I'm going to re-watch that movie with renewed interest :-)

Agreed. For having walked from Amsterdam to Rome ( in 82 days, in winter ), I know how valuable a bottle of whiskey or schnapps can be. Especially when roughing it in, say, the Apennines in a cold night.

...and probably chock-full of bugs. On casually browsing through the source code, I found - and posted - a probable issue with the implementation of the Container state-machine. Does not really inspire confidence.

So. I already feel like a relic from olden times in my Saab with its turbo engine. One more reason to go against the societal current and keep it in top form.

The US state itself is a disastrously over-budget, over-deadline undertaking with the alleged goal to reach so-called "equal rights" for all. You hear nobody about that one.

for one particular, favourite whore ? Or for a BMW Z-3 ?

...to engender any kids ? I could start today, they'd be able to proudly claim to have been engendered on AFD . Now THAT is a claim to glory...

If yours truly and another law-abiding citizen encrypt communication, how is that going to hamper counter-terrorist work ? I pay my tax, he pays his tax, and the worst we do is getting drunk in his or my home on saturday evening, or screwing the occasional whore. Could it that Europol has been touched by the arrogance that comes from wielding too much unchecked, or at least badly checked, power for too long ?

True. I don't outsource any risk. Did you ever read "The Orange Book", on risk management ? It is a British government document, and considered rather as a classic on the topic. The TL;DR version: you only outsource risks if and when there are no new risks attached to the act of outsourcing itself. In my case, I consider there would be such extra risk: Amazon is a corporation I can't control, and it can change its policies any time. ( Please do note I do not even mention the NSA and the US state. There certainly is risk there, but I have no way of quantifying it. ) Moreover, once my data is with Amazon, getting it away from there ( if I ever want to do that ) becomes a guarantee for severe headaches, and in that case I would end up building my own cloud anyway.

The Austrian economy is doing pretty well, thank you. So are some major economies of countries bordering on Austria: Germany, Switzerland.

It is smart. I gain a lot of knowledge and insight from doing this, and these I increase my value as a freelancer, as pointed out above.

I only told you half the story. The other half is: a pair of Fujitsu Primergy TX 200 S7 servers, not dedicated to storage. ( Those were bought used, too, at about 1 year old they went for 1/3 of the original price. ) Each server has 2 sockets, and each socket has a Xeon E5 2420 processor with 6 cores / 12 threads. Makes 48 threads total. These little monsters run only when necessary. I am a freelance developer and software architect. Having this setup helps convincing customers that I know what I am doing, and know my way around storage and networks.

Of course it's more than € 625 / year. Electric power is part of my operationg expenses, and can be offset from taxable revenue at 100%. I currently run about € 600 / year in electricity bills related to computing. At € 0.20 / kWh, this indicates a round-the-year average of € 600 /( € 0.20 / kWh ) / 365 / 24 = 342 Watts.

No, I am not. Two of the machines use plain old ext4. The other one uses a mix of btrfs and tmpfs: tmpfs for reasons of speed, btrfs for experimenting purposes.

Fire: the data is partitioned into two categories: one I can afford to lose, and one I can't afford to lose ( source code, personal stuff, financial stuff ). The latter category is by far the smallest in size, currently about 100 Gb. I run a backup once per week, and keep those backups in another location. Break-in: very difficult in this place, but not impossible. I would, however, doubt that any burglars would take servers with them ( burglars are known to take only light and easy-to-carry stuff ). There is a cigar box with some € 100 in cash, close to the door to the room with the servers. The cash is meant as bait. IF, however, they take the servers: see above, at "Fire". Earthquake: extremely rare, here in Austria, though not unheard off. Early last year we had one that hit about 2.5 on the Richter scale. I was in bed at that moment, and was woken up by it. It felt as if a large truck drove by the house. The last earthquakes that brought down complete buildings on a large scale goes back to the 14th century. For the rest: see above, at "Fire".

From a hardware point of view, yes, that is too short. Hdds last longer than that - and I am familiar with the post mentioned by you. But my tax advisor, who also does all of my accounting, leaves me no choice but to ( financially ) write them off in 3 years.