do both. Single biggest reason I can not move to another phone. My wife has the XL with 4g, and I'll admit that is probably a better buy than my One X since I don't seem to get as much benefit from the quad core chip but it is a pleasure to dev for too. Other "better" things start to get subjective and include the 25gb bundled drop box for two years, but I really do prefer the build quality on the One series compared to my mates S3. His feels cheap and plastic in comparison. Finally I know I'm going to get flamed for this... but I actually do like sense. >.> yes I know point and laugh but it is nice to use for my mid 30's self. Oh and that screen.... <3

Ah also one thing that is forgotten since many people still have rotational harddrives as well, SSD's are silent. Current system is very quiet without any mechanical disks, I don't feel like I have a high pitched turbine sitting on my desk anymore.

Agreed! I've gone a step further though. The system I built in May has 32GB of mem, 3 SSD's, no optical or spinning disks. Swapfile is off. As a dev box it is incredible to not have to wait on the system any more, and for anything that is larger and not often accessed such as raw video file, music and isos (MAPS subscription before I get accused), that sits on the NAS. Considering 512GB SSD's are not that unreasonable now, I don't see my self buying hardrives for a desktop or laptop in future. The way I see it my first WD 120GB hardive back in the P3 days set me back $440 wholesale, so drives are just super cheap these days by comparison ;)

Actually just to clear up a small correction, although the universe is 14 Billion years old it is actually 46 Billion light years across due to duper expansion in the few instances after the big bang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_contents.2C_structure.2C_and_laws (please feel free to insert any and all required weasel words to satisfy your pedantic requirements "to the best of our knowledge", "as theorised", +- etc)

Tight fitting glassware, a thermometer, and a source of heat you can control allows you to capture the liquid that boils off at exactly 100 C. You boil off organics etc first, raise temp slowly, collect vapors that phase change at 100C, that is your safe to drink water, and toss out the stuff that is left behind eg water with lots of heavy metals (these can also make you very sick). Repeat several times if heavy contamination suspected or to be extra sure.

My Summary was poorly worded, yours is better. Yes I was more interested in data surviving as opposed to specifically my data. There are several thought experiments I'd love to explore but thought the summary was already getting too long, Everything from short term events where people are more or less ok initially, and after a period of time the world tries to return to normality, to civilization is destroyed and what is left when we get rediscovered. I joke with my wife that in 10,000 years time an archaeologist will dig up a horders house and then write a paper about how we all held plastic drink bottles in such high regard we would line our walls with them, and the poor of us would only have a few in our dwellings.

The post should have been more clear, I wasn't specifically talking about my data, but any data. If it hit today, what would be left of the wealth of knowledge that exists and how can we plan to save it?

I was thinking even more mundane than this, the dyes in CDR's are only semi stable, Fill a cdr, leave it on a desk where it gets sun through a window for a week, try and read back data. My experience is that you'd get pretty much nothing. I suspect a burst of high energy particles/x-rays and everything else that would bombard the earth would have a similar effect?

Grab the glassware first from a medical supplier. Tight fitting glassware plus source of fire > distillation, and you can pretty much have all the potable water you can drink.

no but I might just write that down :P

Believe it or not this isn't part of some big promotional thing, I'm WAY too far off from completion for that, if it was I'd have at least waited for the website to be up or put some fresh content. It was a fun little thought experiment. Short of sending data off world could humanity store it in a way that way if catastrophic events (pick your favorite) occurred all would not be lost.

That was along the line I was hoping the convo would go, not specifically my own data. A nice what if scenario, is there anything we could do to save data. CDR bit was in ref to high UV etc and was a longer question about various near extinction level events. I know indies can have massive egos but its not THAT massive lol