First, syncing to cloud is not backup. Second, being at the mercy of a provider doesn't strike me as a good idea in long-term.

Better invest in a NAS. A 2-bay Synology would suffice. 2 4TB drives in Mirrored Raid work great. WD has the "red" line of drives specifically made and tested for NAS storage. They are not as fast but run cool, silent, no vibrations.

Most NAS units run on linux so you can easily add syncing, versioning, "personal cloud", maybe use to play movies on smart TVs via DLNA and so on.

Finally, from time to time do proper backups. For home use, proper backup means burning data on DVD/BD - on 2 separate discs.

This is beyond useless.

I live in a country with significant seismic activity.
We know for hundreds of years that every 30 to 50 years a big (7.6 - 7.8) earthquake will happen. We even know where the epicenter will be. We know how it will propagate.

It's been 36 years since the last one so many people who live in problem areas are beginning to get nervous. But we don't know when it will happen. Could be tomorrow or ten years from now.

For a while, MSSE was good, then it took a steep dive to the point it's not even tested by the labs anymore. Quite sad really.

Personally I went back to Bitdefender.

DigitalOcean is seriously oversold. If all you do is host a website you may not notice it though.

For small stuff I recommend RamNode. For bigger things, RackSpace.

I tried AWS and a bunch of others.

Anecdotically, I have two kids, a 9 year old boy and a 3 year old girl. Since the boy is older, I was expecting the girl to copy everything he does. She does, to a point - plays with his Legos and so on. But she also loves to play with anything remotely resembling a doll. She cooks for the doll, feeds it, argues with it. It's definitely not something learned or encouraged. Also, she wants to look pretty, has her own choice of clothing, again something her older brother simply doesn't care about. She's also not copying my wife, she's completely independent and different in these areas.

Exactly. Don't know about other countries, but Romania has a population density of about 90 people / sq. km. If we take only the major cities, we won't exceed 500 people / sq. km. Total land area is 240,000 sq. km.

We have 100 Mbps internet via fiber optics pretty much everywhere except remote areas. For remote areas, 3G is everywhere (over 99% coverage) and H+ and 4G is available in many rural areas.

I pay $10/month for 100 Mbps (tested). Fiber end to end. No caps, no traffic shaping.

The second raid failed, it's pretty clear by now. What do you want, confirmation from the US government that the SEAL forces had to withdraw? You'll never hear it. They'll redefine 'success' and say the mission was successful.

Not sure about UK, but elsewhere in Europe home appliances were also rated from G to A initially. Then they had to add A+ and even A++

And this surprises you?

Last time I was surprised was in 2003, after it became evident there were no WMDs in Iraq. I expected public outcry, heads to roll. Nothing happened.

Well, Bill Gates was showing a special container that doesn't require electricity and can keep medicine refrigerated for up to 50 days at high outside temperatures.
The whole point of a malaria vaccine is to make it affordable for poor nations. The demand for a malaria vaccine in rich countries is pretty low.

Romanian here. Everyone worth their salt here writes code, comments and docs in English. I have my own pet project where I'm basically the only one who ever needs to see the code, yet everything is in English. Considering that the programming language has English keywords (if, while, class, etc) and the text strings are in English too, it's simpler for me to keep everything consistent rather than to make any mental switch.

Agreed. I use Eclipse regularly (FDT and PDT) but whenever I get to work in Visual Studio, it's a much smoother experience.

The major cause of war/unrest in the world isn't skin color, it's religion

No. Religion has been used in the past in the same way "the war on terror" is used now. It's a way to rally people against a seemingly powerful, brutal and subhuman enemy.

According to an article on Ars Technica, salted hashes are no longer relevant - they are cracking the hashes anyway without using rainbow tables. Using SHA256 instead of MD5 has more benefits in this regard than salted vs. unsalted.

I stand corrected. Indeed it looks like the Persuasion was simply abandoned and none of their programs can read those files.