Say, that's an interesting idea... the US Gubbermint can use Eschelon to generate databases for advertisers, and that can help pay for health care/bank bailouts/whatever is "in" this week.

I almost purchased this yesterday, but I picked up Shooter instead. I'll make sure I don't reward them; I'll buy a different movie DVD. Perhaps "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".

Alltel had true unlimited wireless. Just before Verizon ate them, I purchased a data plan for two years. I actually have unlimited access with no surcharges above 5GB. Last month, I pulled a bit over 50GB with my normal bill.

I'm just hoping that something better will come along before the contract expires. I live out in the boonies, and we have one (oversubscribed) ISP provider who would be glad to sell me 128K access for $70/month. The hailstorms here would destroy any satellite antennas, so that's out.

When you're going to get a new host, and it's not a name company (hostgator, dreamhost, etc.) do your research. There are a ton of resellers selling stuff from other resellers. It's like the Amway of the Internet. Look at the whois for your new host. If it's hidden behind one of those obfuscation services, it's a red flag. Look at the name servers. If it's the same as the host (ns1.host.com) it's a plus. If it's something else, go look at the website of the name service...you'll probably find it's where they're re-reselling hostspace. Try to get upline as much as possible, since if one of those people forgets to pay the bill, you're screwed with no (worthwhile) recourse.

I would suggest not going with IXWebhosting. They've been hit with injection attacks for over two years on an almost daily basis. I was with them for years until they were compromised. They will also blame you, saying your website was insecure...except I had fifteen domains that were parked with a single HTML page that just said "go away" hacked.

Make sure they're available 24/7, and that they answer the phones. My current VPS host (InMotionHosting) answered the phone at 1am and placed my order.

Watch out for all the "review" sites. Do a whois and you'll find many are owned by the hosts that get top billing. At the very least, every host review should have some negative hits from a disgruntled webmaster. Look for the ones that lay it all out, warts and all.

Never ever expect your host to back up your website. If it's not in your possession, it doesn't exist, unless you're lucky. Cron jobs are nice for dumping databases to a backup.

I personally like dedicated IPs. Since it seems you're multi-hosting, see if shared or individual IPs are available. Also, check to see if wildcard or sub-domains (space.host.com) are available.

Best of luck to you.

By the by, if we can't refer to Ted Alvin Klaudt's name, perhaps the legal system can assist by changing his name to "The State Lawmaker Currently Referred To As 'The Receiver' By His Cellmates"

Did someone clone wacko lawyer Jack Thompson? It makes me nervous to have a politician with two of the three chipmunks in his name. Maybe he'll owe the trademark owner of Alvin and the Chipmunks 2/3rds of the proceeds.

I can see the tech support calls now...

User: "I have pop-ups taking the whole screen and playing ads for beer and cars all the time. Then something happens so my mouse disappears and things move all over the screen by themselves. Is this a new virus?"

Tech Support: "No, that's the Denver Broncos game. What's the score?"

I've tried ducks, but they tend to nibble the occasional one or zero, and they leave an awful mess on the platters when they poop. Try Spotlight instead -- not as cute, but easier on the data, hardware, and the nose.

Gets rid of all those nasty attempts to break in. Sometimes will get rid of nasty Bobbies. Make sure you put a little lightning sticker near the port so you can say, "Well, it was marked as power, but the gent plugged it in there anyway and started a cool light show. I assumed he knew what he was doing."

Considering they're trying to get more students in the door, this is a terrible public relations nightmare. What student would want to attend a college that threatens to sue over something as trivial as an email adress -- and a private one at that? Very unfortunate for the students and faculty, and a black eye for the administration.

IBM today announced the outsourcing of 90% of Sun employees. "This will save us a good chunk of the $7B we paid for them," said an IBM representative.

Meanwhile, in Washington, IBM was approved to receive $3B in taxpayer money from the Keep America Working fund.

I have an issue with your line that Craigslist is profiting by this. Last I checked, not only was Craigslist free, but there are no ads.

Why not sue magazines that have classified ads geared towards erotic services? I'd bet there are "erotic services" advertised in most major newspapers or local rags.

I'd think that the police looking at Craigslist ads has done more for locating abused kids forced into prostitution than their "normal" investigations.

We've started a similar knowledge base project, and after a lot of searching and testing, we settled on Atlassian Confluence as our Wiki.

It has some excellent plug-ins, so our Visio diagrams can be displayed as web pages. The individual pages can be locked down at a granular level. It has a Sharepoint connector to tie in to our Sharepoint Intranet system.

I've directed my team to post two new articles per week, and the Wiki is getting populated quickly. When a job that only gets run every quarter comes along, we get the steps documented. Our internal processes are on flowcharts so the business folks can see what happens when they put in a request. It's been a very helpful tool, and has not had any down time. We even have embedded Spark messaging links by all the user names, so you can contact an author to ask a question.