Not a thing, just very early to to the party.

Never seen a UID that close to mine, we must have joined the same week.

Ahem.

During the cold war, the Soyuz capsules were equipped with a special pistol that could fire in a vacuum. I don't think it was for defending against the random alien that might wander by.

I'd be a bit nervous putting that much extra load on my neck and then getting on an inertia ride. Seems like there would be a very literal breaking point.

MailChimp sounds like a company that I'll go out of my way to avoid. Seems that their chief data scientist should have run this by their chief privacy officer before he slapped his companies name on it.

If your car doesn't start immediately on the first turn of the key, you die of multiple gunshot wounds.

The history of the Walt Disney company following Walt's death in 1966 appears to be a strong analog for this situation. The company was driven by the vision of one man leading a team of highly talented individuals. When Walt died, the company went into a kind of auto-pilot paralysis, with everyone asking themselves 'what would Walt do?'. This was all well and good, except for the single critical fact that Walt was considered a genius because nobody could predict what he would do next, or how he would accomplish it. The focus on quality stayed, but the unpredictable spark of creativity wasn't something that you could capture by trying to put yourself into someone else's head. The company went into a stagnating decline that would last nearly two decades.

TL;DR - You can't innovate by trying to guess what a creative genius would have done, you have to find a new one.

True, but there are ways to get a reasonably high level of confidence that something will happen. Most flash utils that I've dealt with either do no checking on the image, which is awful, or simply check it for size, extension, or a basic checksum. I'm guessing that this is because the developers believe that only an insane person would try to flash a .jpg or whatever to their BIOS. Since this is one of a very few things that can actually make your computer unusable, you would think that they would take more care, but they don't. As for testing, most of the flash utilities that I've used give you at least two chances to confirm that you really want to perform the flash, usually the last one is after the new BIOS has been read in and, presumably, passed any checks being done. If you were very familiar with the flash program and had the fortitude, you could run the process right up to the point of no return and then say 'no', and I would be pretty confident that something bad would have happened should you have gone ahead...

First, get truecrypt, that takes care of your data.

  Now then, If you have the spark of evil in you, here's the plan.

    1. Set up multi-boot config.
    2. Create a bootable partition that has enough OS on it to run the drive and network, name it something interesting like 'Confidential'.
    3. Get the BIOS flash utils for your netbook, create a corrupt bios image that will still pass muster enough to install.
    4. Set up a boot time process on the netbook that does a 'wget' from a web site that you control. If it gets a file, quietly flash the BIOS with what it downloads.

    If you ever get ripped off, move the nasty BIOS image to the file location on your web site and bask in the glow of pure wickedness...

    You can test this with a valid BIOS image, but don't look at me if something terrible happens, you're playing with fire here.

markup artists?

Good points, all. I use a 500GB drive at home to do back up. I have an DLT8000, but it's just not worth the trouble to dig it out and get it hooked up anymore. It doesn't really protect me against physical hardship, since the backup drive is kept in the same house as the primary, but it's a nice insurance policy against drive failure and human error. For a small web company that I'm working with, we're using Amazon S3 and JungleDisk for their Windows based app server. I'm not sold on it yet, but it's another option and seems to be a reasonable way to make sure critical data is off site.
    The move to commodity pricing on tapes has been a nice development for us, I remember paying upwards of $200 for DTF2 tapes...

I think that you aren't really considering the power of scale in this issue. As of last Friday, I had nearly 6000 LTO-3 tapes in rotation. Granted, about 2500 of those are long term archives, and only get pulled in to do a restore, or when we re-tension or migrate media (2yrs. & 6yrs), but this kind of scale makes the cost of drives (14), and even tape robots level out greatly. My concerns are media stability, transportability, and tracking. Snapshots to drive surely have a place, and help us keep our service level for quick restores high, but for any large (or medium, like us) storage installation, tape is the only real option.