Additionally, an unscrupulous person could take advantage of the current uproar over Internet privacy by claiming that they would develop a snoop-proof email system, collecting those plentiful community-funded dollars, and running off with it. Wish I'd thought of it myself, actually. The guys at paypal pretty clearly did

No, it's slashdot. Whether that makes it better or worse would make for a reasonable discussion. If you're aware of a place where reasonable discussions happen on the Internet, feel free to clue me in. We'll go there and have one. I would rule out any of the sites thusfar mentioned.

I'm a little surprised at the number of people who seem to be taking this seriously. I guess that explains why I'm not suited to a career in marketing.

The article isn't clear on the comparisons either, but I think you are correct.

The writer believes that "The Cloud" has little/no reliance on networking or storage. That's silly. Infrastructure matters. Pretending it doesn't is perilous. "The Cloud" doesn't change that, it just moves that infrastructure further away from the end user. That doesn't mean it disappears.

Because the computers are down?

I'm not crazy about the way that's phrased, but you are essentially correct. Establishing backup data centers, populating them with hardware, purchasing additional software licenses, establishing, testing and maintaining fail over procedures is nontrivial. When you consider the overall health of the airline industry, it's not surprising that the extra tens of millions of dollars were not spent.

It'd be interesting to know how many millions of dollars this will end up costing US Airways. I'll bet accepting the problem saves money over solving it. If you had a car worth $2000, you wouldn't spend $10000 to insure it. That's a rational decision.

You can't fly unless you can prove your aircraft has had all required maintenance done. There are also rules about the number of hours per day crew members are allowed to be in the air. I suspect these records could be printed and used if it were a planned outage but this wasn't.

I work for one of those forward looking IT departments that advocates allowing users to use their personal iPads for work. We also allow them to connect their own personal wireless routers to the network. Problem solved!

The aliens?

Here, here!

Sure. It's just data, right?

There are those who believe the cold war was won because Communism just doesn't work well.

So long as they hire someone for me to collaborate with who isn't an idiot.