I go to http://www.smartvoter.org/ for almost all of my candidate research. You can't see a judge's prior rulings from there, but at least some of them post their priorities. If a candidate doesn't submit a profile to their database, I usually ignore them come election day.

I watch my daily security logs from time to time, but the only remote login attempts I see are my own. I can attribute this to several layers of security:

• I'm using a dynamic IP address.
• Access to my home network is gated through my router. Any incoming SSH connection is directed to a specific IP address on the inside, which is only configured when my computer happens to be running Linux.
• ACL's on the router prohibit SSH connections from everywhere except specific source subnet's I've opened up, and some of those (like work) are only open at certain times during the day.
• I'm subscribed to my Linux distributor's security updates, and apply them on a regular basis.

I won't claim that it's perfect protection, but one of the best things you can do to secure a system is to shut out all access by default and then only open tiny pinholes for the specific connections you need.

I've seldom trusted consumer reviews, not because they might be fake, but because "consumers" often lack enough experience with large enough numbers of competing products for their opinions to hold any weight. When I'm looking for reviews of a product, I want professional reviews from journalists who are dedicated to researching the genre.

The problem with claiming "innovation" in the pharmaceutical industry is that they can easily bypass existing patents simply by tweaking the processes or non-essential ingredients in creating a drug to make it just different enough to claim it as a different product. That doesn't really help society at all. The rate of discoveries of "high social value" has not risen significantly in the presence of patents. See Boldrin & Levine: "Against Intellectual Monopoly", Chapter 9.

When I need a robust business solution, I prefer that the problem it is made to solve be well-defined.

I have been using RAID for many years — RAID-1 at work as I only have two drives and don't need much storage space, and RAID-5 at home. A couple of years ago when I upgraded my computer at work, I downloaded at least three different backup systems to try out. The goals were simplicity of use, keeping historical versions of files, and relatively low storage space.

After setting up bacula, I never bothered with the other backup applications.

I found bacula to be highly flexible, adapted very well to the set of many virtual machines I use, and is the easiest to maintain. I just set it up once (or after any major re-partitioning) with a specific list of files and directories to back up or exclude, then practically forget about it. It's saved my files a number of times already from accidental deletion or overwriting, and I used it once for a full restore at home after upgrading my computer including a new RAID array.

At work my excess hard drive space is enough to store all my full and incremental backups locally, but I also have it back up critical files to a corporate NFS server. At home I use LTO-4 tapes, which provide plenty of backup storage for over 2 terabytes of data; and whenever it runs a full backup I take the used tapes off-site for extra security.

So that explains the unnamed 313 number I found on my caller ID box last night...

But why would he be calling me? I live in California.

I've read evidence that industrial patents do not promote innovation, but hinder it instead. The most effective tools for profiting from either a product or a process are secrecy, complementary manufacturing, and market lead time. (Boldrin & Levine, [2008], "Against Intellectual Monopoly")

Actually, copyright doesn't even do that. See Boldrin & Levine's "Against Intellectual Monopoly".

That's closer, but monopolizing the news is not a right. It's a privilege which may (or may not) be granted by the government.

This is part of the reason I don't trust close-source applications that require Internet access. At least with open source I can take a look at the code and see, "hey — this program is running a key logger!" I can then modify the code and permissions and run the application without the offending network activity.

(I actually did that with one program, found on code.google.com no less. It was written with a key logger that uses a closed-source library called FlurryAgent.)

I considered that, but I have over a dozen LTO-4 tapes. Do you realize how many DVD's worth of data will fit on a single LTO-4?