Like Alton Brown, I believe in multitaskers.

There’s a reason why Swiss Army knives never go out of style, why it seems each new cell phone model gets closer and closer to being not just a portable entertainment center, but the entertainment center of choice.

Right now these gadgets can surf the series of tubes to find out what time happy hour is at Candybar,  shoot video footage of a car accident, listen to music, and sync with the not-so portable devices you left at home.  And, oh yeah, they let you make and receive calls too.

As much fun as it is to ponder the ability to shrink everything down to manageable proportions, every so often, we get reminded of the technological drawbacks to this age of taking it all with you. Case in point, the story of the Kiwi who bought an MP3 player that turned out to have potentially confidential U.S. military files stored on it. Unfortunately this was not the good kind of bargain buy that Antiques Roadshow appraisers would call a steal.

It’s not clear how much information was stored on there, and what might have happened if they hadn’t been retrieved in time. Would the military personnel have found themselves de-friended on Facebook so that someone could rack up his Whoppers? Or could the information have been used to pad the list of people petitioning for the return of the sacrificial app?

This isn’t the first time that confidential files have found their way out of secured areas. There’ve been several reports of laptops going missing (see here, here and here as examples) with information that arguably shouldn’t have been on something so portable in the first place.

Maybe its time to draw a more definitive line between carry out and dine in. Maybe the really valuable information should be made tangible instead of stored on a computer so there’s a chance it can be copied off and taken away. There’s something to be said about those archives where documents and other tangible artifacts absolutely cannot leave the building, much less the room in some cases. After all, didn’t Skip have to go to the Cray supercomputer when he wanted to figure out the Red October’s caterpillar drive?