The surface had quite a bit of potential out of the gate as a tablet. In terms of hardware and OS it was fairly well done. There were two serious problems with it though.
The first was that Microsoft tried to sell it at a 'premium' price from the get go. Widespread speculation before MSRP was released was that for it to be competitive the price was going to have to be roughly have of what it was. The model had some heat and power management issues from a poor choice of chip selection, but was otherwise fairly well executed. You could use the desktop side of the device just like any other Windows 8 device.
The second problem was the companion Surface RT. It looked almost identical from the outside to the Surface but simply wasn't (lower quality screen etc). The bundled version of Office didn't include Outlook and it couldn't be legally used for business purposes per the license. It looked like it had Windows 8, but it didn't and app incompatibility killed you when you discovered that you had to purchase special RT versions for anything, if they were available at all. The only way to ever install anything to the RT was through their market store where everything had to have a minimum $1.50 purchase price.
The confusion between the two devices that were almost exactly the same size, shape and name and functionally very different meant that the very bad Surface RT reputation killed the fairly good Surface. Unfortunately for Microsoft with their arrogance of selling both devices for hundreds of dollars more than they should have from the beginning the Surface never stood a chance to begin with.
Only question is while they dump the devices or while the destroy them?
The H1B war has succeeded and much champagne will be spilled. STEM majors are giving up as the field simply isn't worth going into in this country. Meanwhile I hear that McJobs are hiring and if you work really hard for a long time you might move from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week where you get really, really bad benefits!
I worked at a University for a few years and I saw bright US students routinely drop out of STEM and choose other fields because of outsourcing. Meanwhile the bright international students happily came over, took our STEM classes and are heading back to create the next great thing. We've engineered a future without ourselves, our founding fathers would be ashamed.
Microsoft won't kill this dead before it ever gets out of the gate by making sure that your printers checks with a central database for against anything that could be patent infringing. However, in the event that something could be patent infringing they will offer a service in which they will offer you an immediate license to print your part. Since you license is a legal contract it must be tied to your Microsoft account which will require all of your personal information including you credit card information.
In exchange for Microsoft providing the very valuable service of ensuring that you don't violate someones patent in the privacy of your own home they will extract a 30% royalty of any transaction. The thing store will track all of your purchases in order to make it easier for you (and anyone else) to know what your printing or browsing. They can then offer you "valuable" offers from marketing partners on similar services.
Therefore you can now say it is possible to be financially screwed by Microsoft while making a Microsoft approved screw while screwed by their marketing partners all in the privacy of your own home all while your not getting screwed!
/screwed. I'm claiming patent to this process and donating it to the EFF if it's not already patented dammit.
Tolerance is not someone with 'progressive' values (which are well over a century old by the way). Tolerance is someone that has a set of values, whatever they are and accepts people into their daily life who have diametrically opposing values. If your a flaming gay and can't accept anybody that supports gay marriage your not a tolerant person. If your a straight person and keyed the car of the guy with the gay marriage bumper sticker your not tolerant.
Tolerance is about accepting people in your life who's values are different from your own, and that's what so many people nowadays seems to fail to understand. It doesn't have a god damn thing to do with your political or religious beliefs. It doesn't matter where you live, what you believe in or anything else. The only thing matters is your willingness to accept others into your life that don't share your values.
I've known people that were firmly opposed to gay marriage yet were still friends with gay people and were perfectly comfortable going into a gay bar. Likewise I've known gay people that were militant and intolerant of anyone that did not have a hard line radical view.
Not necessarily the case though. Saudi Arabia, Turkey or any number of other Middle Eastern countries would have also greatly appreciated having a nuclear free Iran. The other countries in the region have a far greater hatred of Iran that stems for a far greater length of time than the US has. The idea that only the US or Israeli would have an interest in writing something like this is nonsensical.
Been around here for over a decade so it's going to be pretty damn hard to call me a paid shill. I've also been more than willing to call out the government on things when they've fucked up. Perhaps, just perhaps, I've formed my own opinion and don't subscribe to groupthink?
I know it's hard to imagine that there are people out there that don't worship Assange, Manning or Snowden as it's pretty easy for the vocal minority to take over a conversation. In the real world though, the vocal minority are just that, a/minority/.
The messenger always has as much to do with the facts as the facts themselves, as well as how they project the facts. Get a report that global warming has been overstated? Might want to check to the back of the report to see if the words "Koch Brothers" are somewhere in there.
Got a poll saying that Americans think unions cost jobs and can't be trusted, might want to see if the Chamber of Commerce wrote it, got a sensationalistic headline that 1 in 4 Women have been raped, might want to find out how those facts were come up it and who came up with them (NOW, and included things like having sex after having 2 Aspirin or Tylenol).
You can't separate the message from the messenger or the facts from the source. That's why scientific data is considered worthless if it can't be repeated completely independently. You need to know the methodology, you need to know the circumstances, the motive, the chain of custody, you need to see if there is corroboration or not.
Now I realize none of this applies if your trying cause political damage where evidence doesn't mean a damn thing and your simply trying to slander someone. After all when your trying to do political damage the facts don't matter and if they come out later well it's too late. Now, if you actually give a damn about the truth, than you'll care about everything I said.
Please tell me how this Snowden guy is doing any of this in the interest of protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA? Remember his original claim was to be protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA that was collecting data on US citizens. He denied trying to simply cause political damage to the US and it's allies. Every single day that goes by his true colors show themselves more and more.
In the beginning I got modded heavily for not subscribing to Slashdot groupthink about Snowden and forming my own opinion. So far every single prediction about this guy has come true, he has consistently shown that he is interested only in causing political damage to the US and and it's allies. People have also started to see through this guy and his popularity has started to fall as they the real person and see he is not simply a whistle blower.
He doesn't want asylum in a freedom loving country because he would rather be holed up in a country that routinely jails and tortures dissidents that aren't pissing of the United States. Why, so that he keep on stroking his ego about the damage that he can personally cause to as many nations as possible.
Sure, they can line right up behind the victims of Iran's and Hezbollah's terror attacks that tend to range from daily to weekly. Would you can to have your case heard after bombings, rocket attacks, hijackings, kidnappings or murders?
As someone who has been the one to/receive/ data by channels like these and has then shut down corruption - more than once, I'm inclined to say that your speaking out of your ass. In no instance has the person reporting the corruption ever faced repercussions, but hey, reality is just a bit more boring than tv.
Go on speaking your hyperbole from the basement of your mothers basement, it will win you a few more +1's from the useful idiots while making you feel just a little bit more self righteous.
Interesting case then, sounds like a few account number or the like. At any rate what I would suggest is that you buy asset tags for securing assets as they made for storing a small amount of data, are difficult to remove and are already made to highly resistant to heat and humidity.
Your other option is to get heavy duty paper that is 'acid-free' from a trusted manufacturer. This is actually more difficult than it sounds as modern paper is pretty much all made with acid based methods. It's why a 1960's version of a book in a book store is often in worse shape than the same book from the late 1800's.
The tricky part is finding acid free paper that you can print on as it's pretty much a novelty item any more for book snobs and archivists. If you can find in your local standard size format you than need to print on it in an ink that is also acid free. I would suggest you head over to an archivist forum for advice on ink's that won't degrade your paper. I once lost a bet with a friend a number of years back as I didn't think bit rot was a real thing, turns out it affects pretty much every single form of media we have.
Since you have such a small amount of data the fairly high cost of supplies for proper acid free materials should be trivial. Once you have them you can simply print redundant copies and read them with a small hand held scanner. I'm used to setting up enterprise asset management systems that included barcode scanners so my suggestion was probably overkill for you;-)
We need more information to be able to answer your question! What kind of barcode scanner? How much information? Are you talking a few pages of account numbers or are you talking reams of source code? How do you plan to get the data once you need it? More than once data recovery project has failed over the years when the data was available but there was no means to recover the data from the media!!
Are you going to keep at least two barcode scanners in your lockbox (a decent one is about $6-$800), what about a license for a product to read the data and it's media? Do you have a preferred operating that you have to use? Is this for legal purposes where you have to maintain the chain of custody?
Do you need the ability to recover data in a hurry, or can you take a couple days to recover data for account numbers for another country, or is this a legal recovery so that you can prove that/you/ wrote the source code to something? Why not use tried and true methods of data archival like tape backup, hard disk, or archival qualities of optical media? It almost seems like your deliberately trying to be obtuse for the sake of being obtuse.
If you simply want privacy go with your pick of an open source crypto program and store with an 2048 bit key or some such thing. For lack of a better way to put it you sound like your asking for the best wrench to hammer a nail into a board with - just get a hammer.
Look, every country that has the ability to spy, spies. Every country that has the ability to spy at a given level, does so. You will notice that every single country that has condemned the US for the NSA's actions has been a country that is a technological backwater. You will notice that every single country that is technological advanced at a given level has not condemned the US. This is not a coincidence.
The simple fact of the matter is that the worlds governments all spy on each others citizens and are all perfectly capable of breeding their own Edward Snowden. Disenfranchisement can happen with any government in any point in history. Governments know it and they don't want to encourage their own Snowden's. What he has to say really isn't that earth shattering, the political ramifications aren't worth it and frankly they have their own spying to hide.
No government is going to stop spying, who the hell wants to be caught with their pants down for the next 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Blitzkrieg, etc....
If there is wrongdoing you can go through your own channels in your own command first, if those don't work you can go directly to your congressmen, as memory from talking with people with clearances there is also a third legal channel as well. Point being he could have affected change entirely by going through legal channels, and that are multiple channels available for exactly those purposes.
Even if he felt that all of those channels were somehow all going to refuse to act on his concerns he could have gone to just an American newspaper with his story about the NSA collecting data about Americans. That alone is a story that any paper in the country would have (and did) run with. However in the real world his concern was not about protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA. His real concern was about inflicting maximum political damage by running stories far beyond the NSA collecting data on American citizens.
The American public is starting to see though him and realize that this is all just a massive ego stroke on his part and his popularity is falling accordingly.
Snowden/is/ a traitor, he has weakened the national security of several countries and has certainly endangered inter-governmental cooperating. Now, unless your living in la la land Russia and the South American states he has been visiting are still routinely known for jailing and killing dissidents, especially of the journalist flavor.
So now that we've taken your hyperbole and shown that it's actually factually accurate let's look at real world changes he affected. At this point you rest assured of a few things:
People with his level of access have had their lives made miserable in his name with new security controls and DLP measures. Other governments with people with his level of access have had their lives made miserable with new security controls and DLP measures. People selling DLP software are making lots of money with government contracts right now. Snowden's family, friends and ex-girlfriend have had their lives ruined by association. People conducting background checks are being more thorough to look for sleepers like Snowden. Exceptions are less likely to be made in case it is a dissident like Snowden (he was an override).
You see Snowden decided to choose the route of maximum political damage instead of maximum change. What he has released goes far beyond a simple set of limited documents about collecting data on Americans. If that was all he released through the proper channels he could be termed a whistle blower. The reality is that he released a lot more than that and he did so in a manner to cause maximum political damage to the US and it's allies. The whole thing had jack to do with protecting American's against overreaching spying by the NSA and everything to do with his ego and how much damage he personally could do to a superpower.
Those three words describe Silicon Valley. Really they do, I've seen that and heard that description for decades from people working there, and more to the point from people no longer working there. Silicon Valley is a trap for the young, once you hit 30 you are no longer employable and either have to move out or scrape by on temp job to temp job.
Silicon Valley is a great place to be from. Ageism is getting so bad in technology that were rapidly reaching parity with strippers. Combine that with H1B and how can anyone in good faith ever recommend a career in technology in the United States?
Countries other than the US that are 'freedom loving' want nothing to do with him. The only countries that are willing to touch him with a ten foot pole are countries with a history of oppressing their own people and their own press. To be blunt the countries who's governments want Snowden are those that have anti-American governments that want him simply to tweak the American government. If he had pulled the same thing in their respective countries they would have at best given him a show trial before shooting him.
The fact of the matter is that what Snowden exposed was a surprise to no one in any national government because every government that can spy does spy. Look at where the condemnations are coming from, they are all coming from countries without the resources to conduct spying at any technological level like that. The first world countries that have those resources aren't condemning spying like that since they are almost certainly already doing it and could just as easily be hosting their own Snowden.
The fact of the matter is that Snowden is just out there trying to inflict maximum damage on the United States and it's allies. If all he cared about was trying to make sure that US citizens weren't being spied on he could have gone about things quite a bit differently to get change instead of political damage. Hell even Russia offered to give him Asylum if he would just his mouth. He refused because all he can focus on is trying to embarrass the US and it's allies. The American public can see that and this is why he is rapidly losing the support of the American public.
Every nation on earth that can spy at any given level does exactly that. This is why you have nation states which have the technological means to spy keeping their mouths shut about the whole Snowden affair. This is also why backwaters like Bolivia and Ecuador are quick to condemn and make an uproar about the whole thing.
Those countries that can spy, do, those that can't, don't - but they would if they could. Why do you think Russia bluntly asked Snowden to stop leaking documents if he wanted asylum? In the real world every such country does the same damn thing and the US just happened to be the one to have their Snowden come forward. It could have just as easily happened to any other country and the world states know it. Why do you think Snowden hasn't had anyone actually grant him amnesty when he has what would seem to be a treasure trove of intelligence?
The US needs a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to privacy.
Nevermind the NSA conspiracy theories, the corps are already doing it almost everything and what they aren't doing the cops are.
Nothing else can stop the march of technology that can and is wholesale systematically slaughtering our privacy. Technology makes it possible to systematically monitor your every move from the time you leave your house to the time return and every interaction you make when you go online, every phone call, instant message, email and mailed letter.
Frankly I can't blame the Euro's for withholding the data, we have jack for data privacy protection, nevermind the whole NSA bit. Almost none of our data has to be encrypted and our standards for protecting data are a joke. We collect everything, dispose of almost nothing and sell or rent it all to the highest bidder. sigh...
This is nothing but scaremongering to spook the masses about the evils of the latest technology. Of course the article fails to mention that people have been improving guns out of secondary materials in places from prisons to school yards for decades. They also fail to properly highlight the fact that the 'gun' blew up when fired and would have maimed the person actually attempting to use it.
The only person that should be scared by this article is the person foolish enough to spend several times the cost of a proper gun on a plastic gun they build themselves that will blow up in their own hands. Meanwhile criminals will continue to bypass the law and get their guns the same ways they always have.
People have been clamoring for tracking of the postal service for decades? Who hasn't wanted some type of tracking for things sent through the post office like they get through Fedex or UPS? As long as they aren't opening the envelopes who cares? This is the literal equivalent to looking at the headers of packets sent over the Internet, meh....
As for tracking of things that are not sent through third party systems, such as people and cars on public streets that is an entirely different story. People forget that computers allow us to automate the absurd and otherwise unthinkable. Nobody has a problem with the policeman in the patrol car looking up a license plate of a passing car. Put that same system in a camera that automatically checks all plates and all of a sudden you have all kinds of implications. What was once absurd is now simply a matter of budget.
I've dealt with cleaning up some nasty data breaches over the years, I've had conversations with Attorney Generals when the breaches were bad enough. Companies fear Attorney Generals about as much as they fear being on the wrong end of the international news.
I've been involved with companies where data breaches happen where Attorney Generals while and while not get involved. The difference is night and day for things like encryption, notification of consumers, risk mitigation and other such steps. Pause and think about it for a moment, do you really think California is breached that much more often than other locations, or do people simply find out because the companies fear being on the wrong end of the Attorney Generals pointy stick?
Attorney Generals that give a damn are good things, they give the security professionals at the companies in their states the leverage they need to actually do the things that they want to do (encryption etc).
Thankfully real space programs prefer to operate with a shred of dignity and class. Next thing you know we would have demands to name a moon somewhere after a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade (Windows 8.0 and the f*cking the start button in Windows 8.1 being the first two). Microsoft Technet was a relatively cheap way for people that made a career out of Microsoft products to get their products for a reasonable price.
This allowed for two very important things, first it allowed for the ecosystem to be license compliant which made it easier to stay in the habit of being license compliant while at work work. The second thing it did was allow workers exposure to products to gain access for skills development. Workers that have exposure to products tends to push for the products that they are familiar with at work.
It's all about the ecosystem, and TechNet was absolutely brilliant for supporting the ecosystem of workers that support their products in the work place. Sure, you can follow their suggestion to switch over to the much more expensive MSDN subscription, but for most workers that is simply too expensive for a personal salary. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot for exploitation of the very people the very workers that make their success possible to begin with in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The surface had quite a bit of potential out of the gate as a tablet. In terms of hardware and OS it was fairly well done. There were two serious problems with it though.
The first was that Microsoft tried to sell it at a 'premium' price from the get go. Widespread speculation before MSRP was released was that for it to be competitive the price was going to have to be roughly have of what it was. The model had some heat and power management issues from a poor choice of chip selection, but was otherwise fairly well executed. You could use the desktop side of the device just like any other Windows 8 device.
The second problem was the companion Surface RT. It looked almost identical from the outside to the Surface but simply wasn't (lower quality screen etc). The bundled version of Office didn't include Outlook and it couldn't be legally used for business purposes per the license. It looked like it had Windows 8, but it didn't and app incompatibility killed you when you discovered that you had to purchase special RT versions for anything, if they were available at all. The only way to ever install anything to the RT was through their market store where everything had to have a minimum $1.50 purchase price.
The confusion between the two devices that were almost exactly the same size, shape and name and functionally very different meant that the very bad Surface RT reputation killed the fairly good Surface. Unfortunately for Microsoft with their arrogance of selling both devices for hundreds of dollars more than they should have from the beginning the Surface never stood a chance to begin with.
Only question is while they dump the devices or while the destroy them?
The H1B war has succeeded and much champagne will be spilled. STEM majors are giving up as the field simply isn't worth going into in this country. Meanwhile I hear that McJobs are hiring and if you work really hard for a long time you might move from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week where you get really, really bad benefits!
I worked at a University for a few years and I saw bright US students routinely drop out of STEM and choose other fields because of outsourcing. Meanwhile the bright international students happily came over, took our STEM classes and are heading back to create the next great thing. We've engineered a future without ourselves, our founding fathers would be ashamed.
More efficient? If he were more efficient he wouldn't have missed the first time.
Microsoft won't kill this dead before it ever gets out of the gate by making sure that your printers checks with a central database for against anything that could be patent infringing. However, in the event that something could be patent infringing they will offer a service in which they will offer you an immediate license to print your part. Since you license is a legal contract it must be tied to your Microsoft account which will require all of your personal information including you credit card information.
In exchange for Microsoft providing the very valuable service of ensuring that you don't violate someones patent in the privacy of your own home they will extract a 30% royalty of any transaction. The thing store will track all of your purchases in order to make it easier for you (and anyone else) to know what your printing or browsing. They can then offer you "valuable" offers from marketing partners on similar services.
Therefore you can now say it is possible to be financially screwed by Microsoft while making a Microsoft approved screw while screwed by their marketing partners all in the privacy of your own home all while your not getting screwed!
Tolerance is not someone with 'progressive' values (which are well over a century old by the way). Tolerance is someone that has a set of values, whatever they are and accepts people into their daily life who have diametrically opposing values. If your a flaming gay and can't accept anybody that supports gay marriage your not a tolerant person. If your a straight person and keyed the car of the guy with the gay marriage bumper sticker your not tolerant.
Tolerance is about accepting people in your life who's values are different from your own, and that's what so many people nowadays seems to fail to understand. It doesn't have a god damn thing to do with your political or religious beliefs. It doesn't matter where you live, what you believe in or anything else. The only thing matters is your willingness to accept others into your life that don't share your values.
I've known people that were firmly opposed to gay marriage yet were still friends with gay people and were perfectly comfortable going into a gay bar. Likewise I've known gay people that were militant and intolerant of anyone that did not have a hard line radical view.
Not necessarily the case though. Saudi Arabia, Turkey or any number of other Middle Eastern countries would have also greatly appreciated having a nuclear free Iran. The other countries in the region have a far greater hatred of Iran that stems for a far greater length of time than the US has. The idea that only the US or Israeli would have an interest in writing something like this is nonsensical.
Been around here for over a decade so it's going to be pretty damn hard to call me a paid shill. I've also been more than willing to call out the government on things when they've fucked up. Perhaps, just perhaps, I've formed my own opinion and don't subscribe to groupthink?
I know it's hard to imagine that there are people out there that don't worship Assange, Manning or Snowden as it's pretty easy for the vocal minority to take over a conversation. In the real world though, the vocal minority are just that, a /minority/.
The messenger always has as much to do with the facts as the facts themselves, as well as how they project the facts. Get a report that global warming has been overstated? Might want to check to the back of the report to see if the words "Koch Brothers" are somewhere in there.
Got a poll saying that Americans think unions cost jobs and can't be trusted, might want to see if the Chamber of Commerce wrote it, got a sensationalistic headline that 1 in 4 Women have been raped, might want to find out how those facts were come up it and who came up with them (NOW, and included things like having sex after having 2 Aspirin or Tylenol).
You can't separate the message from the messenger or the facts from the source. That's why scientific data is considered worthless if it can't be repeated completely independently. You need to know the methodology, you need to know the circumstances, the motive, the chain of custody, you need to see if there is corroboration or not.
Now I realize none of this applies if your trying cause political damage where evidence doesn't mean a damn thing and your simply trying to slander someone. After all when your trying to do political damage the facts don't matter and if they come out later well it's too late. Now, if you actually give a damn about the truth, than you'll care about everything I said.
Please tell me how this Snowden guy is doing any of this in the interest of protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA? Remember his original claim was to be protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA that was collecting data on US citizens. He denied trying to simply cause political damage to the US and it's allies. Every single day that goes by his true colors show themselves more and more.
In the beginning I got modded heavily for not subscribing to Slashdot groupthink about Snowden and forming my own opinion. So far every single prediction about this guy has come true, he has consistently shown that he is interested only in causing political damage to the US and and it's allies. People have also started to see through this guy and his popularity has started to fall as they the real person and see he is not simply a whistle blower.
He doesn't want asylum in a freedom loving country because he would rather be holed up in a country that routinely jails and tortures dissidents that aren't pissing of the United States. Why, so that he keep on stroking his ego about the damage that he can personally cause to as many nations as possible.
Sure, they can line right up behind the victims of Iran's and Hezbollah's terror attacks that tend to range from daily to weekly. Would you can to have your case heard after bombings, rocket attacks, hijackings, kidnappings or murders?
As someone who has been the one to /receive/ data by channels like these and has then shut down corruption - more than once, I'm inclined to say that your speaking out of your ass. In no instance has the person reporting the corruption ever faced repercussions, but hey, reality is just a bit more boring than tv.
Go on speaking your hyperbole from the basement of your mothers basement, it will win you a few more +1's from the useful idiots while making you feel just a little bit more self righteous.
Interesting case then, sounds like a few account number or the like. At any rate what I would suggest is that you buy asset tags for securing assets as they made for storing a small amount of data, are difficult to remove and are already made to highly resistant to heat and humidity.
Your other option is to get heavy duty paper that is 'acid-free' from a trusted manufacturer. This is actually more difficult than it sounds as modern paper is pretty much all made with acid based methods. It's why a 1960's version of a book in a book store is often in worse shape than the same book from the late 1800's.
The tricky part is finding acid free paper that you can print on as it's pretty much a novelty item any more for book snobs and archivists. If you can find in your local standard size format you than need to print on it in an ink that is also acid free. I would suggest you head over to an archivist forum for advice on ink's that won't degrade your paper. I once lost a bet with a friend a number of years back as I didn't think bit rot was a real thing, turns out it affects pretty much every single form of media we have.
Since you have such a small amount of data the fairly high cost of supplies for proper acid free materials should be trivial. Once you have them you can simply print redundant copies and read them with a small hand held scanner. I'm used to setting up enterprise asset management systems that included barcode scanners so my suggestion was probably overkill for you ;-)
We need more information to be able to answer your question! What kind of barcode scanner? How much information? Are you talking a few pages of account numbers or are you talking reams of source code? How do you plan to get the data once you need it? More than once data recovery project has failed over the years when the data was available but there was no means to recover the data from the media!!
Are you going to keep at least two barcode scanners in your lockbox (a decent one is about $6-$800), what about a license for a product to read the data and it's media? Do you have a preferred operating that you have to use? Is this for legal purposes where you have to maintain the chain of custody?
Do you need the ability to recover data in a hurry, or can you take a couple days to recover data for account numbers for another country, or is this a legal recovery so that you can prove that /you/ wrote the source code to something? Why not use tried and true methods of data archival like tape backup, hard disk, or archival qualities of optical media? It almost seems like your deliberately trying to be obtuse for the sake of being obtuse.
If you simply want privacy go with your pick of an open source crypto program and store with an 2048 bit key or some such thing. For lack of a better way to put it you sound like your asking for the best wrench to hammer a nail into a board with - just get a hammer.
Look, every country that has the ability to spy, spies. Every country that has the ability to spy at a given level, does so. You will notice that every single country that has condemned the US for the NSA's actions has been a country that is a technological backwater. You will notice that every single country that is technological advanced at a given level has not condemned the US. This is not a coincidence.
The simple fact of the matter is that the worlds governments all spy on each others citizens and are all perfectly capable of breeding their own Edward Snowden. Disenfranchisement can happen with any government in any point in history. Governments know it and they don't want to encourage their own Snowden's. What he has to say really isn't that earth shattering, the political ramifications aren't worth it and frankly they have their own spying to hide.
No government is going to stop spying, who the hell wants to be caught with their pants down for the next 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Blitzkrieg, etc....
If there is wrongdoing you can go through your own channels in your own command first, if those don't work you can go directly to your congressmen, as memory from talking with people with clearances there is also a third legal channel as well. Point being he could have affected change entirely by going through legal channels, and that are multiple channels available for exactly those purposes.
Even if he felt that all of those channels were somehow all going to refuse to act on his concerns he could have gone to just an American newspaper with his story about the NSA collecting data about Americans. That alone is a story that any paper in the country would have (and did) run with. However in the real world his concern was not about protecting American citizens from an overreaching NSA. His real concern was about inflicting maximum political damage by running stories far beyond the NSA collecting data on American citizens.
The American public is starting to see though him and realize that this is all just a massive ego stroke on his part and his popularity is falling accordingly.
Snowden /is/ a traitor, he has weakened the national security of several countries and has certainly endangered inter-governmental cooperating. Now, unless your living in la la land Russia and the South American states he has been visiting are still routinely known for jailing and killing dissidents, especially of the journalist flavor.
So now that we've taken your hyperbole and shown that it's actually factually accurate let's look at real world changes he affected. At this point you rest assured of a few things:
People with his level of access have had their lives made miserable in his name with new security controls and DLP measures.
Other governments with people with his level of access have had their lives made miserable with new security controls and DLP measures.
People selling DLP software are making lots of money with government contracts right now.
Snowden's family, friends and ex-girlfriend have had their lives ruined by association.
People conducting background checks are being more thorough to look for sleepers like Snowden.
Exceptions are less likely to be made in case it is a dissident like Snowden (he was an override).
You see Snowden decided to choose the route of maximum political damage instead of maximum change. What he has released goes far beyond a simple set of limited documents about collecting data on Americans. If that was all he released through the proper channels he could be termed a whistle blower. The reality is that he released a lot more than that and he did so in a manner to cause maximum political damage to the US and it's allies. The whole thing had jack to do with protecting American's against overreaching spying by the NSA and everything to do with his ego and how much damage he personally could do to a superpower.
Those three words describe Silicon Valley. Really they do, I've seen that and heard that description for decades from people working there, and more to the point from people no longer working there. Silicon Valley is a trap for the young, once you hit 30 you are no longer employable and either have to move out or scrape by on temp job to temp job.
Silicon Valley is a great place to be from. Ageism is getting so bad in technology that were rapidly reaching parity with strippers. Combine that with H1B and how can anyone in good faith ever recommend a career in technology in the United States?
Countries other than the US that are 'freedom loving' want nothing to do with him. The only countries that are willing to touch him with a ten foot pole are countries with a history of oppressing their own people and their own press. To be blunt the countries who's governments want Snowden are those that have anti-American governments that want him simply to tweak the American government. If he had pulled the same thing in their respective countries they would have at best given him a show trial before shooting him.
The fact of the matter is that what Snowden exposed was a surprise to no one in any national government because every government that can spy does spy. Look at where the condemnations are coming from, they are all coming from countries without the resources to conduct spying at any technological level like that. The first world countries that have those resources aren't condemning spying like that since they are almost certainly already doing it and could just as easily be hosting their own Snowden.
The fact of the matter is that Snowden is just out there trying to inflict maximum damage on the United States and it's allies. If all he cared about was trying to make sure that US citizens weren't being spied on he could have gone about things quite a bit differently to get change instead of political damage. Hell even Russia offered to give him Asylum if he would just his mouth. He refused because all he can focus on is trying to embarrass the US and it's allies. The American public can see that and this is why he is rapidly losing the support of the American public.
Every nation on earth that can spy at any given level does exactly that. This is why you have nation states which have the technological means to spy keeping their mouths shut about the whole Snowden affair. This is also why backwaters like Bolivia and Ecuador are quick to condemn and make an uproar about the whole thing.
Those countries that can spy, do, those that can't, don't - but they would if they could. Why do you think Russia bluntly asked Snowden to stop leaking documents if he wanted asylum? In the real world every such country does the same damn thing and the US just happened to be the one to have their Snowden come forward. It could have just as easily happened to any other country and the world states know it. Why do you think Snowden hasn't had anyone actually grant him amnesty when he has what would seem to be a treasure trove of intelligence?
The US needs a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to privacy.
Nevermind the NSA conspiracy theories, the corps are already doing it almost everything and what they aren't doing the cops are.
Nothing else can stop the march of technology that can and is wholesale systematically slaughtering our privacy. Technology makes it possible to systematically monitor your every move from the time you leave your house to the time return and every interaction you make when you go online, every phone call, instant message, email and mailed letter.
Frankly I can't blame the Euro's for withholding the data, we have jack for data privacy protection, nevermind the whole NSA bit. Almost none of our data has to be encrypted and our standards for protecting data are a joke. We collect everything, dispose of almost nothing and sell or rent it all to the highest bidder. sigh...
This is nothing but scaremongering to spook the masses about the evils of the latest technology. Of course the article fails to mention that people have been improving guns out of secondary materials in places from prisons to school yards for decades. They also fail to properly highlight the fact that the 'gun' blew up when fired and would have maimed the person actually attempting to use it.
The only person that should be scared by this article is the person foolish enough to spend several times the cost of a proper gun on a plastic gun they build themselves that will blow up in their own hands. Meanwhile criminals will continue to bypass the law and get their guns the same ways they always have.
People have been clamoring for tracking of the postal service for decades? Who hasn't wanted some type of tracking for things sent through the post office like they get through Fedex or UPS? As long as they aren't opening the envelopes who cares? This is the literal equivalent to looking at the headers of packets sent over the Internet, meh....
As for tracking of things that are not sent through third party systems, such as people and cars on public streets that is an entirely different story. People forget that computers allow us to automate the absurd and otherwise unthinkable. Nobody has a problem with the policeman in the patrol car looking up a license plate of a passing car. Put that same system in a camera that automatically checks all plates and all of a sudden you have all kinds of implications. What was once absurd is now simply a matter of budget.
I've dealt with cleaning up some nasty data breaches over the years, I've had conversations with Attorney Generals when the breaches were bad enough. Companies fear Attorney Generals about as much as they fear being on the wrong end of the international news.
I've been involved with companies where data breaches happen where Attorney Generals while and while not get involved. The difference is night and day for things like encryption, notification of consumers, risk mitigation and other such steps. Pause and think about it for a moment, do you really think California is breached that much more often than other locations, or do people simply find out because the companies fear being on the wrong end of the Attorney Generals pointy stick?
Attorney Generals that give a damn are good things, they give the security professionals at the companies in their states the leverage they need to actually do the things that they want to do (encryption etc).
Thankfully real space programs prefer to operate with a shred of dignity and class. Next thing you know we would have demands to name a moon somewhere after a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...
This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade (Windows 8.0 and the f*cking the start button in Windows 8.1 being the first two). Microsoft Technet was a relatively cheap way for people that made a career out of Microsoft products to get their products for a reasonable price.
This allowed for two very important things, first it allowed for the ecosystem to be license compliant which made it easier to stay in the habit of being license compliant while at work work. The second thing it did was allow workers exposure to products to gain access for skills development. Workers that have exposure to products tends to push for the products that they are familiar with at work.
It's all about the ecosystem, and TechNet was absolutely brilliant for supporting the ecosystem of workers that support their products in the work place. Sure, you can follow their suggestion to switch over to the much more expensive MSDN subscription, but for most workers that is simply too expensive for a personal salary. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot for exploitation of the very people the very workers that make their success possible to begin with in the first place.