MS has been on the way down for a long, long time.
If you think Balmer's job is to take it to new heights, I personally think you're stupid. He's not the man for that kind of job, and everyone knows it.
His job is to keep the ship afloat as long as possible, to make the inevitable decline as slow and smooth as possible. And yes, he has been doing quite well on that task. Time and time again we on/., nerds in general and sometimes even the tech press have predicted MS imminent demise, but Balmer has managed to prevent any serious crash & burn.
I also realize that the fucking Sun has much more effect on the climate than we ever will.
You need to brush up your knowledge. You have a great opportunity because the sun is currently entering a rare low activity phase (google "Maunder Minimum").
More importantly: The Sun cycles are an extensively studied subject. We have a very good knowledge about them and their effect on climate. And, guess what, this effect is figured in when scientists talk about climate change.
The earth will have thousands of years where te ice caps are nearing Texas. It has happened many time in the past and will happen may more times with or without us. Most people are fucking retarded when it comes to climate.
Yes, it has happened many times. The earth is a huge ball of rock, it'll survive pretty much no matter what. It won't give a damn if temperatures go up to a couple hundred degrees - see Venus, she's also doing just fine.
Except, of course, that there's almost certainly no life there.
Climate change isn't about protecting the environment. It's about protecting us, you stupid idiot. The only retard in this discussion is you, because you don't understand what the effect of changes in climate really is. Go ask some people who know about global food production, because you can already measure it there. In a few years, you'll be able to measure it in casualties. Human casualties.
In small words it says "whether one wishes to know about science or religion, there is a place for teachers."
Religious indoctrination is not teaching. There is a very important difference between science and religion: One is evidence-based, and the other isn't. In one a teacher shows you things you can then do for yourself, and build upon. In the other, you are asked to believe with no evidence or proof. In one, if you can show your teacher was wrong and a different answer is better, you are a hero. In the other... well, fortunately the times where you'd be burnt at the stake are past.
Religion and science could not be further apart. The fact that people talk about them, including teaching and "teaching", is about the only thing they have in common. Don't confuse them because of a random correlation.
I beleive he was taking a more inclusive view about the abstract hierarchy of church leadership and the preisthood in general rather than the very narrow view of the Vatican specifically.
He said "Vatican", not church. He certainly meant the institution and not the plot of land, I'll grant you that. From the way he consistently spoke about the Vatican, not the church, I would not assume he means something he doesn't say. Even within the catholic church, the Vatican is a special case.
Really, If the GP only meant the Vatican specifically then his point would have been specious.
Would it? I'm pretty sure the old men who enjoy the pleasures of having their own tiny state would disagree violently. There have been a few power-struggles within the catholic church regarding the position of the Vatican over the past decade or two. I don't think that would happen if it doesn't matter.
There's a difference between being a common man with common sense and being someone who claims he holds the keys to heaven, knows right and wrong and is entitled to teach everyone else.
"surely men of the cloth would be much more noble, moral and ethical than the norm." Because why?
Because those who claim to be the masters of moral need to demonstrate so through their own actions, or else all their claims about knowing right from wrong are in doubt.
If you truly believe in science why do you need universities? What possible benefit could there be to gained from people who dedicate their lives to research and teaching? Surely one does not need teachers. Full knowledge springs into the minds of those who want it. Or not.
What is this? It is neither an argument, nor even coherent. Meaningless rambling does not make a point, you know?
The necessity of the Vatican is a valid question, given that it didn't exist before 1929 and that there were times in history when Rome wasn't the (or not the only) seat of the pope.
The church, like the university may not be perfect, but its not as entirely ridiculous as you imply.
The church is not identical to the Vatican. You are not addressing the GPs point but a similar one you invented yourself.
well.. thing is.. american government can't grant them immunity for breaking the law abroad. or they can, but the other governments aren't likely to accept that - and since MS unlike NSA operatives has to keep operating(to generate profit) abroad.
Over here in Europe, we are already talking about the "long arm of the USA", and even the mainstream media is wondering out aloud why our governments keep so quiet and friendly.
I would be really, really surprised if any serious consequences would come to anyone high in the hierarchy. There might be a few pawn sacrifices, but the fact that our government doesn't go absolutely ballistic over this alone is proof enought that nothing serious will happen.
I sure as hell won't be using Hotmail/Outlook for anything confidential anymore.
If you did before, you're an idiot. (I'm talking about outlook.com here, not the software of the same name).
I hope you lying, backstabbing fucksticks get 20+ year jail sentences for what you have done to innocent users of your email products.
My bets are strongly on nobody getting anything, at least as far as legal consequences go. These people have been busy building and buying themselves immunity from the law for the past 20 years.
I've been through enough reorganisations myself to know one thing:
Changing the labels on the executives doors doesn't change a fucking thing, and neither does painting a new org chart.
The really important things are all in the implementation. Putting people into the same division doesn't mean they magically start working with each other. Announcing a vision or strategy doesn't create it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, nothing interesting has happened - yet.
I am a professional who gets paid to be obsessive over security.
There definitely is a huge difference between work and private life. In work, you can specialise a lot more. One person being obsessive about security is what a company needs to reach a good balance, because most other people care less about security than they should.
In your private life, you need to find that balance within yourself, and it rarely is with being obsessive.
As for myself, the paperwork to list a risk as "accepted" is usually more of a headache than any possible mitigation.
Hehehe. But brother, you know how we work. If some manager doesn't want to spend money to do something about a risk, we are the most cooperative person in the entire universe, we will assure him quickly that that is absolutely no problem, sir, none at all. Just sign here on the risk acceptance form that you are aware of the risk and have made a management decision to accept it and assume responsibility.
Oh, you suddenly found a bit of budget to do that other thing I mentioned? Who'd have thought...:-D
It seems that these days, most folks can't even manage to use it correctly in a sentence...
The primary reason I started my own company was so that I don't have to work with idiots anymore. I feel your pain.
I'm about to launch my own kickstarter campaign, and one thing I gathered from the tons of advise that is out there by now is that you absolutely have to be clear on your goals and stretch goals.
If at all possible (it's a lot easier with software than hardware), do what the parent said: Release what you promised and then invest the additional money into a free expansion pack.
With hardware, I don't get why people invest feature creep at all. Your backers funded the item that you promised, and that is what they should be getting. Giving them more is as much lying as giving them less. To a certain extent you can invest additional money in simply improving the quality, using better materials, better tools, etc. but beyond that, pocket the money and invest it in version 2.
As someone else already said: You can not give someone access to data while not giving them access to data.
What you can make a hell of a lot more difficult is the ability to get the data out in any other way than inside someone's head.
At the extreme range, allow people to enter and exit the building only naked, changing into work-clothes on the inside that never leave the building. Don't forget cavity searches.
Oh, wait - you were planning to run an office, not a prison? That's gonna make things a little more tricky as human beings tend to be picky about archaic things like dignity.
The non-bullshit answer is basically this: The freaking NSA fucked this one up. If you really think a random collection of hints on/. is going to give you a better shot, you need to be fired.
Update your security policy regularily and monitor compliance. Do a good job. Stop worrying about the Snowdens of this world, because there's like one every decade. But users looking for shortcuts, managers wanting a dial-in connection from home, admins leaving the firewall wide open after a change, developers using test-configurations in live, all these things are happening every day. Worry about them.
He should have only been able to see what he was working on.
"should" being the keyword there.
Your average windows admin in your average corporation can access all the company data if he wants, including the CEOs e-mails with his mistress. Yes, that is badly set up security and compartmentalization, but it is also reality.
With all respect for the NSA, they are unlikely to be perfect. It is not unlikely that Snowden had more access than he strictly should have been. In fact, it is the more unlikely claim to believe he didn't.
The question is phrased wrong if you ask how he could have had access to something he wasn't working on directly. Assume that the permissions and restrictions were not perfect, because they rarely are. The correction question is not if, but how wrong they were. How much access to stuff he did not work on can we assume he had? Some, much or a whole lot? Both "none" and "all of it" are unlikely answers.
He got the EU to search all their offices for bugs. If they had found nothing, I'm sure there would be a lot of European countries who would be happy to score a mountain heap of brownie points with the US by saying so and thereby discrediting Snowden.
The same shit is showing its ugly face right now over here in Germany, where several current cases of clear corruption and "networking" show that there are different classes of citizen when it comes to being prosecuted for your crimes.
Western democracy is on its deathbed. It won't be long before we either have our own versions of the Arab Spring or live in something that is only a democracy in the same sense the "people's republics" of the former Eastern Bloc were.
Everyone who says "I knew that" completely ignores that a) believing is not knowing and b) they also "knew" a thousand other things for years that did not turn out to be correct.
We tend to focus on the hits and forget the misses. That's how scammers like mediums and such work, btw.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA
For the record: I'm not a US citizen. Also, the USA can go fuck itself for all I care. I hope I've saved someone the work of classifying me the hard way.:-)
Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it.
Everyone who has the least interest in security or espionage or diplomacy knows the story about the russians and their early mobile phones.:-)
Metadata is crazy informative if you know how to read it, and the NSA has decades of experience with that. But, again, if they want to know my political views, all they need to do is ask.
I'm all there with the outrage, and I am very, very angry with my own government that they don't dare giving the USA a serious diplomatic beating for PRISM et al. At the same time, I'm not afraid and I'm not paranoid. The public tends to swing between ignoring crap like that and going all bonkers. I tend to be somewhere in the middle all the time.
The world is full of dangers. If I were to go to even a reasonable effort to combat all of them, I would be doing nothing else with my life.
In risk management, you quickly learn that some risks can be eliminated, some can be mitigated, some can be insured against, and some you are best of simply accepting.
Most of the time I'm working on something like a dozen small projects at a time. Keeping overhead to a minimum is the only way to make that manageable. That is why using whatever the best, available tool is matters a great deal more than taking precautions against the twice-unlikely scenario of a) this project becoming important so quickly that I don't have time to migrate it and b) some competitor hacking Evernote or Dropbox.
I don't post to Facebook where I am going before I go on holiday. After I'm back, I don't mind the world knowing where I was.
Why? Because my threat scenario is burglars, not the NSA following my steps. If the NSA wants to know where I am, they have better sources than evaluating my holiday pictures. Passenger data from the airlines, for example. You're living in a fantasy world if you think the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. can't get access to those whenever they want them.
I figured that nobody cared to which political party I belonged, nor what religious group, nor that I am military and actually believe in the constitution. Unfortunately, it turns out that in our government, you may indeed be targeted based upon any of the above.
If your job depends on your political views remaining private then yeah, you should not put them out there on the Internet. But I don't see that as a counter-argument, because it is very much a part of the threat scenario.
I - like pretty much every human being - have a few private details I don't want the world to know. Not because they are illegal or immoral or evil, but simply because they are private and I'd rather not discuss them with strangers. I don't put them on the Internet. Not into public forums, but also not into personal (never call them "private", that's a lie) messages on Facebook or G+ or whatever.
On the other hand, if you want to target me for, say, being an atheist, then by all means go ahead. John Gilmore was not allowed to fly once because he refused to show his ID. He didn't go on the Internet to rant about it, he followed it up with lawyers and challenged the airline rules that required IDs.
The only way to prevent your rights being taken from you is that someone has to fight for them. Sometimes, that someone is you. Most of us are busy with having a life, so we can't do the fighting all the time. But we all should be getting more used to doing it at least every now and then.
If everyone on/. had fought for at least one right at least once in his life, and by "fight" I mean at the price of considerable inconvenience or risk, the world would be a much better place.
Well, a "toy plane" only half the size would still be big enough to do real damage.
Thank you for utterly ignoring the 2nd part of my comment, where I already destroyed that argument before you made it.
the Greens are scared as hell that terrorists fly a tiny little Cesna into a nuclear power plant.
Nobody serious I know ever said that. Non-laughable people concerned about nuclear plants and aircrafts are all talking about a passenger jet.
The weight difference between a cessna and a passenger jet is more than 1:100. The speed difference is about 1:4 at cruise altitude, probably more 1:3 at what they can reach at ground level, even descending. Since that goes in squared, the impact force difference is on the order of 1:1000.
Information that is human-readable like account numbers and other details is something that especially in an emergency you might need to have ready, even if due to the emergency you lost access to your computer, scanner, etc. Heck, you might need access to it in order to get a new one.
There are special OCR-fonts that you can use to print out that information and be certain that the OCR will be painless. Use it, because keeping the data human-readable also leaves you with a backup option in case the restore doesn't work as expected (say, the paper got crumbled or smeared) - you can type it in.
For human-meaningless information, pure digital data, QR codes are probably fine because they allow for error-correction and are meant to be able to be read back even if there is noise in the input data, something that barcodes are not as good at.
But, frankly, why the fuck don't you just put your stuff on a CD, USB thumb drive or something like that and put that into the fire box ?
Slashdot Mirror
MS has been on the way down for a long, long time.
If you think Balmer's job is to take it to new heights, I personally think you're stupid. He's not the man for that kind of job, and everyone knows it.
His job is to keep the ship afloat as long as possible, to make the inevitable decline as slow and smooth as possible. And yes, he has been doing quite well on that task. Time and time again we on /., nerds in general and sometimes even the tech press have predicted MS imminent demise, but Balmer has managed to prevent any serious crash & burn.
I also realize that the fucking Sun has much more effect on the climate than we ever will.
You need to brush up your knowledge. You have a great opportunity because the sun is currently entering a rare low activity phase (google "Maunder Minimum").
More importantly: The Sun cycles are an extensively studied subject. We have a very good knowledge about them and their effect on climate. And, guess what, this effect is figured in when scientists talk about climate change.
The earth will have thousands of years where te ice caps are nearing Texas. It has happened many time in the past and will happen may more times with or without us. Most people are fucking retarded when it comes to climate.
Yes, it has happened many times. The earth is a huge ball of rock, it'll survive pretty much no matter what. It won't give a damn if temperatures go up to a couple hundred degrees - see Venus, she's also doing just fine.
Except, of course, that there's almost certainly no life there.
Climate change isn't about protecting the environment. It's about protecting us, you stupid idiot. The only retard in this discussion is you, because you don't understand what the effect of changes in climate really is. Go ask some people who know about global food production, because you can already measure it there. In a few years, you'll be able to measure it in casualties. Human casualties.
Laughing about people isn't the same as killing them.
Especially not when it's the kind of people who tell you the sky is pink when you just need to open your eyes to see that that's not the case.
In small words it says "whether one wishes to know about science or religion, there is a place for teachers."
Religious indoctrination is not teaching. There is a very important difference between science and religion: One is evidence-based, and the other isn't. In one a teacher shows you things you can then do for yourself, and build upon. In the other, you are asked to believe with no evidence or proof. In one, if you can show your teacher was wrong and a different answer is better, you are a hero. In the other... well, fortunately the times where you'd be burnt at the stake are past.
Religion and science could not be further apart. The fact that people talk about them, including teaching and "teaching", is about the only thing they have in common. Don't confuse them because of a random correlation.
I beleive he was taking a more inclusive view about the abstract hierarchy of church leadership and the preisthood in general rather than the very narrow view of the Vatican specifically.
He said "Vatican", not church. He certainly meant the institution and not the plot of land, I'll grant you that. From the way he consistently spoke about the Vatican, not the church, I would not assume he means something he doesn't say. Even within the catholic church, the Vatican is a special case.
Really, If the GP only meant the Vatican specifically then his point would have been specious.
Would it? I'm pretty sure the old men who enjoy the pleasures of having their own tiny state would disagree violently. There have been a few power-struggles within the catholic church regarding the position of the Vatican over the past decade or two. I don't think that would happen if it doesn't matter.
There's a difference between being a common man with common sense and being someone who claims he holds the keys to heaven, knows right and wrong and is entitled to teach everyone else.
I'm surprised that needs to be explained.
"surely men of the cloth would be much more noble, moral and ethical than the norm."
Because why?
Because those who claim to be the masters of moral need to demonstrate so through their own actions, or else all their claims about knowing right from wrong are in doubt.
If you truly believe in science why do you need universities? What possible benefit could there be to gained from people who dedicate their lives to research and teaching? Surely one does not need teachers. Full knowledge springs into the minds of those who want it. Or not.
What is this? It is neither an argument, nor even coherent. Meaningless rambling does not make a point, you know?
The necessity of the Vatican is a valid question, given that it didn't exist before 1929 and that there were times in history when Rome wasn't the (or not the only) seat of the pope.
The church, like the university may not be perfect, but its not as entirely ridiculous as you imply.
The church is not identical to the Vatican. You are not addressing the GPs point but a similar one you invented yourself.
well.. thing is.. american government can't grant them immunity for breaking the law abroad. or they can, but the other governments aren't likely to accept that - and since MS unlike NSA operatives has to keep operating(to generate profit) abroad.
Over here in Europe, we are already talking about the "long arm of the USA", and even the mainstream media is wondering out aloud why our governments keep so quiet and friendly.
I would be really, really surprised if any serious consequences would come to anyone high in the hierarchy. There might be a few pawn sacrifices, but the fact that our government doesn't go absolutely ballistic over this alone is proof enought that nothing serious will happen.
I sure as hell won't be using Hotmail/Outlook for anything confidential anymore.
If you did before, you're an idiot. (I'm talking about outlook.com here, not the software of the same name).
I hope you lying, backstabbing fucksticks get 20+ year jail sentences for what you have done to innocent users of your email products.
My bets are strongly on nobody getting anything, at least as far as legal consequences go. These people have been busy building and buying themselves immunity from the law for the past 20 years.
I've been through enough reorganisations myself to know one thing:
Changing the labels on the executives doors doesn't change a fucking thing, and neither does painting a new org chart.
The really important things are all in the implementation. Putting people into the same division doesn't mean they magically start working with each other. Announcing a vision or strategy doesn't create it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, nothing interesting has happened - yet.
I am a professional who gets paid to be obsessive over security.
There definitely is a huge difference between work and private life. In work, you can specialise a lot more. One person being obsessive about security is what a company needs to reach a good balance, because most other people care less about security than they should.
In your private life, you need to find that balance within yourself, and it rarely is with being obsessive.
As for myself, the paperwork to list a risk as "accepted" is usually more of a headache than any possible mitigation.
Hehehe. But brother, you know how we work. If some manager doesn't want to spend money to do something about a risk, we are the most cooperative person in the entire universe, we will assure him quickly that that is absolutely no problem, sir, none at all. Just sign here on the risk acceptance form that you are aware of the risk and have made a management decision to accept it and assume responsibility.
Oh, you suddenly found a bit of budget to do that other thing I mentioned? Who'd have thought... :-D
It seems that these days, most folks can't even manage to use it correctly in a sentence...
The primary reason I started my own company was so that I don't have to work with idiots anymore. I feel your pain.
Bingo.
I'm about to launch my own kickstarter campaign, and one thing I gathered from the tons of advise that is out there by now is that you absolutely have to be clear on your goals and stretch goals.
If at all possible (it's a lot easier with software than hardware), do what the parent said: Release what you promised and then invest the additional money into a free expansion pack.
With hardware, I don't get why people invest feature creep at all. Your backers funded the item that you promised, and that is what they should be getting. Giving them more is as much lying as giving them less. To a certain extent you can invest additional money in simply improving the quality, using better materials, better tools, etc. but beyond that, pocket the money and invest it in version 2.
As someone else already said: You can not give someone access to data while not giving them access to data.
What you can make a hell of a lot more difficult is the ability to get the data out in any other way than inside someone's head.
At the extreme range, allow people to enter and exit the building only naked, changing into work-clothes on the inside that never leave the building. Don't forget cavity searches.
Oh, wait - you were planning to run an office, not a prison? That's gonna make things a little more tricky as human beings tend to be picky about archaic things like dignity.
The non-bullshit answer is basically this: The freaking NSA fucked this one up. If you really think a random collection of hints on /. is going to give you a better shot, you need to be fired.
Update your security policy regularily and monitor compliance. Do a good job. Stop worrying about the Snowdens of this world, because there's like one every decade. But users looking for shortcuts, managers wanting a dial-in connection from home, admins leaving the firewall wide open after a change, developers using test-configurations in live, all these things are happening every day. Worry about them.
He should have only been able to see what he was working on.
"should" being the keyword there.
Your average windows admin in your average corporation can access all the company data if he wants, including the CEOs e-mails with his mistress. Yes, that is badly set up security and compartmentalization, but it is also reality.
With all respect for the NSA, they are unlikely to be perfect. It is not unlikely that Snowden had more access than he strictly should have been. In fact, it is the more unlikely claim to believe he didn't.
The question is phrased wrong if you ask how he could have had access to something he wasn't working on directly. Assume that the permissions and restrictions were not perfect, because they rarely are. The correction question is not if, but how wrong they were. How much access to stuff he did not work on can we assume he had? Some, much or a whole lot? Both "none" and "all of it" are unlikely answers.
He got the EU to search all their offices for bugs. If they had found nothing, I'm sure there would be a lot of European countries who would be happy to score a mountain heap of brownie points with the US by saying so and thereby discrediting Snowden.
They are officially asking the US to explain itself, which is even more unlikely if they had not, in fact, found bugs.
Mod parent up.
The same shit is showing its ugly face right now over here in Germany, where several current cases of clear corruption and "networking" show that there are different classes of citizen when it comes to being prosecuted for your crimes.
Western democracy is on its deathbed. It won't be long before we either have our own versions of the Arab Spring or live in something that is only a democracy in the same sense the "people's republics" of the former Eastern Bloc were.
No, you strongly suspected that from the get-go.
Bingo.
Everyone who says "I knew that" completely ignores that a) believing is not knowing and b) they also "knew" a thousand other things for years that did not turn out to be correct.
We tend to focus on the hits and forget the misses. That's how scammers like mediums and such work, btw.
That kind of bombs is going to be detected by even the most outdated virus scanner.
However, hiding your actual data inside such a bomb archive might be an interesting way to make the scanners ignore it.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA
For the record: I'm not a US citizen. Also, the USA can go fuck itself for all I care. I hope I've saved someone the work of classifying me the hard way. :-)
Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it.
Everyone who has the least interest in security or espionage or diplomacy knows the story about the russians and their early mobile phones. :-)
Metadata is crazy informative if you know how to read it, and the NSA has decades of experience with that. But, again, if they want to know my political views, all they need to do is ask.
I'm all there with the outrage, and I am very, very angry with my own government that they don't dare giving the USA a serious diplomatic beating for PRISM et al. At the same time, I'm not afraid and I'm not paranoid. The public tends to swing between ignoring crap like that and going all bonkers. I tend to be somewhere in the middle all the time.
Again, it depends on what I am afraid of.
The world is full of dangers. If I were to go to even a reasonable effort to combat all of them, I would be doing nothing else with my life.
In risk management, you quickly learn that some risks can be eliminated, some can be mitigated, some can be insured against, and some you are best of simply accepting.
Most of the time I'm working on something like a dozen small projects at a time. Keeping overhead to a minimum is the only way to make that manageable. That is why using whatever the best, available tool is matters a great deal more than taking precautions against the twice-unlikely scenario of a) this project becoming important so quickly that I don't have time to migrate it and b) some competitor hacking Evernote or Dropbox.
Threat scenario.
I don't post to Facebook where I am going before I go on holiday.
After I'm back, I don't mind the world knowing where I was.
Why? Because my threat scenario is burglars, not the NSA following my steps. If the NSA wants to know where I am, they have better sources than evaluating my holiday pictures. Passenger data from the airlines, for example. You're living in a fantasy world if you think the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. can't get access to those whenever they want them.
I figured that nobody cared to which political party I belonged, nor what religious group, nor that I am military and actually believe in the constitution. Unfortunately, it turns out that in our government, you may indeed be targeted based upon any of the above.
If your job depends on your political views remaining private then yeah, you should not put them out there on the Internet. But I don't see that as a counter-argument, because it is very much a part of the threat scenario.
I - like pretty much every human being - have a few private details I don't want the world to know. Not because they are illegal or immoral or evil, but simply because they are private and I'd rather not discuss them with strangers. I don't put them on the Internet. Not into public forums, but also not into personal (never call them "private", that's a lie) messages on Facebook or G+ or whatever.
On the other hand, if you want to target me for, say, being an atheist, then by all means go ahead. John Gilmore was not allowed to fly once because he refused to show his ID. He didn't go on the Internet to rant about it, he followed it up with lawyers and challenged the airline rules that required IDs.
The only way to prevent your rights being taken from you is that someone has to fight for them. Sometimes, that someone is you. Most of us are busy with having a life, so we can't do the fighting all the time. But we all should be getting more used to doing it at least every now and then.
If everyone on /. had fought for at least one right at least once in his life, and by "fight" I mean at the price of considerable inconvenience or risk, the world would be a much better place.
A wiki does much of what Evernote does, and with a proper UI could probably be almost as comfortable to use.
I do use wikis for a couple of scenarios where few, if any, people besides me access it.
Your example has nothing whatsoever to with holiday pictures. Why are you making it?
Well, a "toy plane" only half the size would still be big enough to do real damage.
Thank you for utterly ignoring the 2nd part of my comment, where I already destroyed that argument before you made it.
the Greens are scared as hell that terrorists fly a tiny little Cesna into a nuclear power plant.
Nobody serious I know ever said that. Non-laughable people concerned about nuclear plants and aircrafts are all talking about a passenger jet.
The weight difference between a cessna and a passenger jet is more than 1:100. The speed difference is about 1:4 at cruise altitude, probably more 1:3 at what they can reach at ground level, even descending. Since that goes in squared, the impact force difference is on the order of 1:1000.
Your argument fails the giggle test. Again.
It depends on what kind of information you have.
Information that is human-readable like account numbers and other details is something that especially in an emergency you might need to have ready, even if due to the emergency you lost access to your computer, scanner, etc. Heck, you might need access to it in order to get a new one.
There are special OCR-fonts that you can use to print out that information and be certain that the OCR will be painless. Use it, because keeping the data human-readable also leaves you with a backup option in case the restore doesn't work as expected (say, the paper got crumbled or smeared) - you can type it in.
For human-meaningless information, pure digital data, QR codes are probably fine because they allow for error-correction and are meant to be able to be read back even if there is noise in the input data, something that barcodes are not as good at.
But, frankly, why the fuck don't you just put your stuff on a CD, USB thumb drive or something like that and put that into the fire box ?