I'm not going to speak to the open source applications. Instead, I'll point out a couple of resources.

First of all, ancestry.com is definitely costly, but at the same time, it can be free. Go to your local library and they will likely have a subscription to ancestry.com that you can use. My local library also has HeritageQuest ( ) available on their website.

Dick Eastman ( ) has a fantastic blog about Genealogy and technology. He is technically literate and is constantly reviewing various genealogy programs.

You may not believe it, but Google Books is also another great genealogy site. I've found several books there that specifically address family lines of mine and gave me context of the area where my family lived.

Plenty of people have already mentioned the Mormons. Definitely make use of them.

One thing you should know about genealogy. While a ton of information is on the web now, it is only a drop in the bucket. To really understand your history, be ready to spend time in libraries, county courthouses, and talking to family. The reason groups like Ancestry charge money is to help defray the costs of continuing to digitize paper records as well as to further application development.

Final tips - cite your sources, keep tons of notes about where you found information, and spend time with family.

Who do you think pays the people that develop these "free" web-based applications? I believe that would be you, the tax payer. Nothing that government does or "gives you" is free. Everything costs you tax dollars. Frankly, I'm not surprised to see this kind of thinking on /. A free market that provides a product that is a fair value for the money will always provide better solutions and services than government, and you get good product support from companies like Intuit, HR Block, etc. compared to anything you could possibly get from government.

A basic understanding of how a country's government works is more important than just about any of the options presented, other than perhaps math & science.

First off, I am not an employee of the company who's product I'm going to recommend. My company does use their products and I highly recommend them for all sizes of companies. We use Connected Backup (http://www.ironmountain.com/digital/pc/) from Iron Mountain to do all of our Windows desktop/laptop backups. They have several service levels you can choose, from data only to full system backup. As a large enterprise, we employee two solutions. For our engineering community, we have Connected Backup servers inside of our firewall. For our business users and road warriors, we make use of the Iron Mountain hosted servers. Some cool features

• Compression and encryption of data prior to sending it to the server.
• One copy backup - if a file already exists on the server, the client notes that fact and doesn't send another copy to the server.
• Email optimization - like the last feature, Connected will scan your inbox for duplicate emails so that when your email happy receptionist sends a copy of her latest puppy pictures to everyone in the company, only one copy gets sent to the Connected Servers.

These are only a few of the cool features that sold us on this tool. The end result is that qhen backups occur, even over slow networks, the backup lasts mere minutes and are opportunistic (they'll back up as much as possible when they detect network and pick up where they left off the next time.)

Let me reinforce many of the points made in this thread. Disk encryption is critical for laptops. Version control is essential for engineering teams (for non open source, check out True Blue Software's SnapShotCM (http://www.truebluesoftware.com/)). Hope this helps!