Quote from: reddevilggg on October 20, 2010, 05:56:28 PM

Didn't think there were that many native americans left!

As in, free to shoot each other in their homes and brave enough to blow themselves up as well.

Actually I don't think you can just get a large amount of explosives. You could of course just shoot the HDD with a few dozen shotgun blasts.

Really, most of the time it's an exercise in self-import. In order to justify using an expensive and rather arduous type of destructive method like that, the cost of that data getting into the wrong hands has to be HIGHER then the cost of destroying it. the FBI isn't going to reconstruct your hard drive to recover your vacation pictures, OK? No non-industrial persons data needs anything more then a DBAN wipe to "protect" anything else is simply stroking the ego of your own importance. First, in order for ANYBODY to ever consider reconstructing said data, they need to have an idea what is on it and deem it worth recovery. Your fallout 3 game saves simply aren't as valuable as you MIGHT think. Neither is your doctoral thesis. Besides, if they know what's on the hard drive or even have an idea about it, clearly it's not "top secret" which would essentially be a pre-requisite to any sort of large scale reconstruction. Almost all the methods are far to ineconomical to even consider in this case; simply DBAN wipe it and use it for something else, or if your a paranoid delusional freak you can hit it WIT ha sledgehammer. Starting to mess about with explosives to protect your precious vacation pictures from falling into the hands of evil seems a bit over the top, and I don't think it would make a particularly honourable death if you happened to blow yourself up in the process.

The Only true way to conclusively prevent any being in the universe from getting access to your apparently universally coveted vacation pictures would be to remove said data from the universe to begin with. A 'la a black hole. Sure, blowing up or melting a hard drive can prevent humans from reconstructing the data, but if your crazy enough to think that any person would give a flying dung beetle about your data then clearly you've entered the land of the crazy and it's assumed you also might SUSPECT that aliens would be after it. Aliens, with their clearly superior technology, may have ways of recovering data even from melted piles of metal.

Even sending it into the sun doesn't destroy the matter, it just get's vaporized. a sufficiently motivated race of aliens working for hundreds of years may be able to accumulate the stellar dust that once comprised your hard drive and using advanced technology reconstruct it, and then to your horror they would be able to see your visit to Fuji. THE BASTARDS! therefore, the only surefire way is to remove it from the universe and drop it in a black hole.

This causes quite a conundrum, since even if humans could travel through space to a black hole- how could you trust anybody? the Pilot might make a copy of your data before you remove it from the universe- the steward might as well. Therefore you would have to go alone- also, you'd need to go naked, otherwise they or the aforementioned alien race might hide some sort of communications device in your clothing... but they might put a tiny transmitter in your food also, which means you would have to refrain from eating from the point you announce your intentions to the time you leave. In fact it might be better if you were to simply not tell anybody.

With your covert launch known only by the flight coordinator, you only need to kill him to destroy the last known witness. At this point, killing seems easy- after all, if you don't kill him, the aliens might get a hold of your fiji vacation pictures. That would be devastating for some reason that I cannot even fictitiously rationalize. Now, you've managed to escape and are now in orbit of Cygnus X-1, prepared to drop the hard drive into the black hole and therefore remove it from the universe.

Then you realize, that one of the theories is that a black hole is in fact a "portal "to an entirely separate universe... so it's feasible that your hard drive, while removed from this universe, might materialize in yet another where sentient beings might have the ability to recover and view your fiji vacation photos. Therefore, your only choice is to go into the black hole with it. So, naked and starving as well as cold (to help prevent stowaways) you enter the black hole and are squeezed into spaghetti and die.

However, you die knowing that your Fuji photos are probably safe.

Probably.

The end.

I said brave, not braves. Although, they do say it that way in Atlanta.