Hah, I agree completely. I don't mind good friends and close family, but I get irritated when my best friend's wife's sister calls for tech support, when my friend's parents call for tech support, or when the uncle I see once every two years wanted me to completely analyze his website for SEO (not my normal field, BTW).

Anyway, I like your policy.

Not to be a smartass, but...

For the folks (family and friends) that seem to think I'm a free computer repair store I told them to go buy a cheap USB hard drive and just set up a quick and dirty batch file to back things up nightly (or weekly, depending on how big their files are).

I've told them to do this or there's a good chance that I won't be able to recover their files if their PC crashes. This is an easy solution, cheap, and requires virtually no end-user interaction. That last bit is especially important since I've found that they typically ignore even the easiest backup procedures (e.g. copy C:\My Documents to D:\).

As for the original question, I still do attempt file recovery for the stubborn ones who ignore my backup advice. I've had moderate success with various pieces of software. Just Googled "hard disk recovery software." Interestingly enough, different programs have recovered different data on the same HDDs...

In case anyone's wondering:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/02/27/uninstalling-the-clickonce-support-for-firefox.aspx

Sorry, but this is not a real big deal outside of communities like /. Beta is just another one of 'those fancy tech terms' for most folks, so regardless of whether or not Gmail is beta or not in beta millions of people will still use it as their primary mail service.

Not sure how long ago you tried to do this, but there are a number of colleges (Bachelors and post-grad) that offer solid Infosec programs now (disclaimer, there are just as many that offer crappy Infosec programs). In-depth training and certification is available for most major/widely-deployed Infosec products, such as Snort (http://www.sourcefire.com/services/education). Also, there are professional training organizations (e.g. SANS) that offer excellent [mostly] vendor-neutral Infosec training. Infosec as an actual field is fairly young, so it's not surprising that there isn't an Infosec program at every college in the country, but there are numerous high-quality training options available.

In the most controversial move, the SANS Institute, an independent organization, plans to organize the Network Attack Competition, which challenges students to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software, compromise enemy systems and steal data.

Can someone explain to me why this is controversial? SANS is one of the leading security organizations in the world...

Maybe they could take a tricycle into the Naval Observatory Bunker?