I'm REALLY not a lawyer, but I can't really see the penalty definied! This is all bullshit?

HVM is slower than Paravirtualization anyway... as a rule.

I know this has been covered by a few dozen people, but backup your backup's backup.

Having worked tech support for storage devices over the past 5 years, I've had to personally tell many people that their drive is corrupted/broken, and thus all of their family photos/baby's first steps video/wedding photos/life's work is either unrecoverable or exceedingly expensive to recover. This is the hardest part of my job, and it never gets any easier to take. I can't even imagine how it is to hear something like that.

Do NOT depend on RAID... just cause it's "Redundant" doesn't mean it's backed up. RAID only protects you against a single failure mode: a failed drive.

RAID will simply not protect you against:

power fluctuations (power loss, brownout, spikes, surges...)
bit rot, stripe and filesystem corruption,
acts of god ("crap, the basement flooded"),
acts of human ("which folder did I just delete?"),
etc, etc.

You CANNOT protect data 100%. There is ALWAYS some coincidence that can happen to mess everything up. The best you can do is have as many layers of backups as financially possible, and make sure you don't keep them all in the same place! Keep AT LEAST one offsite (different state) backup.

In short, if you can't replace something digital, then make sure you have multiple backups of it, with some in a completely different location.

Yes, because you were on the same local network, without any firewalls between the two computers.

If you think most people can learn networking without pictures or diagrams, I think you should stop assuming things about the way people learn.

too bad string theory is about as plausible as religion... yeah, i'll take the flamebait mod. string theory isn't all that elegant.