You see no problem with the military becoming involved in what is essentially a police action (by definition, war is declared on nations, so what nation is "al Qaeda"?), and committing a summary execution upon U.S. citizens without providing the Constitutionally guaranteed right to a hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to charge -- much less convict -- him of the crimes of which he has been accused?!?!
I think you might be in need of a remedial civics class.
Pearl Harbor began the best thing to happen to the US in the last century, the Second World War. The combination of economic expansion and military supremacy which resulted dwarfed the costs such that they were trivial by comparison.
That's easily said by someone who, most likely, has never even heard a shot fired in anger. However, for one of the U.S. soldiers, like my father-in-law, who spent time sitting in a German P.O.W. during WWII, I daresay the costs were anything but trivial. I think that my father-in-law would probably agree that he did what needed to be done to protect liberty, and as such, the cost of his service was worth what it produced, but I seriously doubt that he would say that "economic expansion" or "military supremacy" (meaning, in this context, "becoming a world superpower", as opposed to "stopping the advance of a very, very evil regime") was worth even a single minute of the time he spent as a prisoner of war.
Come on. That was from a set of "apparently" middle eastern people.
So in other words, as long as it's only happening to one of them (whoever "they" might be at any given point in time) it's okay? I'm not one to play the race card -- I'm as white as they come -- but we're (the U.S. in particular, modern western culture in general) supposed to be more enlightened than that!
one of the [sic] behaving strangely while actually ON a plane.
Sure she didn't come on with them, but the whole arrangement ended up looking odd, and someone complained.
And that's the problem -- we have become so freaking paranoid that anything outside a very narrow definition of "normal" receives some pretty extreme overreaction. It's a waste of time, it's a waste of resources and it unnecessarily engenders anger and bitterness towards LEO. We (the people) should be on the same side as LEO, but when LEO treats every person in the nation as a terrorist, then LEO ends up turning people who would have been allies into enemies.
I've done odd things that made security people question me before and understood from their standpoint why they are asking questions.
In real life matching on this face profiler...You are totally blowing the whole thing out of proportion, and attempting to limit use of a technology that can ACTUALLY improved security as opposed to making every person on earth remove shoes in an airport.
I don't necessarily have a problem with security teams questioning people when there is a reasonable cause. I've been questioned by security people before too, and it's never been anything more than a minor annoyance. However, last year, if you had told me that Ms. Hebshi would have the experience she had because a man from India sitting next to her was suffering from Montezuma's Revenge, I'd have said you were out of your gourd...but it happened. So AM I blowing it out of proportion? You can't tell me, "It will never happen here!" because you can't know that.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." (Thomas Jefferson) but we've not only stopped guarding against threats to our liberty, we've stopped caring that our liberty is being threatened. That's a very, very Bad Thing.
As I said before, you are attacking (your perception of) my character rather than the concepts in the discussion. Therefore, you are adding nothing of value to this discussion, and consequently, I will waste no more time on you.
Yes, I think it's a big deal, and I'm vocal about it. I have a problem with injustice and oppression, and that's what I see this as. People like you mocked MLK, Jr., Rosa Parks and Gandhi as well...but the world is a better place because of them. Consequently, if you have nothing intelligent to add to this discussion, kindly screw off.
There are two logical fallacies in your argument. First, you are presenting a false dichotomy. Second, you are comparing a worst-case scenario (terrorist takes down an airplane, killing hundreds or thousands of people) to a best-case, or nearly best-case, scenario (innocent passenger gets their luggage swabbed).
What we are talking about is risk management. Risk management is not just a matter of comparing scenarios; it is a matter of multiplying risk probabilities to risk weight (i.e., the severity of that risk), then summing all of the results of that operation. For example, a hijacker crashing an airplane into a building is a very severe risk -- it killed over three thousand people ten years ago -- but it has only happened *ONCE* (okay, four flights) in what...fifty? sixty?...years of airline service. That's a really, REALLY low probability times a really, really severe risk weight, which I'd argue results in a moderately low OVERALL risk. There is also the possibility of a hijacker murdering individual passengers until his (her) demands are met. That's happened significantly more often than a 9/11 hijacking (although still rare, in terms of number of hijacked flights vs. number of uneventful flights), but it directly affects (comparatively) fewer people. However, because it is more common, I'd argue that this scenario results in roughly the same OVERALL risk. Then there is the risk of an unruly passenger. That's much more common than the other two risks, but the risk weight is comparatively minor, which again results in an overall low risk.
As far as scenarios you are comparing...if all that happens is a false positive gets the luggage swabbed, then I really couldn't care less. If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released then I have a MAJOR problem with it. Consider it this way: if there were 520 people detained in Gitmo and the error rate for false positives (as assumed in the above thread) is 1%, then that means there were likely at least 5 innocent people detained at Gitmo. THAT is what I meant by "wrecked", and I maintain that's an accurate description. Ms. Hebshi's life may not have been wrecked, but I'd say that it has been severely and negatively impacted.
So, yeah. I do think that the worse error is false positives because the risk probability is significantly higher, and the risk impact is moderate to severe as well, which leads to a much, much greater overall risk than a one-in-twenty-million probability of 9/11, even when multiplied by the impact of the death of 3,000+ people.
People of faith normally believe that God sees all of their actions and even their thoughts.
(somewhat) Off-topic: At risk of starting a theological debate on/....just because that is a common belief, don't make the mistake of thinking that that is what Christians have always believed or that this is necessarily correct (assuming that Christianity itself is correct, of course). As a Christian myself, my theology is a bit different. Yeah, God can "see" all of my actions and can understand my thoughts...but that's not why I live the way I do. I don't believe in a God that's waiting for me to screw up so He can give me the smack-down. I believe in a God who is warning me that actions have consequences, and that I will have a better chance of avoiding the unpleasant consequences (not His punishment, but the cause-and-effect results) that come from making bad decisions if I follow His advice. I always explain it like this: if your young child stood in the middle of the street, you will probably say something like, "Get out of the street, or you will get hit by a car!", right? Are you going to send a car to hit them if they don't follow your rules? Of course not! But, because there are cars in the street, you warn your child about the danger of playing there because you don't want him or her to get hurt, right? Same thing.
Back on topic...
A society in which life is transparent just might be wonderful. Crime would vanish. Cheating and lying would vanish. This technology is only a step along the path to a truly open society.
I disagree. This is a path to a manipulative, controlling, dystopian society. Think about life in small towns a hundred or more years ago. People knew everybody else's business, and there was very little anonymity. Ever hear of a town called Salem, back in the 1600's? Something happened there...what was it? Oh, yeah...people who didn't fit into a very rigid, narrow interpretation of "normal" were burned at the stake for being "witches". Ever read "The Scarlet Letter"? I know, I know...this is/.; we're more likely to reach "Childhood's End" than Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it's a good morality play about ostracizing those who don't conform. That may sound like an ideal society to you, but it sounds smothering and stifling to me. IMHO, if you follow the rules because you are afraid of being punished, then you may as well not follow the rules; the only GOOD reason to act ethically and morally is because you want to protect the relationship you have with someone else.
I can see one major difference, though. When someone "asks around" about me, my friends might (in fact, have) come to me to let me know that someone was asking about me. In my case, it was a prospective employer, and it was a good thing (I landed the job, btw). However, it could just as easily be someone with malicious intent, in which case, I'd be even more appreciative when my friends let me know that someone is asking about me.
With this tech, people can "ask" (Google, Facebook, etc.) about you and you'll never know it.
Fezzig: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something?
Roberts/Wesley: I find that they are terribly comfortable. In the future, I expect everyone will be wearing masks.
Dude, seriously...please don't give me ideas. I have enough projects that I'll never get to already. Creating a web site lampooning Facebook as you described above would be hilarious -- or at least it could be; whether or not I have the comic chops to pull it off is open for discussion:)
No, the problem is justice. I don't give a @#$@!! how many jobs it takes to track down the false positives. If you wreck even three hundred lives because your technology isn't accurate enough, that's three hundred too many.
Depends what the inconvenience is. If it's a quick background check with no lasting effects (i.e. not being added to a do-no-fly list or terrorist watch list or your record or subjecting you to public humiliation or arrest), then perhaps...if we start applying this tech to the population at large, we had better be certain that the consequences of a false match WHEN IT HAPPENS are acceptable, legally, ethically, and morally, or we shouldn't do it at all, IMHOP.
Not to get on my political soapbox, but have you been living under a rock for the last ten years -- or at least the last one year? You don't think being felt up by TSA at the airport is "subjecting you to public humiliation"? How about thiswoman who was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight, cuffed, detained, strip-searched, interrogated and finally released? Her crime was nothing more nefarious than sitting next to two men of Indian (the country, not Native American) descent, one of whom was suffering from, ahem, "digestive maladies", and consequently was making frequent and lengthy trips to the restroom, because clearly, three brown-skinned people (her heritage is half Jewish, half Saudi Arabian) sitting together on an airliner making frequent trips to the loo are up to no good </sarc explanation="just in case it wasn't blatantly obvious">
Personally, I agree with your concerns -- even a 1% false positive rate would be "a horrible perversion of justice." As Plato said, "It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than for even one innocent man to be punished unjustly." Unfortunately, in post-9/11 U.S.A., the majority has apparently -- and wrongfully, IMHO -- decided that it's better that one hundred innocent men (and women) be punished unjustly than even one guilty man go free:/ So while I agree that what you described is the way it should be, I think you are very, very mistaken if you think that is the way it IS.
Okay, let's put it this way. The Streak is roughly 2/3 the size of an iPad2 (that doesn't sound so bad). Or you could say that the iPad2 is roughly half again as big as the Streak (which sounds like a much bigger difference). You can also say that the Streak is about $67 per inch less expensive (which sounds like a bargain). Your "big" difference is my "little" difference, in this case. I own a Streak, I've used iPads, and IMHO, the price difference isn't worth it...at least for me.
Who are you saving them for? For what occasion? Do you look at pictures of yourself as a baby, ever?
For the most part, you are right...but not entirely.
My dad died in 2006, and my mom and wife teamed up to create a slideshow to play at his funeral. I ended up with an electronic copy of the photos that my mom provided for the slideshow, which I stuck on a hard drive and forgot about.
Fast forward to 2009. I had just earned a motorcycle license, and was feeling kind of maudlin because my dad used to ride when he was in his twenties...in fact, he took me for rides around the block a couple of times, although I only remember riding with him once. You can probably guess where this is going...
Eventually, I flipped back through the copy of the slideshow, and one of the photos I found was me at about six years old on the back of his Honda CB350. That photo, and a similar photo of me and my daughter on the motorcycle I now ride, are among my most treasured possessions.
You don't have to have photos to have memories, but unless you and your entire family have hearts of stone, I can guarantee that at least some of those photos WILL be treasured by someone eventually.
OK, maybe I'm just being dense (wouldn't be the first time), but I don't really understand your problem here. You've got the files stored locally on your Mac, and you are backing the Mac up to a Time Machine (which is basically a special purpose NAS, like what a lot of people are recommending here, albeit not a very flexible NAS). What, exactly, is the problem you want to solve, then?
If the Time Machine dies, you've still got the original files on the Mac. If the Mac dies, you've still got the files on the Time Machine -- although I'll admit that, while I own both a Mac and a Time Machine, I've never had to restore data from one Mac to another, so I don't know how difficult that would be. Yeah, at some point in the future, you'll need to export all of your data off of your Mac onto a new computer, but that's not exactly a difficult proposition: if going to another *Nix machine (including Mac), just open up a terminal window and run...:
rsync -av ~/Pictures <user name>@<ip address of the new machine>:~/
(Actually, I can't remember offhand if it's ~/Pictures or ~/Photos since I spend a lot more time on Linux than OS-X, and you'll probably need to rsync ~/Movies as well).
This will work on a Windows machine too, but you'll have to install cwrsync first, and you'll probably have to play with the directories to figure out exactly what paths to use.
To be completely honest, I actually use the shotgun approach to archiving photos and movies: I have a desktop machine at home, a laptop at home, plus two work laptops (one of which is the Mac) and a work netbook. My photos are archived indiscriminately across most (if not all) of these machines AND I've got many of them stored on Picassa, too. When you upgrade from one computer to another, assuming that it's not because the old machine died, you can use the old machine(s) as glorified NAS boxes and rsync between them to keep multiple backups of your files. It's not elegant, but it works:)
Thanks for posting that. I loved A.C.C.'s stories when I was a kid, but I don't remember reading a story about a solar sail race to the moon. I was about to search for it (it sounds interesting), but you've saved me the work:)
I'll bet you that there are hundreds of people -- if not thousands -- breaking that law every day in NYC (although this picture was not taken in NYC, the principle still applies). While the primary intention of this "mask" is not to hide your identity, it does -- or at least, can -- serve that purpose as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You see no problem with the military becoming involved in what is essentially a police action (by definition, war is declared on nations, so what nation is "al Qaeda"?), and committing a summary execution upon U.S. citizens without providing the Constitutionally guaranteed right to a hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to charge -- much less convict -- him of the crimes of which he has been accused?!?!
I think you might be in need of a remedial civics class.
My kingdom, for mod points. Well said.
Pearl Harbor began the best thing to happen to the US in the last century, the Second World War. The combination of economic expansion and military supremacy which resulted dwarfed the costs such that they were trivial by comparison.
That's easily said by someone who, most likely, has never even heard a shot fired in anger. However, for one of the U.S. soldiers, like my father-in-law, who spent time sitting in a German P.O.W. during WWII, I daresay the costs were anything but trivial. I think that my father-in-law would probably agree that he did what needed to be done to protect liberty, and as such, the cost of his service was worth what it produced, but I seriously doubt that he would say that "economic expansion" or "military supremacy" (meaning, in this context, "becoming a world superpower", as opposed to "stopping the advance of a very, very evil regime") was worth even a single minute of the time he spent as a prisoner of war.
I don't swear very often, but the simple fact that you (apparently) think this is a reasonable point of view scares the living HELL out of me.
Come on. That was from a set of "apparently" middle eastern people.
So in other words, as long as it's only happening to one of them (whoever "they" might be at any given point in time) it's okay? I'm not one to play the race card -- I'm as white as they come -- but we're (the U.S. in particular, modern western culture in general) supposed to be more enlightened than that!
one of the [sic] behaving strangely while actually ON a plane.
Sure she didn't come on with them, but the whole arrangement ended up looking odd, and someone complained.
And that's the problem -- we have become so freaking paranoid that anything outside a very narrow definition of "normal" receives some pretty extreme overreaction. It's a waste of time, it's a waste of resources and it unnecessarily engenders anger and bitterness towards LEO. We (the people) should be on the same side as LEO, but when LEO treats every person in the nation as a terrorist, then LEO ends up turning people who would have been allies into enemies.
I've done odd things that made security people question me before and understood from their standpoint why they are asking questions.
In real life matching on this face profiler...You are totally blowing the whole thing out of proportion, and attempting to limit use of a technology that can ACTUALLY improved security as opposed to making every person on earth remove shoes in an airport.
I don't necessarily have a problem with security teams questioning people when there is a reasonable cause. I've been questioned by security people before too, and it's never been anything more than a minor annoyance. However, last year, if you had told me that Ms. Hebshi would have the experience she had because a man from India sitting next to her was suffering from Montezuma's Revenge, I'd have said you were out of your gourd...but it happened. So AM I blowing it out of proportion? You can't tell me, "It will never happen here!" because you can't know that.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." (Thomas Jefferson) but we've not only stopped guarding against threats to our liberty, we've stopped caring that our liberty is being threatened. That's a very, very Bad Thing.
As I said before, you are attacking (your perception of) my character rather than the concepts in the discussion. Therefore, you are adding nothing of value to this discussion, and consequently, I will waste no more time on you.
Perhaps...although the last line in the post made me think otherwise. But, yes, I could be mistaken.
Nice ad hominem attack.
Yes, I think it's a big deal, and I'm vocal about it. I have a problem with injustice and oppression, and that's what I see this as. People like you mocked MLK, Jr., Rosa Parks and Gandhi as well...but the world is a better place because of them. Consequently, if you have nothing intelligent to add to this discussion, kindly screw off.
There are two logical fallacies in your argument. First, you are presenting a false dichotomy. Second, you are comparing a worst-case scenario (terrorist takes down an airplane, killing hundreds or thousands of people) to a best-case, or nearly best-case, scenario (innocent passenger gets their luggage swabbed).
What we are talking about is risk management. Risk management is not just a matter of comparing scenarios; it is a matter of multiplying risk probabilities to risk weight (i.e., the severity of that risk), then summing all of the results of that operation. For example, a hijacker crashing an airplane into a building is a very severe risk -- it killed over three thousand people ten years ago -- but it has only happened *ONCE* (okay, four flights) in what...fifty? sixty?...years of airline service. That's a really, REALLY low probability times a really, really severe risk weight, which I'd argue results in a moderately low OVERALL risk. There is also the possibility of a hijacker murdering individual passengers until his (her) demands are met. That's happened significantly more often than a 9/11 hijacking (although still rare, in terms of number of hijacked flights vs. number of uneventful flights), but it directly affects (comparatively) fewer people. However, because it is more common, I'd argue that this scenario results in roughly the same OVERALL risk. Then there is the risk of an unruly passenger. That's much more common than the other two risks, but the risk weight is comparatively minor, which again results in an overall low risk.
As far as scenarios you are comparing...if all that happens is a false positive gets the luggage swabbed, then I really couldn't care less. If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released then I have a MAJOR problem with it. Consider it this way: if there were 520 people detained in Gitmo and the error rate for false positives (as assumed in the above thread) is 1%, then that means there were likely at least 5 innocent people detained at Gitmo. THAT is what I meant by "wrecked", and I maintain that's an accurate description. Ms. Hebshi's life may not have been wrecked, but I'd say that it has been severely and negatively impacted.
So, yeah. I do think that the worse error is false positives because the risk probability is significantly higher, and the risk impact is moderate to severe as well, which leads to a much, much greater overall risk than a one-in-twenty-million probability of 9/11, even when multiplied by the impact of the death of 3,000+ people.
People of faith normally believe that God sees all of their actions and even their thoughts.
(somewhat) Off-topic: At risk of starting a theological debate on /. ...just because that is a common belief, don't make the mistake of thinking that that is what Christians have always believed or that this is necessarily correct (assuming that Christianity itself is correct, of course). As a Christian myself, my theology is a bit different. Yeah, God can "see" all of my actions and can understand my thoughts...but that's not why I live the way I do. I don't believe in a God that's waiting for me to screw up so He can give me the smack-down. I believe in a God who is warning me that actions have consequences, and that I will have a better chance of avoiding the unpleasant consequences (not His punishment, but the cause-and-effect results) that come from making bad decisions if I follow His advice. I always explain it like this: if your young child stood in the middle of the street, you will probably say something like, "Get out of the street, or you will get hit by a car!", right? Are you going to send a car to hit them if they don't follow your rules? Of course not! But, because there are cars in the street, you warn your child about the danger of playing there because you don't want him or her to get hurt, right? Same thing.
Back on topic...
A society in which life is transparent just might be wonderful. Crime would vanish. Cheating and lying would vanish. This technology is only a step along the path to a truly open society.
I disagree. This is a path to a manipulative, controlling, dystopian society. Think about life in small towns a hundred or more years ago. People knew everybody else's business, and there was very little anonymity. Ever hear of a town called Salem, back in the 1600's? Something happened there...what was it? Oh, yeah...people who didn't fit into a very rigid, narrow interpretation of "normal" were burned at the stake for being "witches". Ever read "The Scarlet Letter"? I know, I know...this is /.; we're more likely to reach "Childhood's End" than Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it's a good morality play about ostracizing those who don't conform. That may sound like an ideal society to you, but it sounds smothering and stifling to me. IMHO, if you follow the rules because you are afraid of being punished, then you may as well not follow the rules; the only GOOD reason to act ethically and morally is because you want to protect the relationship you have with someone else.
I can see one major difference, though. When someone "asks around" about me, my friends might (in fact, have) come to me to let me know that someone was asking about me. In my case, it was a prospective employer, and it was a good thing (I landed the job, btw). However, it could just as easily be someone with malicious intent, in which case, I'd be even more appreciative when my friends let me know that someone is asking about me.
With this tech, people can "ask" (Google, Facebook, etc.) about you and you'll never know it.
Yet even here on /., among those who should know better, apathy still exists.
Yep, and both of those people are shrugging this tech off. The rest of us can imagine the Orwellian possibilities, and are consequently concerned.
Dang it...left out the two "
" tags between the two quotes, and didn't take the time to actually look at the preview before clicking "Submit"
LOL. Flashback to 1989 (and several times since):
Fezzig: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something? Roberts/Wesley: I find that they are terribly comfortable. In the future, I expect everyone will be wearing masks.
Dude, seriously...please don't give me ideas. I have enough projects that I'll never get to already. Creating a web site lampooning Facebook as you described above would be hilarious -- or at least it could be; whether or not I have the comic chops to pull it off is open for discussion :)
No, the problem is justice. I don't give a @#$@!! how many jobs it takes to track down the false positives. If you wreck even three hundred lives because your technology isn't accurate enough, that's three hundred too many.
Depends what the inconvenience is. If it's a quick background check with no lasting effects (i.e. not being added to a do-no-fly list or terrorist watch list or your record or subjecting you to public humiliation or arrest), then perhaps...if we start applying this tech to the population at large, we had better be certain that the consequences of a false match WHEN IT HAPPENS are acceptable, legally, ethically, and morally, or we shouldn't do it at all, IMHOP.
Not to get on my political soapbox, but have you been living under a rock for the last ten years -- or at least the last one year? You don't think being felt up by TSA at the airport is "subjecting you to public humiliation"? How about this woman who was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight, cuffed, detained, strip-searched, interrogated and finally released? Her crime was nothing more nefarious than sitting next to two men of Indian (the country, not Native American) descent, one of whom was suffering from, ahem, "digestive maladies", and consequently was making frequent and lengthy trips to the restroom, because clearly, three brown-skinned people (her heritage is half Jewish, half Saudi Arabian) sitting together on an airliner making frequent trips to the loo are up to no good </sarc explanation="just in case it wasn't blatantly obvious">
:/ So while I agree that what you described is the way it should be, I think you are very, very mistaken if you think that is the way it IS .
Personally, I agree with your concerns -- even a 1% false positive rate would be "a horrible perversion of justice." As Plato said, "It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than for even one innocent man to be punished unjustly." Unfortunately, in post-9/11 U.S.A., the majority has apparently -- and wrongfully, IMHO -- decided that it's better that one hundred innocent men (and women) be punished unjustly than even one guilty man go free
Okay, let's put it this way. The Streak is roughly 2/3 the size of an iPad2 (that doesn't sound so bad). Or you could say that the iPad2 is roughly half again as big as the Streak (which sounds like a much bigger difference). You can also say that the Streak is about $67 per inch less expensive (which sounds like a bargain). Your "big" difference is my "little" difference, in this case. I own a Streak, I've used iPads, and IMHO, the price difference isn't worth it...at least for me.
Perceptions are always subjective <shrug>
...I'm loathe to delete them, as storage is comparatively free compared to the cost of not having it...
Exactly :)
You have to work up to it to be able to handle it, but it's very doable.
"They were both poisoned. I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to capsaicin." With apologies to S. Morgenstern.
Who are you saving them for? For what occasion? Do you look at pictures of yourself as a baby, ever?
For the most part, you are right...but not entirely.
My dad died in 2006, and my mom and wife teamed up to create a slideshow to play at his funeral. I ended up with an electronic copy of the photos that my mom provided for the slideshow, which I stuck on a hard drive and forgot about.
Fast forward to 2009. I had just earned a motorcycle license, and was feeling kind of maudlin because my dad used to ride when he was in his twenties...in fact, he took me for rides around the block a couple of times, although I only remember riding with him once. You can probably guess where this is going...
Eventually, I flipped back through the copy of the slideshow, and one of the photos I found was me at about six years old on the back of his Honda CB350. That photo, and a similar photo of me and my daughter on the motorcycle I now ride, are among my most treasured possessions.
You don't have to have photos to have memories, but unless you and your entire family have hearts of stone, I can guarantee that at least some of those photos WILL be treasured by someone eventually.
OK, maybe I'm just being dense (wouldn't be the first time), but I don't really understand your problem here. You've got the files stored locally on your Mac, and you are backing the Mac up to a Time Machine (which is basically a special purpose NAS, like what a lot of people are recommending here, albeit not a very flexible NAS). What, exactly, is the problem you want to solve, then?
:)
If the Time Machine dies, you've still got the original files on the Mac. If the Mac dies, you've still got the files on the Time Machine -- although I'll admit that, while I own both a Mac and a Time Machine, I've never had to restore data from one Mac to another, so I don't know how difficult that would be. Yeah, at some point in the future, you'll need to export all of your data off of your Mac onto a new computer, but that's not exactly a difficult proposition: if going to another *Nix machine (including Mac), just open up a terminal window and run...:
rsync -av ~/Pictures <user name>@<ip address of the new machine>:~/
(Actually, I can't remember offhand if it's ~/Pictures or ~/Photos since I spend a lot more time on Linux than OS-X, and you'll probably need to rsync ~/Movies as well).
This will work on a Windows machine too, but you'll have to install cwrsync first, and you'll probably have to play with the directories to figure out exactly what paths to use.
To be completely honest, I actually use the shotgun approach to archiving photos and movies: I have a desktop machine at home, a laptop at home, plus two work laptops (one of which is the Mac) and a work netbook. My photos are archived indiscriminately across most (if not all) of these machines AND I've got many of them stored on Picassa, too. When you upgrade from one computer to another, assuming that it's not because the old machine died, you can use the old machine(s) as glorified NAS boxes and rsync between them to keep multiple backups of your files. It's not elegant, but it works
Thanks for posting that. I loved A.C.C.'s stories when I was a kid, but I don't remember reading a story about a solar sail race to the moon. I was about to search for it (it sounds interesting), but you've saved me the work :)
I'll bet you that there are hundreds of people -- if not thousands -- breaking that law every day in NYC (although this picture was not taken in NYC, the principle still applies). While the primary intention of this "mask" is not to hide your identity, it does -- or at least, can -- serve that purpose as well.