They have an online form where you can check if your data was in the compromised lot. It requires to enter your bank- details...

That's so ..... fishy

Didn't help Iran when STUXNET hit, did it?
The truth is: if you have no network-connection, people start using USB-sticks over and over - which creates a completely different attack-surface.
Air-gapping critical infrastructure isn't a bad idea - but it can't be an excuse to not secure these system at all.

I like this quote:
"Finally, Snowden’s physical location worked to his advantage. In a contractor’s office 5,000 miles and six time zones from headquarters, he was free from prying eyes. Much of his workday occurred after the masses at Ft. Meade had already gone home for dinner. Had he been in Maryland, someone who couldn’t audit his activities electronically still might have noticed his use of thumb drives."

Reminds me of the days when Aldrich Ames was splurging all the money the Soviets gave him - and nobody noticed (the first couple of years).

Trial-periods and time spent in prison before execution is much shorter in China.
In China, the verdict is usually "final" on the spot and execution follows swiftly.
Most inmates in the US and Europe probably have some sort of infectious disease (from sharing needles, drugs, etc.pp.) that they acquired in the years waiting for the verdict and the appeal and the appeal to the appeal....

Reminds me of the cops in that series.
The creepy thing is that almost everything I see in the news almost every day reminds me of the dystopian future in that TV-series.
The trick they did was to place everything in 2077 - when in reality it's just around the corner.

I'm not sure, actually. There aren't that many physical servers (a couple of hundred - vmware has helped reduced than a lot, already). We are a bit of a "boutique"-ISP in that some of our customers are not price-sensitive at all. Which is good, because we can't compete on price anyway - we compete on flexibility, knowledge, reaction-time. We usually build multi-server, often multi-site, multi-network solutions in heterogeneous environments with high availabilty demands....
Salaries are probably at least as big an expense.

True. Efficiency has always been a concern.

Until recently, we mostly used FreeBSD ;-)
Now, a lot of Ubuntu is creeping in...

THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:

• -a new storage platform (like ceph or gluster, which we know nothing about, obviously)
• -a new backup platform (equivalent of veeam?)
• -most likely a separated switching (going 10G)
• -and probably duplicate a lot more things that are on VMware currently

Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?

I have a busy Typo3-site running with NGINX+PHP-FPM.
No Apache anymore.
Unless you need complex rewrite rules or the need for user-accessible .htaccess files, there's no need for Apache.

Switzerland is far too small and with far too many large international companies with assets and real business in the US.
As the whole "tax evaders" situation described above proved, it caves in far too fast.
Add to that that they probably have no interest protecting a company that isn't even Swiss...
There's a reason why Snowden didn't fly to Zurich or Geneva from the beginning - he did his research (and from what he saw in 2007, apparently he didn't like the city anyway)

Just pay by credit-card or ask for 2*5 in return...

I'm really surprised at what people can get worked up on.

And here in Switzerland, too.

The people selling expensive (4 and 5-figure expensive) watches and jewelery to Chinese tourists here are making an absolute fortune these days.

No, but I'd really hate it if the "flagship" phone was bigger than the iPhone5.
I don't read books on it (I do that on my 24" iMac) or buy a real book. For what I do (some Mail, reading slashot and a couple of other sites, WeatherPro, some other apps and a couple of games - and phoning people, receiving calls) the size of the screen on my iPhone 4S is big enough. I don't want to lug around anything bigger.
If I wanted to, I'd have bought an iPad Mini long ago.
I also don't need a stylus (I don't need or want to run rdesktop on my phone, like the co-worker with the SG Note 2 does).

Given Apple's latest quarterly numbers, there seem to be at least a couple of other people who think likewise.
There is a market for "phat" phones - but I doubt it's much larger than the vocal audience that continues to push these phones.

And thanks to the good ol' US of A, this line of thinking has caught on to most western democracies.

This is a very dangerous and slippery slope that the US has led the western world onto.
Judging from history, nothing good can ever come from this.

Sadly, your advice will not be listened to.

It will need a couple of TV-shows for Americans to realize the reality ;-)

Guess what, there are other nations, also well-off that are not hated by some many other people. There's a reason the US is targeted and it's not your aircondition - your posting is just a perfect example of why the US is perceived to be a "problem" in large parts of the world. If it wasn't so sad, your posting would be funny.