I agree with everything you said... But in this instance there's a more fundamental issue.
I'm NOT going to pay DropBox hundreds of dollars a year just for the privilege of replacing my hard drive.
Until they start ruining that with ads too (like Disney and their infamous unskippable trailers).
One of the many advantages to ripping my legally-purchased DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, then running them through HandBrake, is never again having to watch a "coming soon" trailer for a movie that was in the theaters a decade ago.
What will they think of next?
Now, be fair. They thought they were voting for Pat Buchanon.
Seriously - a virtual online camp? A "field trip" hangout?
How about a REAL camp with real, hands-on experiences for kids, Google? How about some first-hand exposure to these amazing real-world makers?
He "sounds needlessly paranoid"? That's kind of an odd thing to say, given that you posted anonymously. Is your name Sergey or Larry, perchance?
Nobody wants to see some pocket-protector-wearing nerd trying to bed Kelly McGillis. Plus the fight scenes would've been incredibly boring.
How exactly is Google good at PR?
Well, they've managed to convince a non-trivial number of people that "do no evil" still drives their decision-making process, for one.
It's unlikely those decision makers are the same people who hard-coded an ssh key into the device. They don't even know what ssh is.
Is it referring to our professional responsibilities, or to our personal computing habits?
At work we use VMs for a good percentage of our servers. At home, though, my VM use is quite limited.
Google = Do No Harm.
Microsoft = Do Harm.
From what I've seen, the difference between the two is Google is better at PR.
Unless you believe that it takes 10 years to plan a new terrorist attack.
Without many of these extraordinary laws in place, the time between highly visible attempts on the World Trade Center was 8 years - first in 1993, then in 2001. So yeah - 10 years between major attempted attacks in an unfriendly country where you don't have complete freedom of movement doesn't seem particularly hard to believe.
Time to buy stock in John Waters' production company!
As always, early adoption will be driven by the porn industry.
That sure worked out well for HD-DVD!
Maybe I missed something: Why encrypt the hard drive if I'm going to tape the password to it?
That was a brain fart on my part. Initially I had typed the part about having the drive and password in two separate locations, then thought "wait, it's a safety deposit box - they can be together" without taking the next obvious step.
The whole point of using a hardcopy is to avoid a number of problems with digital copies, the biggest of which is that harddisks, flash memory, and optical discs all suffer in terms of data longevity. They can also be damaged relatively easily, and, as someone mentioned above, data and hardware formats go obsolete and may be practically inaccessible in relatively short order.
At least some subset of this data won't be static - it'll have to be maintained. At least I hope he's not keeping the same passwords for decades! In that case it seemed silly to me to treat this as a separate problem from the fact (not mentioned by him) that people should keep a separate offsite backup of all their data. He should be doing that as well - so why not kill two birds with one stone?
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
