Just finished teaching my pre-calculus class we've made kind of a week out of it a bunch of students were going away for Spring Break a little early, so we had several pies (coconut cream and strawberry rhubarb were among the standouts) on Tuesday then we went back to it today with a couple of apple pies for the few kids I've got left :)

Now if only there could be a mathematical constant called "poutine", I'd really be set.

I've got a Mac mini with CyberLynk / Macminivault. What they offer - a dedicated server (albeit, not the most powerful one imaginable, but dedicated nonetheless) with a significantly lower cost than other colocating companies. They even financed the server for me over several months (at 0% interest / fees, if I recall correctly their special at the time). Then, when I got sick of OS X Server (after about 12 minutes), I emailed them, and they went ahead and installed Debian on the Mac mini for me (in fact, I believe it was Jon Schwenn from the article who did it). There was some confusion about how to get it to reboot after power failure under linux, but a little careful googling fixed that. It's been running perfectly ever since.

Long and short of it? I've got a quad-core dedicated Debian server at less than 1/3 the price I used to rent a similar machine for from another company, and close to the price I was paying at the time for a VPN at Slicehost. The service from Jon and his co-workers has been outstanding, the data centre has been reliable (one brief hiccup due to a power issue in the last year and a half). And I'm with you on this point - not quite sure why anyone would really want to run OS X Server.

Well, your criteria is a lot stricter than mine... I just need my trip across the border to save me money after I factor in my time... So, when I can get down, pick up a mail-ordered bit of electronics (e.g. a camera for my daughter's birthday, about $40 less than available in Canada), a tank of gas (saving about $20), and some milk and cheese (saving another $20 or so), it becomes a worthwhile trip - I live very close, so the round trip is only about 45 minutes including border waits, most of the time. Add in the fact that I find the drive rather enjoyable, and I make the trip fairly often.

You are right - the border folks can be a tad unpredictable. But lately I've found them much more likely to let you through (assuming you are upfront about what you've got and are in possession of your receipts), even with largeish amounts (several $100s), than they are to ask you to go inside.

For my home machines, I use Time Machine (external hard drive, basically) for all the bulky stuff, and Dropbox for the really mission-critical stuff. My Dropbox syncs to several different machines that I use, including a remotely-located server, just for good measure.

For my main server (which hosts a bunch of web apps for clients, primarily), I use dual hard drives and a combination of tarsnap and plain-ol' S3 for external backup.

Of course, just as important as backing it up - verifying the backups occasionally. I had a recent laptop HD crash, followed by a Time Machine backup which looked initially like it was corrupted. There was a couple of hours of panic until I got it working again. :)

Really? Did you just call a guy who ACTUALLY donated a cheapskate?

Compare how often you use your mobile data plan and/or ISP to how often you use archive.org's services. I use my ISP every single day, for hours, and couldn't get a lot of my work done without them. I still gripe about how much I'm forced to pay them, too! By comparison, I've maybe looked for one site (which wasn't there) on archive.org in the last year or two.

They need $150,000 in donations. At BenJeremy's $5 level, they'd only need 30,000 donors. Just gonna guess his donation will come in well above the median for users of the site.

And your comment clearly shows that you are unable to engage rationally with viewpoints which differ from your own. Unfortunately, you've missed the point of my post, and simply repeated the same logical fallacies as the GP which I was attempting to point out.

Simple. There's people who ascribe the term "evil" to each of those concepts (yes, even potty-training). They have, in some cases, equally emotionally-charged opinions about secular humanism or potty training as Nadaka seems to have about religion. They would claim that those things cause "severe mental, emotional and ethical harm". They could even back it up with some anecdotal evidence ("I grew up in a secular-humanist household", or "I grew up in a household that potty-trained"), or some statistics (there's an awful lot of criminally-minded individuals out there who commit a lot of evil who have been potty-trained).

Hopefully, most of us would see right through their arguments. But, for some reason, when people start talking about the "evils of religion", we don't see the same holes in those arguments that we would see in a similarly-constructed argument about the "evils of potty-training", the "evils of vaccination", the "evils of wi-fi radiation", etc. Nadaka's argument is high on the same sort of hyperbole ("it imposes a severe mental, emotional, and ethical harm", "inflicting the communicable memetic disease", "the child never recovers") that often comes from the "anti-everything" crowd, but pretty short on data to support some pretty over-the-top claims.

Now, none of this is to say that Nadaka's "fundamentalist christian" upbringing DIDN'T have any hallmarks of mental, emotional, or ethical harm, or even child abuse. Perhaps it did. It does happen. But to paint all of "religion", or even all of "fundamentalist christian" with the same brush is rather poor reasoning.

One could just as easily substitute "secular humanism", "agnosticism", or for that matter "potty training" for the word "religion", and be on equally shaky philosophical footing with your comment.

I'm a biology teacher at a Christian school. I do teach evolution - with far more rigour than I ever taught it in public school - because I think that it's important for anyone who wants to hold a dissenting view on something considered to be this foundational to be really, really well informed about what they're disagreeing with. That said, I also work with students who have actually been abused by their parents - real abuse... emotional, physical, sexual, etc. Dogmatically stating "never teaching a child about evolution is abuse" just seems silly and insulting to anyone who has actually encountered abuse. Let's not throw the term "abuse" around so lightly.