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.

A used HP Microserver ( Gen 8 ), its standard, out-of the box Celeron processor replaced by a Xeon E3, needs about 50 Watts, idling, and maxes out at 75 Watts. It manages 8 TB in a RAID array. If you call that high electricity, I don't know what your mental model of "low electricity" is.

Never. Never ever. I run a couple of servers here at home, and have my own 30 TB cloud. Pricing model: simple. I buy used servers, at about e 300 apiece, and stick in new hdds. For 30 TB and a three-year write-off, that is € 625 / year. Expensive ? Yes. But what I get is priceless: total control

My fingers having a very hard "hit" upon individual keys, laptop keyboards tend to not survive my hands for much more than a year. I have been using a Mech CM Storm for some time now, with the added benefit that the aluminum plate, on top, can be taken off in order to clean the insides ( you'd be amazed at what falls out of a keyboard after some months of intensive use ! ). The keyboard has Cherry MX blue switches, and is - hence - loud and very "clickety-clickety". The thing is already heavy out-of-the-box; I attached an extra strip of lead to the bottom, so the keyboard sits rock-steady in the place where I put it. Customers ( I always bring the Storm on assingments ) tend to react amazed and interested.

This.

Call hierarchy is the word. I use that all the time with NetBeans, the built-in function for that is really awesome. Yields a lot of insight.

DOXYGEN ?? You MacOS punks ! Now get off my lawn, before I hose you with my emacs-generated documentation !

Finally. Finally someone popped up who pronounced the word "component". Mod parent up into fucking heaven. Finafuckingly.

The more pertinent question, in 2015, is whether anyone is going to protect mankind from its various religions.

TFTFY..