I use Bacula for my home computer; it feels powerful enough for a small office, and is very versatile.

It has three main components: a client daemon that you install on the computers you want to back up, a storage daemon that you install on the computer that will write the backup files and/or tapes, and a director daemon which controls the backups. The director and storage daemons only run on unix-like operating systems (BSD, Linux, Solaris) but the client daemon has also been built for MS-Windows.

http://blog.bacula.org/

Reminds me of San Angeles circa 2032

I was going to say young people confuse the two as well, not because they don’t know about astrology but because spelling skills are dwindling.

The Moon Treaty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty) is only signed by 15 members of the United Nations, and by none of the countries which engage in manned space flight. So doesn’t have any legal force.

There is no explicit mention of a copyright in the document itself, but the authors have posted this on their home page:

Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of course we are hungry for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded, you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.

If I stay at home, it's definitely my desktop. When traveling, it's divided fairly evenly between my smartphone, tablet, and possibly laptop.

I've used bmf via procmail on my ISP shell account for years, and it was extremely reliable and accurate. As an added bonus, it automatically forwarded spam to uce@ftc.gov.

When my ISP discontinued the use of procmail filters, I moved it to my home computer and configured two filters in Evolution: the first one to auto-remove mail marked by my ISP as suspected spam, and the next to pipe the mail through bmf and remove it if it tested positive for spam. When I say "auto-remove", I mean it's moved to a spam folder where I can double-check it in case false positives get through.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bmf/

Hardly. I started using LTO tapes just a few years ago, taking my cue from our backup systems at the office. I have 12TB of media that I rotate between home and an off-site storage facility. A lot of my data is irreplaceable. Plus I'm a data pack rat. ;-)

I go to http://www.smartvoter.org/ for almost all of my candidate research. You can't see a judge's prior rulings from there, but at least some of them post their priorities. If a candidate doesn't submit a profile to their database, I usually ignore them come election day.

I watch my daily security logs from time to time, but the only remote login attempts I see are my own. I can attribute this to several layers of security:

• I'm using a dynamic IP address.
• Access to my home network is gated through my router. Any incoming SSH connection is directed to a specific IP address on the inside, which is only configured when my computer happens to be running Linux.
• ACL's on the router prohibit SSH connections from everywhere except specific source subnet's I've opened up, and some of those (like work) are only open at certain times during the day.
• I'm subscribed to my Linux distributor's security updates, and apply them on a regular basis.

I won't claim that it's perfect protection, but one of the best things you can do to secure a system is to shut out all access by default and then only open tiny pinholes for the specific connections you need.

I've seldom trusted consumer reviews, not because they might be fake, but because "consumers" often lack enough experience with large enough numbers of competing products for their opinions to hold any weight. When I'm looking for reviews of a product, I want professional reviews from journalists who are dedicated to researching the genre.

The problem with claiming "innovation" in the pharmaceutical industry is that they can easily bypass existing patents simply by tweaking the processes or non-essential ingredients in creating a drug to make it just different enough to claim it as a different product. That doesn't really help society at all. The rate of discoveries of "high social value" has not risen significantly in the presence of patents. See Boldrin & Levine: "Against Intellectual Monopoly", Chapter 9.

When I need a robust business solution, I prefer that the problem it is made to solve be well-defined.

I have been using RAID for many years — RAID-1 at work as I only have two drives and don't need much storage space, and RAID-5 at home. A couple of years ago when I upgraded my computer at work, I downloaded at least three different backup systems to try out. The goals were simplicity of use, keeping historical versions of files, and relatively low storage space.

After setting up bacula, I never bothered with the other backup applications.

I found bacula to be highly flexible, adapted very well to the set of many virtual machines I use, and is the easiest to maintain. I just set it up once (or after any major re-partitioning) with a specific list of files and directories to back up or exclude, then practically forget about it. It's saved my files a number of times already from accidental deletion or overwriting, and I used it once for a full restore at home after upgrading my computer including a new RAID array.

At work my excess hard drive space is enough to store all my full and incremental backups locally, but I also have it back up critical files to a corporate NFS server. At home I use LTO-4 tapes, which provide plenty of backup storage for over 2 terabytes of data; and whenever it runs a full backup I take the used tapes off-site for extra security.

So that explains the unnamed 313 number I found on my caller ID box last night...

But why would he be calling me? I live in California.